Bladesman of Antares

by Alan Burt Akers

  This pretty pot might yet boil into an affair of light amusement, or deadly peril, with the steel flying and the blood spurting. In my mood I knew which I would prefer.

  The way it did go I would not relish to have to suffer again.

  Chido’s slender frame partially shielded me from the view of the two Storms at their table. Casmas was so wrapped up in his little passionflower that he had eyes for nothing else. The girl was pale, very pale. Her color came and went, it is true, but by the way her breast moved, and the little helpless fluttery movements of her hands, and by other signs, I knew she had no joy in this marriage with Casmas the Deldy.

  The genteel uproar in the tavern, so different from the full-throated bellowings of taverns when the moons have risen, sounded all about; there was much coming and going as the midday meal was served. Kregans like six or more good meals a day, as I have said. Chido and I tucked into good red beef from cattle that might, for all we knew, have been destroying Rees’s lands. There were momolams, green vegetables, a great fruit pie, and many cups of tea to follow the table wine, a poor stuff, to my surprise; then the inevitable and sweetly necessary silver dish of palines.

  With my mouth full of palines I looked up and there was the fair hair, rosebud mouth, and pale blue eyes of the girl I had pulled from the zhyan’s claws outside The Crippled Chavonth in the dusty town of Urigal in the lazy and half-forgotten Kovnate of Waarom. Before I could stand up, over Chido’s sudden explosion of wonder, she was blurting out quick words.

  “I have only a moment, Horter. You saved me once, in Urigal. You risked your life for me, a stranger, and I could not thank you then, for my guardian and his men prevented, and you were gone. But now, Horter, I beseech you! I need a strong arm to defend me once again.”

  Chido was staring in bewilderment, beginning to stutter a question.

  She ignored him as I half rose, a serviette to my lips, bowing to her.

  “I am Rosala of Match Urt. My father was the Strom there, but he is dead now and my fortunes have fallen away, and I am being forced to marry that fat disgusting Casmas.”

  “Jolly bad show, that,” burbled Chido. We ignored him. She was imploring me with her great pale blue eyes, the tears dropping down her deathly white cheeks, pleading with me.

  “You are a brave warrior. I know that. You have proved it, Horter . . . I do not know your name. No one knew . . . or would not tell me. I beseech you, sir, help me! Take me away from that horrid Casmas! Please!”

  Of course! Nothing simpler! Just leap on the nearest zorca and away!

  But I was not Dray Prescot here. I was Hamun ham Farthytu, with a certain reputation to uphold.

  What a situation!

  I was aware of movement on the other side of the table and then of course laughter breaking through Rosala’s words as she pleaded.

  “Please, Horter! You are brave! You will find a way. I beseech you, for the courage you have already shown, the kindness to me — save me from that wretch!”

  “Courage, Hortera, courage?” Strom Lart bellowed his amusement. “The man is a poltroon!”

  “He is a ninny,” boomed Strom Hormish, “a swordless weakling, fit only for rast-nest fodder.”

  Rosala of Match Urt stared speechlessly at me, her hands clasped together, all her vulnerable beauty crying out for rescue.

  I put down the serviette.

  “I am Hamun ham Farthytu, Hortera. I regret I do not know you. You are mistaken. I cannot help you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jikaida en passant

  A blank followed that performance until I found myself back in my rooms in the inn, with Chido much perplexed and worried and declaring that, by Krun, he’d never known me like this before, old fellow. I took a stiff drink of wine; the stuff tasted foul, unmixed as it was, and I spat it out.

  I said to Chido: “You’re a good fellow, Chido. But leave me alone right now. I have some thinking to do—”

  “If that’s the way of it, Hamun . . .” He brightened. “I’ve engaged to race old Tothord.” He hovered, hesitating. “Well, Remberee, Hamun. I’ll see you.”

  “Remberee, Chido.”

  When he had gone, shaking his head, I stretched out on the bed, shooed Nulty away, threw a boot at the Fristle, Salima, who wanted to comfort me, and I fell into dark and evil thoughts.

  How low I had sunk!

  And yet, it was all my own doing. Every step of the way I had been the master of my own decisions. I had chosen to act this part, thinking how clever it would be. I had forfeited my primitive ideas of honor to what I conceived of as my duty.

