The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (37 page)

       
He rested, then nerved
himself to attempt a heroic project: namely, making his way to the upper deck.
He found himself too weak for the task; exhausted, he slept. He woke to find
the darkness alive with activity. Men, some screaming in pain, were being
carried down to join him. A chop-surgeon wearing a blood-bespattered leather
apron prowled up and down with a lantern, looking for mutilated limbs he could
hack off. He eyed Togura hopefully, then, disappointed, moved on.

       
Very shortly, he found a
suitable victim. Togura, with a little bit of hell now visible by lantern
light, watched. And soon saw enough to make him faint dead away.

       
When he recovered
himself, he was being dragged along in darkness. Something heavy and dark
shrouded him. He screamed and punched at the darkenss with his fists. The
dragging stopped. Daylight opened at his eyes; a face peered in. Two men
conferred, then, without ceremony, tipped him out of their canvas removal bag.
He lay on the open deck of the ship, blinking at the sunlight. A sailor grabbed
him by the armpits, hauled him into the shade of a tarpaulin which sheltered
twenty wounded men, and left him there.

       
From where he was lying,
Togura could see cremation fires burning on the quayside; he suspected he was
lucky not to have been incinerated.

       
"Do you speak
Galish?" he said to his nearest neighbor.

       
But the man was
zombie-silent, his eyes staring into the distance. Togura could get no response
from him.

       
"What about
you?" he said to the next-nearest man.

       
"Shrrr-shrrr,"
said the man, his breath muttering in and out between stubbly yellow teeth.

       
"Sure," said
Togura, heartlessly. "And what's your name and all? Hey?"

       
"Shrrr ... "
said the man.

       
And said no more, for he
was dead. Togura was disconcerted by this unexpected development, and felt a
little bit guilty at his heartlessness.

       
A man came round with
soup and water; Togura took his second soup share of the day. He eyed the dead
man. A chest wound had ruined his jerkin, but his trews looked stout enough.
But Togura was not bold enough to strip him by daylight, and soon corpse men
dragged him away.

       
Togura was now feeling
well enough to be disgusted by his own mired, filthy body and his dungbath
reeking rags, which were softly seething with vermin. He swore that he would
get the next setof clothes which were going. But, each time the opportunity
arose, his courage failed him. When evening fell, he was still in the same
rags.

       
He woke in the darkness
to find distant sounds of battle carrying through the still night air; there
was fire inland, to the east. He was cold.

       
He slept again, waking
before dawn because of the cold. The rising sun found him stripping a corpse
for its clothes; nobody raised an eyebrow. Later in the day, he managed to draw
up a bucket full of harbour water which was marginally less disgusting than he
was; he washed himself, after a fashion.

       
There was a lot of
coming and going and gossiping. He heard many people talking in Galish, but was
too sick and shy to dare their disfavour and ask his basic questions; their gossip,
apart from their commonplace complaints, was unintelligible because he did not
know the context. Then, late in the afternoon, as he was tottering about the
deck, exercising his shadow, he came upon a man he thought he knew. It was
Draven, flushed, sweating and feverish.

       
"Draven!"
cried Togura, in amazement.

       
The pirate, who had been
dozing, opened his eyes and surveyed Togura. At first, Togura thought he was
too sick to speak, but speak he did, and his voice sounded strong enough.

 
      
"Who
would you be, young man? No - don't tell me. Yes! Forester! Or should I say,
Togura Poulaan? Isn't that how you introduced yourself in Lorford?"

       
"I did," said
Togura.

       
"You gave me quite
a shock, turning up like that. I'm sorry I couldn't have stopped for a word -
it would've been more than my life was worth."

       
"Why?" said
Togura, remembering his desperate efforts to make contact with Draven at
Lorford.

       
"Because,"
said Draven.

       
That was all the
explanation he was ready to give; Togura suspected that if he pushed for more,
he would only get an elaborate series of lies, so he let the matter drop. He
was so glad to see a familiar face and hear a familiar voice that he didn't
chastise Draven for the disgraceful episode on the Warwolf, when Draven had
helped throw Togura to the sea serpents.

       
"So," said
Draven, "you're the man with the price on his head."

       
"Yes," said
Togura, claiming this identity with something close to joy, even though it might
expose him to danger. "That's me. Togura Poulaan, also known as Barak the
Battleman, a veteran of many wars and battles."

       
"Including, now,
the battle of Androlmarphos. We're lucky to be still alive, wouldn't you
say?"

       
"Androlmarphos?" said Togura, blankly.

       
"Yes, yes,
Androlmarphos."

       
"Where's
that?"

       
"Where's that?
What's wrong with you? Did you just fall out of the sky? What do you mean,
where's that? Androlmarphos is here. Around us. Under us. To the left of us,
the right of us. It's where we are. We - tattoo this on your skin, in case you
forget - we are now, and have been for some days, in Androlmarphos. The main
port of the Harvest Plains, in case you didn't know. This thing we're sitting
on is called a ship. That - "

       
"All right, all
right," said Togura. "I get the picture. Don't be so hard on me. I've
had a very difficult time."

       
"So have I,"
said Draven. "Right now, I'm dying of fever."

