The Shasht War

by Christopher Rowley

  Filek asked what the heir had been eating.

  He paled as he heard the list of powerful purgatives and toxins that the witch doctor had been prescribing. Red Dust, a pernicious poison, and the Powder of Ground Entrallium, that was guaranteed to cause tumors in the liver. It might already be too late for the heir. A pity, thought Filek the doctor.

  "Your Revered Majesty, I must tell you some important facts. The red powder is a most pernicious substance. First they ground up sulfur with a rock rich in iron. Then they add arsenic and cantharides beetle extracts. My own research has shown that a spoonful will kill a sheep, a pinch will finish a rat."

  He had Nebbeggebben's attention.

  "So how much do they put in the medicine?"

  "A pinch usually, but if it becomes ineffective they add a second.

  "What's it supposed to do, kill me?"

  "It will cause you to purge your bowels, but it will weaken you and harm your liver."

  "Hmmmph." The heir was displeased.

  "The use of metal powders is an equally pernicious mistake. These metals are almost all toxic. But the powders glitter so, and that makes the ignorant vulnerable to their prescription. Also they are expensive; metals are rare. And so the expense is part of the lure of them. However, only the most costly of all is harmless. Ground gold seems to be relatively nontoxic. All others kill rats and rabbits quickly.

  Nebbeggebben was wide-eyed and angry.

  "They've been poisoning me, haven't they? The foul ungrateful swine. By the Balls of the Great God, I'll have them split open and roasted from the liver out."

  As Nebbeggebben grew more heated, he waved his cane around and promised the most hideous tortures to his witch doctors.

  The mere mention of the rack and the hot irons caused Filek's nerve to fail completely. He started thinking that it was an awful pity to threaten old Nebbe. Why risk it all like that? Nebbeggebben was going to go after the witch doctors. He seemed to be converting to Filek's own way of thinking.

  Steadying his voice, Filek prescribed a healthy diet. Fresh green vegetables, oatmeal, and small oily fishes. To be followed with fruit and tea. There was to be no alcohol, no meat, and very little fat, except from the fishes.

  "My research on the inmates in the mental asylum back home showed that on this diet elderly sufferers from many diseases grew healthy and survived several more years."

  The heir was not enthusiastic. "I hate oatmeal."

  "Yes, Your Revered Majesty, but it will help your bowels. You see, we need to clean out as much of the toxins as we can. The fibers in these foods can help in that way. The oils in small fish appear to be very beneficial to health and can help to regulate the heart in some way that we do not understand."

  Nebbeggebben quickly grew bored with details. He waved Filek to silence.

  "Don't bore me with it, just do it. I have decided that you shall care for my health from now on. You will live just as long as I do."

  The audience was over. Filek stood there for a moment completely nonplussed. He didn't have to go through with the stupid plan. He could just step away. He would be safe here, on Nebbeggebben's ship. There was no need to risk his life at all.

  The moment was passing, he started to turn away, abandoning the opportunity.

  "Noooo!"

  A sudden whirl of motion broke the tableau.

  The admiral had surged up on his one and a half legs and cut the nearest guard open from belly to neck. Now he whirled, knocking away the other guard's spear with his crutch and swept the knife across the other guard's front, intersecting his right wrist. The poor man's hand was severed in a moment, and his sword never left the scabbard.

  Blood squirted in the air, and the guard spiraled to the floor while Heuze lurched toward the heir.

  Nebbeggebben was too surprised to scream, but the admiral's open rebellion enraged him, so he stood on his wobbly legs and met Heuze with a great swing of the heavy black cane.

  To Filek's horror, the cane struck Heuze on the side of the head, and he went down with a thud. Knocked cold.

  Filek realized they were undone. Heuze would be taken, and under torture he would implicate Filek. Under torture himself, Filek would confess to anything and then his fate would be sealed. The tortures would be slow and terrible and then there would be death. All his work would be undone, all his hopes lost forever.