  Well, this day’s sorry doing was an end to the business.

  The unsettling thought occurred to me that given the situation of war between Hamal and Vallia — an eventuality I dreaded — my duty would be to kill this Strom Lart in any way I could, duel or no duel. But I had already made up my mind not to kill him, for affairs of that nature tended in Hamal to drag on with potential litigation and all kinds of entanglements. The situation baffled and infuriated me. All manner of common sense attitudes are scattered to the winds in wartime. How could I conceive of Nulty, and Chido, and Rees, as mortal enemies? Was this not a situation similar to that which made of my friends Tilda the Beautiful and her son Pando the boy Kov of Bormark my enemies through the hostility of Pandahem and Vallia?

  Stupid, stupid . . .

  The duel had been set for late evening (all the murs of Kregen have their own names, varying with the seasons, of course), and at last I roused myself, had a meal, bathed, and, again, hurled the other boot at Salima as she purred in with a sponge to scrub my back. I dressed carefully. Around my waist I wrapped the old scarlet breech-clout. With that drawn up and buckled I donned a fresh frame of mind.

  Over that I wore a fine white ruffled shirt, dripping with lace. A pair of dark blue trousers, strapped under my boots, concealed them completely. I slung a fur-trimmed satin jacket of a lurid green color over my shoulder by its golden chains, rather after the fashion of a hussar’s pelisse. The rapier and dagger I selected were a matched pair given me by Delia. They were superb weapons. I had declined the Trylon Rees’s kind offer of a set of his own weapons. Most of the rapiers in use in Ruathytu had been purchased in Zenicce, part payment for vollers, probably, and were of good quality. My friends of the House of Eward were fine swordsmiths. Soon the Hamalians would be forging rapiers themselves, although the armories were hard at work turning out thraxters and stuxes for the army. But these two, the Jiktar and the Hikdar, the rapier and main-gauche, were of pure Vallian make, superb.

  That thick-bladed knife I always refer to as my old sailor’s knife, for all that this specimen had never been to sea, went as ever strapped over my right hip.

  “Now,” I said to my wavering reflection in the mirror. “To sort out Strom Lart. And, sink me!” I burst out, all to myself, puffed up with anger and bile. “If he tries to be clever I’ll skewer him, by Makki-Grodno’s diseased left eyeball!”

  In the event I had to be clever myself, for as I entered the dueling hall, and saw the eager faces of friends and enemies, and heard the bets being called — a fatuous business, that, with the bets on just what Strom Lart would do and how he would do it, and the artistic execution of his designs — I realized it would still pay me to preserve my cover. Chido was there, but Rees was not well enough to attend. Casmas the Deldy was there. He had brought his passionflower, his lily of desire, the china doll beauty, Rosala of Match Urt. She looked dreadful, I could see, beneath the paint and powder.

  Casmas, I saw at once, had been unpleasant to her.

  When a noble family falls on hard times and they plan to recoup their fortunes by marrying off a beautiful and nubile girl of the family to a fabulously wealthy moneylender, they do not much care for the girl to ask strangers to rescue her. Her family, those prideful, hard-eyed, hard-lipped men I had seen outside The Crippled Chavonth, no less than Casmas, would have been vile to Rosala.

  Again that unsettling thought str
uck me — they were all Hamalian.

  I remember the duel that followed with some warm affection. I clowned about, as I had done in alley-fights with Rees. At the last moment my blade would flick across, as though purely by chance, and deflect Lart’s thrusts. I stumbled about, and flailed the rapier as though it were an ax, and retreated with my legs twinkling, and slipped so clumsily as to let Lart stagger past barely missing by a whisker the blade that had no intention — then — of sinking into his vitals. I needed to keep clear of public entanglements with the confoundedly pedantic laws of Hamal.

  The crowd yelled and hullabalooed, and I had plenty of time to take my eyes away from Strom Lart and his bloodthirsty swashbucklings to look at Rosala. She sat frozen like a lump of black ice — black ice, despite her whiteness.

  Chido was beside himself, yelling: “Keep him out, Hamun! Bladesman! Bladesman!”

  Strom Lart’s followers were chanting also, and the din built up into an inferno of sound.

