by John Dalmas
Kryger knew of two. A few weeks earlier, the intended landing of Royal regulars on the north coast of Hrumma had failed, reportedly when the troop-filled boats had been turned back at sea by an assault of sea serpents. It had caused an altogether irrational amount of upset. Since then there'd been civil unrest, including riots, by crowds who took it to mean that Hrum disapproved the invasion of Makklan.
All this had reflected on himself. It was he who'd suggested the waterborne invasion.
"Indeed! What this time?"
"About an hour ago a kiruu arrived with a message from Koziida Manteeros in the southeast. It seems a large force of barbarians has entered the duchy, killed or routed much of the ducal defense force there, and has the rest holed up in the ducal fortress."
Kryger frowned. "Is this a problem for you, Your Majesty? Or is it simply the duke's problem? I understand the barbarians do raid the borderlands from time to time."
"Ah, my good Vendel, but this is not the normal raiding party. Or even the unusual large party of one or two hundred. The report has it that this is a veritable army, with thousands of warriors. Allowing for exaggeration, that probably means at least two thousand."
"Ah! That is more of a problem." Kryger pretended to consider the matter. "I suppose the barbarians are besieging the fortress?"
"At this point it seems probable. They'd just invested it when the message was written, day before yesterday. But they could bypass it and continue moving east."
Kryger nodded. "It doesn't make much difference to my suggestion. Being wildmen, they probably plan to live off the land. I suggest you order the surrounding duchies to drive their livestock west, so the barbarians can't use it for their own provision. Meanwhile—Meanwhile they seem to be enough of a problem to be worth sending a brigade or two from here to meet them and run them home."
Gamaliiu didn't answer at once. He'd retired behind a frown, fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. "I'd been thinking of sending a pair of brigades from Makklan. Now that we've broken out of the isthmus, the situation there is less demanding. We're in a position to settle for the status quo there till we've chased the barbarians back to their wilderness."
Kryger nodded. "True. But it would give the Maklanni time to organize and improve their defenses. And if I recall your maps correctly, the Throne District is closer to Koziida Manteeros; troops from here could arrive there more quickly." He paused, then went on diffidently, watchfully. "Or is there—a danger here from Djez Seechul?"
Gamaliiu's eyes narrowed. "Do not test my temper, ambassador," he said quietly. "Or the limits of my friendship. A king of Djez Gorrbul does not fear Seechul."
Time for some confusion, Kryger thought. "True, Your Majesty. I did not doubt it for a moment. Forgive my imperfect use of your language; I sometimes fail to make myself clear.
"My point was that the vark might raid an unguarded border farm. But I get vark and kienno confused, the one deriving from the other. The king of Seechul is kienno, not vark, and your border districts are hardly unguarded. Removing one brigade here will leave three others, and anyway the barbarians seem to have more vark in them than the Sechuuli do. Meanwhile, by sending a force from here, you won't have to compromise your invasion of Makklan."
Gamaliiu's expression had gone blank. Kryger went on.
"Of course, my comments are always tentative. As yet, I don't know your continent and kingdom well enough to speak with full assurance on such matters."
He bowed then and stood waiting.
Again Gamaliiu retired behind a thoughtful frown. "You are somewhat right in this, nonetheless," he said. "I will send a brigade from the Throne District. The forces of the Vaski River dukes are enough to give Seechul pause. Certainly with a weakling like Labdallu on the throne there."
Kryger's nod was half a bow, and he waited a moment before speaking again, as if to be sure the king was through. Then he asked, "Which has the most formidable army, Seechul or Makklan?"
"Seechul, easily. Their numbers are much greater. The problem in Makklan is the difficult terrain. And the archery."
Kryger nodded. "I may have a solution to Seechul's army that will interest you," he said. "A weapon. A weapon much more difficult to make than cannons. It will take a lot longer to produce than cannons did, and you'd need far more of them, but I suspect your artificers can be taught to make them."