  Filek opened the kit bag and pulled out the long needle. He jumped forward and seized Nebbeggebben around the shoulders. Nebbeggebben elbowed him in the mouth. The heir was a big man, albeit withered by the plague.

  "Leave me alone, you fool!" snarled the heir, still thinking that Filek was trying to help him.

  Filek, stunned by the pain, saw his moment and lodged the needle firmly into Nebbeggebben's neck behind the ear. A trickle of blood ran down the heir's skin. Filek angled the needle perfectly for a death stroke. With a single thrust he could drive that needle under the edge of the skull. So he had dispatched many poor sick people, in agony from terminal illnesses. Nebbeggebben would be dead before he hit the floor.

  "Don't move," hissed Filek Biswas harshly in the heir's ear. "This is a trephination needle. It is a foot long. If you don't do what I say, I will drive it into your brain. In case you were wondering, I've performed this act many times, to put patients out of their misery."

  Nebbeggebben went rigid. He could feel the sharp prick of metal in his skin. Sweat beaded his forehead. Filek had amazed himself. He had taken charge of the situation.

  The outer guards had entered the room but were halted ten feet away, swords drawn. They could see that shiny silver of steel in Filek's hand.

  "Tell them to keep back and to close the doors."

  Nebbeggebben did as he was told.

  "Now, move back here and sit on your chair. Move very slowly, or I'll kill you."

  The heir shifted back to his throne. Filek moved behind the throne, getting Nebbeggebben squarely in front of him, still with the needle jabbed securely into the scrawny neck.

  "What do you want?" said Nebbeggebben in a harsh whisper.

  Filek struggled for a moment to speak. Now his terror returned.

  What was he doing? They would feed him to the eels for this.

  "The admiral will tell you. It is not my place."

  "Hah! The precious, sodomistic admiral won't be awake any time soon. That was a good blow I caught him with. If only I'd had a sword in my hand. I'd have taken his head."

  But Heuze's head was a hard one, and now to their surprise he stirred, and made swimming motions with his arms and legs. They could see the straps of his stump as his short trouser leg rode up.

  "We will wait and see if he recovers..."

  "And what if he doesn't recover? Had you thought through that part of this madness?"

  "Please don't say anything. I feel shame for my embarrassing attack upon Your Revered Majesty. I am not disloyal..."

  "If you're not disloyal, then why are you holding a knife to my neck."

  "I cannot answer that question at this time, Your Revered Majesty."

  "Well, you'd better be thinking of a good answer, because the priests will want to hear it. They'll make you wish you'd never been born."

  "I already do, Your Revered Majesty."

  "You have no idea, you stupid peasant."

  Filek colored. "I am no peasant, Your Revered Majesty. I am of good family. Biswas has been a name in the dyes and paints trade for a hundred years in the city of Shasht."

  Nebbeggebben laughed sourly.

  But then the admiral stirred again, and sat up. He shook his head and looked up at the figure of the heir, seated in his throne. Then his vision sharpened, and he saw Filek crouched behind the heir with a hand on his shoulder.

  The guards were back against the walls.

  Hope bloomed anew.

  Heuze got back to his feet a little unsteadily, shook his head, and picked up the heir's heavy cane. He swung it sharply against Nebbeggebben's shins.

  "Ow!" shrieked th
e heir, who jerked and almost shed the needle.

  But Heuze pressed his sharp knife against the withered neck of the Scion of Aeswiren.

  "I ought to cut your throat, you old gander..."

  Nebbeggebben stared back at him, unable to speak.

  "But I won't." Heuze had a nasty smile on his face. "Because we can do business. I don't want your position. I want to be safe while I do my job."

  "Traitor..."

  "Shut up!" Heuze raised a hand. Nebbeggebben stifled his angry response.

  "Tell the guards to put their weapons down."

  The guards disarmed and stood in one corner of the room. Filek went out to pass the message to the men in the barge.

  They swarmed up the side of the ship and hurried to take control of the throne room. Now events were swinging their way.