  Having clowned around long enough, I decided to finish the thing. Lart had skill, of that there was no doubt. But he did not have the experience that might have told him I merely toyed with him. As I was not acting the part of a master swordsman baiting an inferior, toying with him in that sense, but, instead, acting as though I were in terror of my life and only managing to keep alive by the most atrocious series of passages of good fortune, I fancied the keen eyes of the master swordsman from Ponthieu, Leotes, might not have penetrated my antics. Leotes stood at the side, limber and lithe, his dark handsome face intent on the bout. I marked him. I took care when the climactic point came that Strom Lart’s gross body blocked Leotes’ view.

  Lart rushed, using a quite clever system of connected passes (all the terms of Earthly fencing could be brought in; suffice it to say Lart used a passage linked by a strict discipline taught him by swordsmen from Zenicce), and I yelped aloud, and twisted, awkwardly and with smooth subtle cunning, and then stepped back, my left hand high, withdrawing the blade from Lart’s right arm. His rapier, snared by my dagger, snaked up alongside my dagger, and my rapier snaked up, also, through his arm. He dropped his main-gauche before he dropped his rapier.

  For a single and fleeting instant, as I recovered, I let my point hover at his throat. I looked into his eyes. I laughed at him.

  “How easy it would be, Strom Lart!”

  “You — you—” he gobbled. He held his arm and the blood was already dribbling between his fingers.

  I swung away.

  The judges declared the duel ended in blood and honor and we could collect our winnings and go home. Casmas was so exuberant he actually came up and slapped me on the back.

  “By Havil, Amak! You have done me a good turn this day! No one expected you to live! And the bets — all the lovely golden deldys — you are to be congratulated, Amak Hamun!”

  Casmas was raking in the deldys. He had made a killing here if no one else had.

  I did not reply. Chido was wringing my hand and bubbling, quite forgetting to collect his winnings from Casmas. I willingly allowed them to carry me off in triumph to a late supper. Casmas, who lived in a sumptuous villa, but not in the sacred quarter, excused himself, smirking, saying his passionflower awaited. Rosala’s family went with Casmas. They were brilliant, foppishly dressed men, yet hard and flint eyed.

  We settled down to serious drinking, Chido, Nath Tolfeyr, Tothord of the Ruby Hills, old fussy Strom Dolan, and others of our cronies. We missed the Trylon Rees, for the Numim was acknowledged the leader in all our escapades.

  “Let us go to him and turn him out of bed, and tell him the news!”

  “No, no!” I shouted weakly. “He needs his rest.”

  “He’ll rest all the better when he hears, Hamun! Come on!” And Chido and Nath Tolfeyr laughed and yammered and would not listen to me, and so we trooped out into the night, ruffling it in our cloaks, with our rapiers swinging, beneath the moons of Kregen.

  Well, I will not weary you with our antics that night as we traversed the sacred quarter, hunting trouble. A spirit of adventure, sheer mischief, floated in the warm air.

  We ran yelling with laughter from the watch, and they, despite the strict rules and laws of Hamal, were never so anxious to catch us. We drank from bottles, and we lost stupid old Strom Bolan, who fell down the steps into a dopa den, and yelled at us as he staggered up that since he was down here he would stay, and crack a bottle or two of dopa, and we yelled down that he was a fool and an onker; he hiccupped and pushed through into the den and we, cursing him for his folly, left him and pressed on to Rees’s villa. Well, as I say, we were young and high-spirited, for all that our ages would have made us appallingly old on this Earth, and we roused Rees and he roared his joy at our news and fresh bottles were brought.

  By the time I slipped away the Maiden with the Many Smiles floated serenely above, and the Twins were eternally orbiting each other midway down the western sky. The light was far too great for the kind of enterprise on which I embarked, but I would not wait.

  I insist I am not a man puffed up with pride. Pride is for fools. But I knew then, as I swung off for Casmas’ luxurious villa in the shining quarter — a select area of secluded villas tucked into the southwestern corner of the city between the Walls of Kazlili and the Black River — that this fraught emotion I experienced, which led me into harebrained schemes, was as near to baffled pride as I care to admit.

