Witches of Kregen (13 page)
“I thank you, dom.” I hopped off the zorca and fetched my hat. “My head is of little value; I wouldn’t like to damage this hat.”
“Ha!” he said. “A joker.”
By the dripping mucous and yellow puss of Makki Grodno’s left eyeball! What would folk say to that? A joker?
“One has to live,” I said, and climbed back into the saddle. He reined alongside and gave the lahal.
“I am Nalgre the Point — not, I hasten to add, a name of my own choosing and one of which lately I grow tired.” He was not apim like me. He was an olumai, and he looked like a panda; he wore a white tunic with a golden hem and he did not carry a rapier, instead he had a lynxter strapped to his waist. The lynxter instead of a rapier and main gauche, which many of the paktuns wore for travel, indicated Nalgre the Point’s origin. He was from Loh. Also, like me, he concealed his pakzhan at his throat.
I said my name was Kadar the Silent. Kadar was a name used by me aforetime and happened to be the name inscribed on the reverse of the golden image of the zhantil on its silken cords at my throat. By Zair! That had all happened a long time ago! Now, I was a properly accredited and legal hyrpaktun — I was no fake.
We talked occasionally and I gathered Nalgre the Point hankered after something he kept secret. He did say: “I find myself feeling a strange emotion for the people of Vallia. I almost feel sorry for them. Yet troublous times give us our livelihood, brother. Who are we to complain?”
A trifle incautiously, I said: “When all Vallia is pacified we paktuns will find employment elsewhere.”
“For one dubbed Silent, Kadar, when you speak you enlarge grandly upon the course of events.”
Acting my part, I did not reply.
When we reached Fakransmot we discovered that mercenaries were being hired on there; but the dowager kovneva had shifted her headquarters northwards, almost to the Mountains of the North, often called the Snowy Mountains.
Nalgre the Point looked out from the tavern windows where they were signing men on to the yard, where the red and green suns smoked dusty ruby and jade across the waiting men, the saddle animals, the hurrying slaves. He put a powerful paw to his chin.
“I have been told that in Vallia it is not cold weather until you cross the Snowy Mountains.”
“That is right, zhan
[ii]
,” said the Hikdar at the table. “Now just sign on with us and—”
“My heart was set on joining the dowager kovneva.”
Instantly, standing at Nalgre’s side, I got out: “Mine too.”
“That is, of course, your privilege.” The Hikdar, flamboyantly attired and smothered with the black and white favors, Racter colors, gave a grimace which indicated he was conveying a private confidence. “We fare better down here against the forces of the so-called Emperor of Vallia than they do up in the north against the King of North Vallia.”
He made a further attempt to induce us to join his regiment, and when we refused, waved us pettishly away.
Outside, Nalgre said: “So we ride north?”
“Aye.”
“Let us, for the sake of Beng Dikkane, find another tavern to refresh ourselves first.”
Without wearying you with details of our ride north, I will content myself with saying that Nalgre the Point proved an agreeable companion. He nursed this secret hurt, something troubling him he wrestled with constantly; but he remained cheerful and alert. I made what inquiries I could and discovered that everyone believed the two wars, north and south, were being won handsomely. The dowager kovneva shuttled from front to front. There was not the slightest whisper that she considered herself to be dying. As for her son, Kov Nath, he was universally condemned as a weakling and of no account in statecraft.
If the old biddy really wasn’t at death’s door I could be wasting my time up here. There was comfort in the fact that Csitra couldn’t spot me and therefore should not be bringing further plagues and curses upon my people.
In the end I decided to have a good look around, find out everything I could, and then get back home sharpish.
Ha!
Natyzha Famphreon could really be dying, could even already be dead, and for obvious reasons of state no one at her court would admit to that. This was the possibility that caused me to travel north with Nalgre the Point. I’d given a promise to Natyzha, enemy though she was, and I intended to keep it as best I could.
Nalgre came from Whonban in Loh and he told me somewhat of that mysterious place. I told him I came from Hamal, which seemed reasonable at the time.