       
"You have my
sympathies," said Togura, without any sympathy; Draven looked too sick to
fight or ride, but the vigour of his conversation proved him to be a very long
way from death.

       
"Apart from the
fever," said Draven, stung by Togura's obvious lack of concern, "I've
been to Gendormargensis and back. I've been tortured. I've been killed."

       
"For sure,"
said togura. "For sure. May I stretch out my bones right here? I feel
faint."

       
"Stretch
away," said Draven. "Stretch away."

       
Both of them were in
fact rather ill, and both had over-excited themselves with too much talking.
Draven roused later in the evening, to listn to gossip about someone called
Menator, who had been parlaying with the enemy, and had been murdered.

       
"This is very bad
news," said Draven.

       
"Why?" asked
Togura. "Was this Menator a friend of yours?"

       
"No, my
enemy," said Draven. "I swore to kill him and eat his liver. The
first part of my vow is now impossible, and the second, in this heat, is
probably already over-ripe."

       
"What have you got
against him?"

       
"I'll tell
you," said Draven.

       
And he did, in detail.
But Togura found pirate politics too complex to follow, and fell asleep in the
middle of the explanation.

       
The next day, just after
soup, Draven resumed the tale of his trip to Gendormargensis and back.

       
"Gendormargensis is
in Tameran," said Draven. "It's so far north that it's cold all year,
so they make buildings out of ice. They freeze the heads of their enemies in
blocks of the stuff. Wherever you walk in the streets, there's dead eyes
staring at you."

       
"If the buildings
are made of ice then what happens when they light a fire?"

       
"They don't have
proper fires, not in Gendormargensis," said Draven. "What they have
is the heads of dead dragons. They shove their food between the jaws, and it
cooks. They have live dragons, too. Hundreds of them. Armies of them. It was
outside the dragon stables that they killed me."

       
"They killed
you?!"

       
"Killed me dead.
Then hacked me apart. Split me from stem to stern. Chopped me into
dogmeat."

       
"You look healthy
enough to me."

       
"Ay. I was
resurrected. A dralkosh it was which did the deed."

       
"A dralkosh?"

       
"A woman of
evil," said Draven, with a shudder. "Her name was Ampadara. Yes, that
was the name. She was the chief torturer for the Lord Emperor of Tameran, the
man they call Khmar. She had me cut to pieces, starting with my
testicles."

       
Togura at first had his
doubts, but Draven backed up his tale with so much detail that it surely had to
be true. Draven was eloquent about the terrors of the Collosnon Empire which
dominated the continent of Tameran.

       
"The women have the
rule of it," said Draven. "That's the worst part. The rule of women
is a fearful evil."

       
He told of the streets
of Gendormargensis, which were paved with layers of ice-covered skulls; of the
Yolantarath River, which ran red with the blood of human sacrifices; of the
Lord Emperor Khmar, a huge giant of a man with three arms, who went about
naked, butchering babies and eating their livers raw; of the evil Ampadara,
mistress of the knife, an ugly hag with a voice as vicious as a whip.

       
"She laughed as she
cut me," said Draven. "A foul laughter, like a bird of prey gone
rabid."

       
He told, in agonising
detail, of his death and resurrection.

       
"It was that
Ampadara who raised me from the dead," said Draven. "She meant to
make me her slave. But I escaped. When all's said and done, a man's a match for
any woman - though in this case it was a near thing."

       
"But what were you
doing in Lorford?" said Togura.

       
"Oh," said
Draven. "That's another story."

       
"It's one I
wouldn't mind hearing," said Togura, who felt much stronger today, and was
not going to be put off as easily as he had been the day before. "You owe
me an explanation. You owe me quite a lot, for throwing me off the
Warwolf."

       
"Throwing you
off?" said Draven, astonished. "I did no such thing! You
jumped!"

     
  
"I did not!" said
Togura, indignantly.

       
"But yes - I was
there. I remember. You were fooling around at the stern, watching the women get
slaughtered. I told you to watch your footing. You remember - come now, don't
tell me no. I even grabbed hold when the sea lurched you over. But you slid
from my grasp, no helping it."

       
"That's not
true!"

       
"Well ... perhaps I
misremember a detail or two. But the main sighting's there. I wasn't to
blame."

       
"You threw me
over!"

       
"That's a lie. I
distinctly remember the weapons muqaddam had you in his grips. Throwing you or
saving you, I'm not to know, but he had you. Didn't he?"

       
"Well, yes, but -
"

       
"There you are
then," said Draven triumphantly. "You say I threw you over and now
you admit I didn't. Memory's a funny thing, young man. I tell you that. Don't
trust yourself too far."

       
Togura was about to
protest further, but at that moment something strange was heard from the east.
He could not see what it was; ships at anchor and harbourside buildings allowed
him no vistas inland. There was a heavy grinding, growling sound, like ice
breaking up, perhaps. He heard much shouting and screaming in the city, then an
incoherent roaring, loud as breaking surf, or louder.

       
"What is it?"
said Togura.

       
"We're under
attack," said Draven, with fear in his voice. "We're under
attack."

Chapter 35