Gamaliiu's brows raised. "New weapon? What sort of new weapon?"
"We call it a rifle. It's like a very small cannon, small enough that a single soldier can carry one. It is accurate at longer ranges than a bow, and its projectiles will pass through shields almost as if they were cloth. I'd think that in a year or two you could have at least enough for a battalion. And a battalion of riflemen might well drive a full division from the field, I would think."
Gamaliiu's eyes were bright. "Draw me a picture of one of these 'rifles.' They sound very interesting!"
"Certainly, Your Majesty. If I may have paper and pencil . . ."
The king turned to his scribe. "Gossi, give the ambassador paper and pencil."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Rifles, Kryger thought. Before long you'll have thousands of rifles in Djez Gorrbul. Tens of thousands. Each in the hands of an Almaeic soldier. "Thank you, Gossi," he said, taking the drawing materials handed him, and began to draw. Meanwhile this one on paper will soothe your temper.
Sixty-Five
In an islet-sheltered cove at Hrumma's North Cape, the three east coast schooners had lain at anchor for eleven days, with submarine mines in their holds. They'd left Theedalit with seventy each, scarcely more than the project minimum of 200, not knowing when the Almaeic fleet would be reported. Two swift sloops had shuttled back and forth between Theedalit and North Cape, delivering more mines as they were built, till the three schooners had more than 100 each. Which meant they could lose one sloop and still have enough.
Each schooner had a captain, a mate, and a crew of eight, and for this mission ten marines. In addition, the "flagship" of the little flotilla carried Juliassa Brokols; her personal bodyguard, Jonkka Yelltis; and a smart and seasoned marine centurion, Varros Vemborros.
There was also a non-human contingent. Just aft of the bow, the flagship had two wooden tanks partly filled with seawater, the larger one for carrying three sullsi. The sullsi were vital to the mission. Off Haipoor l'Djezzer lay one of the longer of the sandy islands strung out along the Djezian shore. On its seaward side there waited more than two hundred sullsi and several serpents. Juliassa and her three sullsi, when they arrived, would brief and organize the sullsi mine-setting crews.
Sleekit's metamorphosis was complete. His arms had thickened, especially the left. It looked fearsomely powerful, ending in a huge hand like some clawed grapple, and he wore a thirty-inch, double-edged sword on his face, unsheathable, the outward half of it serrate and sharp enough to slice with. His thickened and otherwise drastically altered facial skeleton made his air speech mostly unintelligible, but any sellsu, or any serpent, could understand his underwater speech without difficulty, picking it up with the rows of sonar organs along their sides.
The second tank was for an immature serpent, the bright and eager two-year-old, Tssissfu. He'd swum all the way from the Gulf of Seechul to serve as Juliassa's telepathic communicator, keeping her in touch with the sullsi/serpent force off Haipoor, with the serpent watch-pickets at sea, and with K'sthuump and Brokols at Theedalit.
It happened on the twelfth day.
Morale had sagged a bit from long waiting. The marines, Juliassa, and Jonkka had lived ashore in tents. The marine centurion had drilled his men a lot, and they gambled for low stakes in their spare time. Jonkka took the opportunity to work further on his sullsit.
Juliassa's morale had held up the best, though an edge of impatience and even anxiety lay not far from the surface. She'd spent considerable time, some of it with one of the sullsi, developing an alphabet and grammar for sullsit air speech. When the war was over, she'd told herself, sh
e was going to collect sullsi sagas and write them down both in Hrummean and sullsit. And teach others. She'd already written down some of them in Hrummean.
On the west coast of Hrumma, early autumn differed from summer mainly in that it rained only occasionally, and the storms, instead of being brief squalls, could blow for several days. Thus, when a storm blew out of the east, with clouds and occasional assaults of wind-driven rain, they were concerned that the time to leave might come in weather unfit for sailing. Elver had been monitoring Almaeic fleet communications, and it seemed they must be drawing near the continent.