  Soon the first Gold Tops were summoned from other ships. Each for an audience with the heir. Each to lose his head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Filek stood on the after deck of the frigate Cloud and watched the land falling away to a grey smudge on the horizon. It was done. He would never have to see that world again.

  He put his arm around his daughter, wrapped in the hooded robe and veil. They were going home. And with them they carried the best protection possible, good news. In addition there were the scrolls, a royal one from Nebbeggebben, reporting favorably on the state of the expedition and the other, that mysterious little scroll from the rulers of the aborigines that his daughter insisted on calling the "mots."

  After long and earnest negotiations with the Scion, Nebbeggebben had been won round to their point of view. The admiral and Filek had begged forgiveness and accepted floggings, twenty lashes apiece, and then been forgiven.

  The choices were stark for all of them. Either Nebbeggebben forgave them, or they had to kill him. But they all knew that then they would live under the shadow of Aeswiren's wrath, and inevitably another fleet would appear with another army. So each side had cards to play. The bargaining consumed the first night of their rebellion—even while they killed the Gold Tops. One by one their bodies were stuffed into Nebbeggebben's changing room. At one point they had to soak up blood leaking from under the door with heavy velvet torn from the windows so as not to alert the unsuspecting Gold Tops as they were brought in.

  What brought the breakthrough in the end was the realization that once they'd killed most of the Gold Tops they'd taken away Nebbeggebben's strongest support. The Scion needed the admiral, after that, because the admiral held the loyalty of the fleet commanders and of the army.

  Filek winced as he shifted position. His back was healing well, but it was still a mess of cuts and bruises. By the Great God, Nebbeggebben had demanded fifty lashes, but was persuaded to lessen the sentence. Filek didn't think he could have survived fifty. By the third he was howling, and he lost consciousness twice after the fifteenth.

  "Oh, Father," said his wonderful, intelligent daughter, "we are going home."

  "Yes, darling."

  "I never thought we would. I thought we would have to live there for the rest of our lives."

  "We have been retrieved by a miracle."

  "Father, you were very brave, you know."

  "I wish I could agree with you, my dear."

  "No, you were. You are not a soldier, not accustomed to pain like that. You cried out, but then you were silent."

  "Because my throat seized up."

  "What do you think will happen to us now?"

  "We will go to Aeswiren. If he chooses, we will live. If not, then we will be given to the Great God."

  "But before that we will give him the scroll?"

  "Yes. He will look at your precious scroll first."

  Simona smiled behind the dark veil. The admiral had said the scroll was powerful, and from the look on his face, she knew it had worked magic on him. Simona had renewed her faith in the powers of the Assenzi.

  "And if we live, Father?"

  "Then I will go back to the hospital. I have an enormous amount of research to do."

  "Yes, Father, I know. I think I would like to go to Shesh Zob. I would like to spend the rest of my life there."

  "I know you would, dear. And I agree that you will spend most of your time there, but there will be social occasions in the city when you will need to be seen by my side."

  "Oh, I will come to the city whenever you want me to, dear father, but the rest of the time, even the winters, I will be in the country."

  Filek shrugged to himself. His daughter had been exposed to privations and terrors in these last few years that he had never dreamed would come her way. If she needed a year or two to recuperate in the country, then she would get them. But, eventually she would have to be wed. The family would need an heir.

  "It is good that I am going back. My work needs the resources of the city. But I'm sorry in some ways that I won't see this lovely land ever again. It was beautiful there, wasn't it?"

  For a moment both of them recalled the soaring trees, the rushing torrents, the boundless life of the land.

  "I never imagined the world could be so beautiful."

  "Nor did I, Father. Or that our people could be so wrong."

  Filek frowned. "You must keep those opinions to yourself, my dear. Remember that the Hand will be listening to you. If they can find the slightest thing, they will put you to the questioning."

  How brutal of him to remind her like this. His darling daughter who had already endured one questioning, when she'd returned from her sojourn among the aborigines. But, he was concerned that she didn't take this danger seriously enough.

  "I know, Father," she said after a moment.

