The Honorable Barbarian
Page 8
"We could hang it from the bowsprit for a while and then dispatch it as you say, Captain," said another.
"Nay; the sea birds would damage it beyond recognition." Malgo kicked Kerin again.
Struggling for breath from the last kick, which had battered his ribs, Kerin said: "You should have more consideration for a fellow Novarian, Captain."
Malgo kicked Kerin again and spoke in the Othomaean city dialect of Novarian: "And ye should have better sense than meddle in things that concern you not."
"Couldn't I join your crew?"
"I have a full crew and no need for rash boys; nor am I fain to give up the pleasure of your slow death." He kicked Kerin again.
"But listen! Since you left Novaria, you've risen to chief of this band, with your own ship. So my brother really did you a favor, didn't he?"
"Oh, hold thy tongue!" Malgo roared, kicking Kerin again. "I'm a man of deeds, not words, and I'll not let you turn me from my course by fine talk!"
Sunk in misery, Kerin fell silent. Facing death was bad enough, but this death promised to be in a peculiarly disgraceful, degrading form. If others had not been present, he would have wept.
"Fool! Ninnyhammer!" squeaked Belinka from the air above him. Kerin had already come to that conclusion himself; but what else could he have done?
The sun sank below the sea rim, leaving bands of red, yellow, and green below the deepening blue, mottled by meager clouds, of the sky. Overhead the half-moon brightened. Several pirates strolled past, pausing to kick Kerin and to boast of the heroic feats of sodomy they would perform. Since all but the captain were barefoot, their kicks were ineffectual compared to Malgo's.
"Now," said Captain Malgo, "let's get on with the old wizard—why, where in the seven hells is he?"
Kerin struggled into a sitting position and looked towards the fire, where Pwana had lain. The space was empty. Shadows cast by the flickering firelight indicated the hollows in the sand made by Pwana's body, but of the retired wizard and cult leader there was no sign.
IV
The Pirate Ship
"The old garantola must have slipped his bonds!" roared Captain Malgo. "Search! Search! You, look in his hut! You, west along the beach! . . ."
Kerin did not know the word garantola but assumed it to be a pejorative. Malgo continued shouting until he ran out of breath. A pirate said:
"Captain, he is a wizard. To tie up one such, you need another wizard to bespell his bonds."
"Too late for that!" yelled Malgo. He continued issuing orders until most of the pirates had gone off in search of their prisoner. Kerin could hear them thrashing about in the brush. After a while they straggled in, baffled. One ran up limping, crying:
"I stepped on one of those god-detested lizards, and the damned thing bit me! Somebody tie up my leg, for Vurnu's sake!"
As another pirate improvised a bandage for the lacerated limb, Malgo said: "That is all right, Krui. We will give you the first go at Kerin here. Is dinner ready yet?"
Racking his brains, Kerin remembered Pwana's tale of having a cap of invisibility. If the hermit had hidden such a thing beneath his sarong, he might have slipped it on when the pirates' attention was elsewhere. As for his bonds, making them tighten or loosen on command was elementary magic.
Would Pwana take advantage of darkness to rescue Kerin, and perhaps the princess as well? The thought gave him hope; but he did not much count upon it. Before his exile, by his own admission, Pwana had been a ruthless, unscrupulous adventurer. It was all very well to prate of his reformation; but Kerin would believe in Pwana's new-found virtue when he had a demonstration. Of one thing Kerin was sure, namely, that Pwana remained an incorrigible liar, from the mutually contradictory stories that he told of himself.
The pirates squatted or sat in a circle round the fire, while one of them passed out mugs, which he filled from the smaller cask. They thrust swords and daggers into the stew pot to spear their food. Captain Malgo stood grinning over Kerin, with a piece of meat impaled on the end of a dagger.
"Hungry?" he said.
"Aye, Captain, I am," replied Kerin.
"Isn't that too bad?" said Malgo, pulling the gobbet off the blade with his teeth. Having chewed and swallowed, he kicked Kerin. "I know not how ye did it, but ye maun have had to do with the wizard's vanishment." He gulped from his mug.