The twelfth day, however, dawned clear, and the near gale-force winds had slackened considerably, blowing now out of the south.
That was the day on which, finally, it happened.
Constantly at sea was a line of serpents, some thirty of them spaced a few miles apart, roughly two hundred miles off the Djezian coast. Their role was to watch and listen for the invasion fleet, while alert to other marine life that might notice ships.
Near midmorning, young Tssissfu "heard" from one of the pickets: It had sighted the Almaeic fleet.
Within half an hour the tents had been struck and loaded aboard the flagship. The sullsi and Tssissfu had been loaded into their travel tanks. The anchors were weighed and the schooners put to sea, driving fast before a moderate wind.
And Jonkka of course got seasick again, immediately and severely.
* * *
On the schooner, a lookout squatted on a crosstree. For hours he'd seen nothing but water. Wishing not to be noticed, the captain was sailing by the sun, out of sight of land, and when night fell he'd sail by the lodestar.
It was dusk when the lookout spotted something. "Small boat three points to port!" he shouted. "About two hundred yards! With someone in it!"
The steersman spun the wheel, peering through the dusk, seeing now what the lookout had seen. "Make ready to pick him up," the captain called, and men hopped to. The marines moved to the rail. Juliassa, napping in a tiny cabin below deck, didn't hear.
The wind had dropped to perhaps ten knots. Exhaustion had overcome hunger pangs, and the man in the small boat dozed, to waken with a start at the first shout.
He looked around, confused, then stood up, turning, and almost fell overboard. "Help!" he shouted. "Help!"
The ship was slowing but still had a lot of momentum, and for a moment he thought they'd run him down. As it slid past, no more than eight feet away, a sailor threw him a rope. In his exhausted state, the man was too slow-witted to loop it around a cleat. He simply grabbed it, and as the rope tightened, it jerked him from the boat. Desperately he hung on. The sailor and a marine hauled him alongside, hand over hand, like some ungainly fish, every pull jerking him under water. Finally he reached a ladder that someone had lowered, and desperately grabbed a rung.
The schooner had five feet of freeboard, but a sailor had come down the ladder to help him, grabbing his wrist. "You're all right, mate," the sailor said. "Here. Hang on with both hands and we'll pull you aboard." Then he climbed back over the rail, and a second later they pulled the ladder upward, with Tirros Hanorissio on it.
The moment his feet touched the deck, he collapsed, as much from relief as exhaustion and hunger, trembling as if he had the ague. As two men lifted him by the arms, he realized: They were speaking Hrummean, not Djezian!
"Here. Let's get you to a bench. Prawo, bring him a cup of water and something to eat. A sweetfruit to start with."
They lowered him onto a bench. "You able to sit up?"
Tirros nodded.
"Here." A man pushed a cup of water at him. He took it and drank.
"He doesn't look too starved," someone said. "More like underfed."
"How're you doing?" someone else asked him.
Tirros feigned an inland dialect. "I ain't ate since early yesterday, nor slept since afore that. If I could have somethin' to eat . . ."
"Here." A sailor handed him a sweetfruit. He tore it open and ate it out of the rind, seed-pulp and all, juice dripping on his belly and pants, then looked around. "Can I have more?"
"Not too much. It might make you sick. Prawo, get him another sweetfruit and a square of hardtack."
Tirros licked juice from his callused grimy hands. After a minute, someone handed him hardtack, dry, and he finished that almost as quickly as he had the sweetfruit, washing it down with another cup of water. The second sweetfruit he ate more slowly, then got shakily to his feet to spit seedpulp over the side.
Instead he almost swallowed it. He'd realized that some of the men wore Hrummean marine uniforms; there was even a centurion's helmet. Surely one of them would recognize him! He began to shake visibly, not from exhaustion.
The man who'd given orders earlier was the skipper. He took Tirros's arm. "Steady, lad! What's your name?"