Once he’d commanded his own group of mercenaries. Zhanpaktuns can attract followers with the promises of employment and loot. Lone zhanpaktuns usually have a colorful history. His band had been chopped in a disastrous battle and, from his demeanor and what he didn’t say, I gathered he hadn’t had the heart to create a fresh band of followers.
I simply said I’d been fighting in Hamal and preferred to be a loner.
Most wealthy fighting men when they travel and go by road ride one animal and have a few in the string to carry their belongings. I had Swivelears. Nalgre had three preysanys and a totrix. Naturally, being a sensible fellow, he rode a zorca. The very ride itself, wending through the country, proved delightful. Neither of us was in a hurry. The war would still be there when we arrived.
The Snowy Mountains appeared on the horizon ahead. The weather remained good, for Kregen’s enormous temperate zone assures sensible weather from the equator north and south over a much wider series of parallels than on Earth. We put up at inns, ate and drank well, and got on famously.
The absence of bandits was welcome. Natyzha policed her kovnate with a hand not so much of iron as of carbon steel. We suffered only two assaults, and of these the first fracas was over in a twinkling with a few lopped heads and limbs, a few writhing bodies and the rest running on bandy legs as fast as they could get away.
The second fracas was of a more serious nature.
As Nalgre said, carefully wiping his sword on the tunic of a fellow with no face: “I do wish these fellows would think before they acted.”
Casually, returning my sword to the scabbard, I said: “Oh, they mistook us for a couple of idiots, easy prey, I suppose.”
The bandits had chosen a narrow trail between overhanging vegetation-clothed banks from which to make their attack, and these drikingers consisted of fellows to make your hair curl, all dripping furs and golden-ornaments and fierce eyes and bad breath.
“They might have profited from the wasted year I spent at school learning of the philosophic theories of Olaseph the Nik.” Nalgre mounted up, chik-chikking to his zorca, Goldenhooves. “I cleared out as soon as I could and went for a mercenary. That was a long time ago, by Hlo-Hli!”
We trotted on out of the shadowy trail into the twinned sunshine. There had been little of value to be liberated from the dead drikingers, although Nalgre found a nice ring, which I indicated I wanted nothing of.
He went on, as though ruminating: “I remember that fool teacher hammering at me that appearances are all. What one sees on the surface is all there is. Nothing of what lies beneath can be revealed by insight or self-analysis because there is nothing beneath the surface.”
“Umm?” I said, letting Snagglejaws take me along, and thinking what a powerfully intellectual comment that Umm was. It takes all kinds to make a world, and all kinds of philosophies and theories to furnish that world with concepts to play with and, perhaps, to extend understanding.
“Those drikingers looked down and saw your execrable zorca, the string of pack animals, my Goldenhooves, who no doubt brought the light of avarice into their eyes, and they failed to observe the glitter of gold at our throats. They saw two men lumpily riding and talking, taking no notice of the world about them. They went by appearances, sensing nothing below the surface.”
“You stretch the analogy a trifle, I feel. The surface did include the pakzhans at our throats. It was faulty observation, surely—”
“I grant you that.” His panda face showed intense pleasure, as a panda’s face, diff or not, quite clearly could reveal an emotion understandable by an apim. “But my argument encompasses their reading of the gold as a mere ornament. They saw an appearance of a couple of ponshos ripe for the shearing, and they fell upon a couple of leems.”
“They fell right enough. I grant you that.”
“But you agree, also, that one cannot judge all there is to be judged by surface appearances alone? A person is more than his outward shell, more than his words?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, if you grant only one sometimes, the philosophy of Olaseph the Nik must fail.”
“You have me there, Nalgre. Hip and thigh.”
“Although the philosopher marshals vituperative arguments, suggesting for example that people prone to self-analysis have not grown to adulthood, he finally does not convince me. And, through your admission, you either.”
Nalgre used Kregish words and language concepts, naturally, encompassing what I have rendered here, including “self-analysis.” It struck me that I was not, in this context, yet adult because I continually questioned what I did. Did this mean, therefore, that anyone who simply knew that they were always right was fully adult? The theory would seem to imply this.