  I unslung the bright green pelisse. I took off the white frilled shirt. I stripped off the dark blue trousers and the boots. Clad only in my old scarlet breechclout, with rapier and dagger belted to my waist, with my sailor’s knife over my hip, I stalked off. I had the sense to throw the great gray cloak over all; but it was touch and go, in my frame of mind, whether I damned ’em all to the Ice Floes of Sicce, and left it with my clothes bundled up and slung into a bush beneath Casmas’ walls. I did however — and not without a curse of annoyance — don the mask.

  Casmas the Deldy’s outer wall was frosted with razor-edged glass. I simply tore up a bush, hurled it onto the glass, handed myself up, and leaped down on the inner side.

  Without a snarl, without a screech, the great vicious black-and-white form of a wersting launched itself at my throat!

  Werstings are bulky, black-and-white-striped hunting dogs of Kregen, lethal in their vicious savagery. I had met them before, but not about the same kind of business I was engaged in now. The wersting leaped. I saw the fangs in his gaping red mouth and I flung myself sideways and the rapier licked up and in, silver bright under the moons, black and greasy as I rolled away, dragging it clear. The beast let out a whining grunt of pure astonished pain. A second thrust finished him.

  I padded on over the turf, beneath the shade trees, between the graceful fountains, toward the villa of Casmas the Deldy. I held the rapier gripped in my fist.

  Lights from mellow samphron-oil lamps still shone from windows. I selected a first-floor window above a balcony and handed up the greenery, peered in past hangings. The room contained Casmas himself playing Jikaida with one of Rosala’s family. Two other men sat drinking and polishing their weapons. So the family was keeping the proprieties before the marriage. Very right and proper, too!

  As I watched, Casmas, with a fat chuckle, swept up a swod from his opponent’s central drin. The swod in Jikaida, named for a common soldier, a private, is almost equivalent to the pawn in chess. I chinned myself up, mentally working out the next move I would have made to confound Casmas — his king’s paktun stood perilously exposed — and so worked my way along to the next window. This was in darkness, with a faint moonglow reflecting from the dark panes. My knife eased the catch and I slipped to soft rugs inside.

  The room was empty, with a bed ready, and I guessed it was a guest room for one of Rosala’s family of hawks. I padded along the corridor to the back of the house and soon found a door that looked promising. This door was smaller than the usual, and stood in an angle between two larger doors. It was typical of the doors to rooms for body
-servants, in instant attention upon their masters or mistresses. The girl in the bed inside awoke to my brown hand across her mouth, a dagger flashing in her eyes, and my evil old face glowering down upon her.

  She tried to scream and then to bite, and I showed her the error of her ways.

  “Do you know the Hortera Rosala of Match Urt?”

  Her eyes, wide with shock, blinked. I tickled her and said, “Blink twice if you know—” She blinked twice. I said, “Very good. Blink twice if you will keep silent if I take my hand away.” Instantly, two more blinks. I took my hand away, ready to slap it back at once if she yelled.

  She took a breath — she was a slip of a thing with lustrous dark hair in the cheap oil dip’s light — and said: “I am Paline and the lady Rosala is my mistress; have you come to rescue her?”

  Those romantic plays and books that are the rage of Kregen with their foolish notions of high passionate love, and excursions and alarms! They have much to answer for.

  “How do you know, Paline, that I have not come to ravish you?”

  She giggled. She was thoroughly at home and enjoying every minute of it.

  “You wear a mask, and you carry a sword, and you are a Notor, sure. These things are not necessary to ravish Paline.”

  I did not chuckle. I said, “Where is the lady Rosala?”

  She rose at once, clad in a long white nightgown, and on bare feet she led me out of her room and into the one next door. Rosala lay sleeping in the wide double bed, beneath a canopy ostentatiously woven of gold thread, with blue flowers and yellow faerlings embroidered upon it. Paline shook her awake. She sat up, her fair hair gleaming in the light, and saw me, and put a hand to her mouth.

  “The great Jikai has come to rescue you, my lady! We must dress and fly! Hurry, my lady, hurry!”

  “We?” I said.

  Rosala looked at me.

  “Surely, you who drew me from the zhyan’s claws would not leave my faithful Paline? You would not desert a defenseless girl?”