"Barrkos, sir," Tirros answered, and told himself to remember it. "Barrkos Vendellto."
The skipper walked him forward as they talked. "All right, Barrkos. I've got no empty bunk for you. Matter of fact, I've given my own cabin to a guest, and I'm doubling up with my first mate. But we can give you better than that rowboat to sleep in, and you won't have a steering oar in your armpit." He gestured at a space between the forward hatch coaming and the anchor capstan. "Here. You won't be in anybody's way, you can't roll around, you'll have a pad to sleep on, and a blanket to keep you warm."
Tirros was almost too tired to nod. "Thank you, cap'n," he said. A sailor came forward with a rolled up sleeping pad and woolen blanket. He flopped the pad onto the deck and dropped the blanket on it. Tirros got down on his knees, laid the pad against the coaming, spread the blanket, and lay down. It took him about a minute to go to sleep, whispering his new name to himself: "Barrkos Vendellto, Barrkos Vendellto."
The skipper walked to the waist of the ship, leaned back against the rail, and looked shoreward. The marine centurion came over. "Well," said the marine, "that was an interesting change of pace. How do you suppose he got out here?"
The skipper shook his head. "Hrum knows. That accent of his is from so far back in the uplands, you'd wonder he'd even heard of the ocean."
"How long d'you think he'd been out here?"
"Not as long as he looks like. Probably blown to sea by that little storm we had. Probably from somewhere on the North Cape, the day before we left. He must be at least a bit of a sailor to have come through it.
"He's lean looking, but it's not the leanness that comes from starvation. More like the leanness that goes with a lot of hard work and barely enough to eat. Or not quite enough. I've seen men, more than once, that had been two or three weeks without food. They look different. This Barrkos Vendellto will look pretty decent with a good bath, a shave, and his hair cut." The skipper stopped for a moment. "You know, he didn't grow that beard in two or three days or a week. And his hair . . . it's not only long, it's stiff. Stiffer than sea water'd make it. I'll bet there's dirt enough in there to start a garden. Sticks out like a bush."
The centurion chuckled. "Not just his hair's dirty. When he gets out of the bath, you'll be able to bake bricks out of the water."
The skipper grunted. "I'll bet there's an interesting story there. I'll see if I can draw it out of him when I have time."
* * *
Tirros woke up with a little cry, from bad dreams of being adrift in a storm. There'd been a sellsu in the dream, and it had kept turning his boat over. He'd kept righting it, and the sellsu would turn it over again. Finally he just left the boat upside down and crawled onto the upturned bottom. Then he'd seen a fin coming—a sarrka. It paid no attention to the sellsu; it just circled the boat, looking at him. The sellsu had laughed and tipped the boat, dumping him into the water again, and the sarrka, with a ridiculously wide, toothy mouth, had started for Tirros. That's when he'd wakened.
Tirros lay there for a moment, panting. He knew what sellsu he'd dreamed about: his sister's. I should have killed it when I had the chance, he thought.
He had to urin
ate. Slowly he untangled himself from the blanket and got up. Ships generally had a urinal, a little trough, built into the bulwark aft, and he shuffled back to use it. When he'd finished, the wheelsman spoke.
"How ye doin', mate?"
"Better'n I was, that's sure." For the first time, vaguely in the night, he noticed another ship following—two others. Cautiously he asked: "Where's these ships a-goin'?"
"We're not supposed to talk about that. I don't suppose it'd hurt, seeing as how you're here now, but you'd best ask the skipper."
Tirros had no intention of asking the skipper. He nodded and started back for his pallet. When he got there, the two wooden tanks forward caught his eye, and he went to one of them to see what they were. There was no moon. All he could see were large oblong darknesses, three of them, partly in the water. One of them moved. Its head raised, turned toward him, a horrible head with a long swordlike snout. Black eyes stared, reflecting starlight, seeming to glare.