  Filek turned away and looked past the sails, stretched taut by a good wind out of the north. Away there, ten months' sailing, according to the captain, lay the great city. They would be so surprised to see him again at the hospital! Old Klegg was in for a shock! Poor old man had been crying when Filek had last seen him. Klegg hadn't relished the thought of having to take up the administrative burden that Filek had carried.

  For a moment he wondered again if Nebbeggebben hadn't sent another message, secretly, that would expose the admiral's mutiny and seizure of power. Heuze had expressed confidence that Nebbeggebben wasn't double-dealing and that he had truly forgiven them. Heuze claimed that the Scion was happy to be rid of the Gold Tops anyway. Now Nebbeggebben ruled the Red Tops more directly, through his own appointed high priests. But it was always possible that the Scion was merely biding his time before killing Heuze and Filek.

  Again he shrugged. If his fate was to die on the temple pyramid, then so be it. He could only do his best. He had a serious goal: to find a cure for the plague. The machinations of Emperors were beyond his powers, as inscrutable as the wind and the rain.

  —|—

  Becalmed for days, the ship was surrounded by stinking water. The heat pervaded the closeness of the hold like a physical thing. Like some huge animal with fetid breath it crowded their space, sitting on their chests, cutting off the very air they struggled to breathe.

  Thru Gillo awoke with a gasp. The dream faded, but the images it had brought did not.

  "What did you see, Thru Gillo?" asked a voice at his side, Ter-Saab.

  Thru looked at the ruined face in the dark.

  "I saw a small boat carried across a great sea of darkness, and in the boat were the seeds of light and life eternal..."

  The others had roused themselves to listen. They had all had such dreams, and in the darkness of their prison they clung to these shafts of light, insubstantial as they were, for in truth they had nothing else to give them hope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  "We will never return to our homeland," said Pern Glazen in his usual gloomy way.

  "You cannot know that for certain." As ever Juf Goost stood up to him. They had been opponents on this issue since the beginning of their captivity aboard the Biter.

  Bodies shifted in the fetid darkness. It was cold again. Mor
e evidence that they had gone a long way south of the equator now.

  "How many new moons have we counted, twelve? We have been on this ship for a year. How do you think you would ever find your way back? The men will not take you back."

  "We will find a way. Remember we have the great secret."

  "Bah, so we know some of their language? So Thru Gillo taught us the meaning? It is good that we have that power and that we keep it hidden from them. Maybe it will help us escape somehow, but how will we sail a ship like this halfway around the world? There are only eleven of us."

  "It doesn't matter, anyway," said Pern Glazen. "When we reach the city of men, they will kill us. They will sacrifice us to their dark God."

  "Damn their God, if he exists," swore Juf Goost.

  "He doesn't," said Juf Nolo. "They delude themselves with their vicious God. It gives them permission to kill and destroy."

  "The great secret will come to our aid at the right time."

  "So you say, Juf Goost. But we may not live to see that time. They may march us straight from the ship to the temple and kill us on the spot."

  Pern Glazen had an unerring eye for the bleakest scenario...

  "The men say their God gave them dominion over the world," said Jev Turn, who was much taken with questions of god and spirit. "They say that gives them their right to do whatever they want with us."

  "God didn't give them the right," griped Juf Nolo. "Their strength in battle gave it to them."

  "What if their God is really stronger than our Spirit?" said another voice.

  "Uh-oh, there goes Jevvi again," chuckled Pern Glazen.

  Jevvi Panst was not deterred. "You don't like to think about it, but it's like I've always said, what if their God is real? Then maybe this is the way God really wants it? How are we, who are only God's creatures, able to know what God wants?"

  "Bah, there is no such God. The Spirit is all, unseen but felt, singing in all the corners of the world. We know the Spirit. Their God is but an illusion." Juf Nolo was a firm adherent to the orthodox position of the Land.

  Thru Gillo stirred at last, and the others fell silent. With his Assenzi training, Thru was wise beyond his years.