Back in the real world, of Kregen or of Earth, anyone who always knew they were right usually trailed a whole string of catastrophes in their wake. Also, did I patter on too much about my problems? I could simply bash straight on, as I used to do, and hell take anyone else. That, to me in those days, seemed the immature approach to life. What I felt about Vallia, about all of Paz, about our coming confrontation with the Shanks who appeared to want only to raid and kill us, nerved me into taking decisions the enormity of which would appall me if I felt those decisions to be — not so much wrong as ineptly directed.
The real world impinged again as Nalgre lifted in the stirrups, pointing ahead: “There’s the tower we were to look out for. And I can see the walls of Tali. Good! I’m for the very first tavern and a stoup of ale.”
“And a dish of palines.”
Now
we were talking of the important things of life, by Krun!
There was no doubt that the philosophic theories of Olaseph the Nik were supremely correct about this city of Tali. The walls were tall and thick, the towers many and strong, the twinkle of weapons along the ramparts clear evidence of a powerful garrison. Stringing blue-white along the far horizon the Snowy Mountains floated against the sky. From there descended the perils Tali guarded against.
Up here past the northern boundary of Natyzha Famphreon’s Falkerdrin we rode through the vadvarate province of Kavinstock. Kavinstock’s ruler, its vad, had been Nalgre Sultant. He and I had had our run-ins before; he was a fanatic Racter, and a mad-dog in many people’s eyes, certainly a man who hated my guts. I did not much care for him myself. He could easily be reported dead, and his heirs could now rule here in Kavinstock for all I knew.
As one of the inner circle who controlled the actions and plans of the Racters, Nalgre Sultant did what Natyzha bid him. If I ran into him the ending might be six inches of steel through his guts.
As Nalgre the Point and I rode toward the massive gate in those frowning walls I tried to imagine just what Natyzha wanted up here if she thought she was at death’s door. That she held the most powerful voice in the councils of the Racters was without question. Equally the Racters, people like this Nalgre Sultant, and Ered Imlien, whose estates of Thengel were long since lost to him, fought to gain an ascendancy over her and one another.
We rode unmolested through the Thoth Gate of Tali.
Most of the walls surrounding the cities of Vallia are old, built in the long ago when the country was divided up into petty kingdoms. Some are kept up. The walls of Tali were thick through, for I measured off in my mind the paces and there were a full sixty of them. Against the predators from the Mountains of the North those walls had been reared. Now they served as a bulwark against raids from this King of North Vallia.
Thick walls and many regiments guarded against the perils from the north. Was it too arrogant of me to wonder how much peril I posed to this fortress city of the Racters?
On the Day of Nojaz the Shriven
Thwack! slammed the rudis against the soldier’s chest and then quite quickly Smash! against his head. The girl doing the smiting, naked save for a breechclout, panted with effort, her body shining, her hair bound into a fillet. The soldier was carapaced with straw-stuffed wooden armor. He jerked about like a marionette and the girl hit him cleanly about one in four.
Wearing a highly ornate uniform, a confection of ribbons and streamers, slashes and sashes, in a virulent greenish-yellow, Nalgre the Point stepped forward.
He thrust his sword against the girl’s wooden sword and turned the rudis away.
“Not quite right yet, my lady. Look—”
Nalgre showed the girl the trick of turning the hand over between blows. His panda face expressed no impatience. He spoke normally. He taught this high-flown girl the rudiments of swordplay — or the art of the sword, as I prefer — matter of factly. The exercise yard smoked a little dust from the tramp of feet; but a cooling shadowed tree overhung the south wall and this far north in the temperate zone violent exercise could be indulged in without discomfort.
I stood in the shadows of the little porch by the entrance gateway and waited for Nalgre to finish up.
When at last he let her go, streaming sweat and panting as she was, he said: “Tell your father, my lady, I am only half-pleased with you.”
“Oh, Nalgre! You’ll spoil it all!”
She looked a willful thing, long of brown hair and finely formed, with a twisting pout to her lips a little suffering would help — not that I advocate suffering for anyone. More often than not it drags down rather than ennobling the ordinary sort of person.
“All the same, my lady, that is my word.”
Nalgre said to the swod: “Thank you, Garnath. You performed well. Same time tomorrow.”