"If I knew how, I should have done likewise," said Kerin. "Now hold, Captain! Instead of kicking me again, wouldst rather not have a story? I know some good ones."
Kerin hoped to postpone the treatment the pirates meant to give him as long as possible. He recalled that his brother Jorian had often entertained others in his adventures by telling stories."Very well," grunted Malgo. "Gather round, boys. If ye please us, we will as a special favor give you a speedy death—" Malgo brought the edge of his hand sharply against his neck "—instead of the fancier one I'd planned. Say on!"
Kerin: "Know you the tale of the frog god of Tarxia?" When all professed ignorance, Kerin started the story. Thinking it tactful to omit the part his brother had played in the original transformation, he said:
"Tarxia City stands on the river Spherdar, which winds through the great Swamp of Spraa on its way to the sea. In the city, the Temple of Gorgolor is one of the finest structures in Novaria, with its gleaming corner towers and enormous central dome, which soars at least 350 feet into the air, all bedight inside and out with gold leaf and semiprecious stones.
"The central figure of the interior was a statue of Gorgolor in the form of a frog the size of a bear or lion, carved from a single emerald. No other emerald in the world, I'm told, compares with this in size. If some thief were to steal it, 'twere worth more than all the other gems in the world combined. Purloining it would, however, present a problem; besides being closely guarded, the statue must have weighed nigh unto a ton.
"At any rate, the Theocrat of Tarxia, Kylo of Anneia, was at outs with a leading local magician, a Doctor Valdonius. The wizard found the rule of the priesthood irksome and blamed it for holding progress back in the magical and other sciences in Tarxia. Plotting an uprising to overthrow priestly rule, he decided to steal the statue. By a mighty spell, he thought he could shrink it down to a size that could be carried on one's person, say that of a cat."
"Hey!" said a pirate, one of those who had gathered in a circle to listen. "I know about shrinking spells; but the weight of the thing stays the same. So your emerald frog would still weigh a ton."
"Valdonius thought of that," continued Kerin. "This spell lessened the weight of the statue whilst leaving the mass unchanged."
"What is the difference?"
"It is a technical matter involving the science of physics, which I am not qualified to explain and whereof I am a little uncertain myself. But let me continue the story. Valdonius reckoned he could pick up the shrunken statue and carry it, though it would take a much greater push to get it moving and more effort to stop it than a normal object of its size.
"He took some confederates to confer with the Theocrat on conditions in distant lands, whither the priesthood considered sending missionaries. Whilst these allies distracted old Kylo at the temple entrance, Valdonius wrought his spell at the central altar.
"The spell did not work quite as planned. Instead of shrinking the statue to a convenient size, it turned it into a living frog the size of the statue. With thunderous croaks of gloop! gloop! this superfrog went leaping and bounding out the temple, knocked down the Theocrat and Valdonius' accomplices, and vanished into the night.
"The Theocrat raised an alarm, and soon the folk of the city were running pell-mell after the frog, hoping to head it off; for they had little hope of catching it once it reached the Swamp of Spraa. And reach the swamp the monster did, and vanished into the stagnant waters.
"Meanwhile Valdonius sent some of his followers into the streets to raise a revolution. But they had no success whatever. When they mounted stands on corners to harangue the multitude, they found no multitude, only a few
too old or too young to go haring after the holy frog. When the returning temple guards appeared, the agitators fled. Doctor Valdonius fled likewise to Govannian, where he was a distant cousin of the Hereditary Usurper.
"When the priesthood recovered from the shock of losing their runaway god, they sought to get Gorgolor back, albeit they were a little vague as to what they should do with the creature when they had it. Should they build a pool to keep it in? A frog of such size could not live on flies as normal frogs do, by shooting out a long, sticky tongue to ensnare insect prey. Live fowls might serve the purpose."Whilst the pool on the temple grounds and the massive fence around it were a-building, the priests attempted schemes to capture Gorgolor. The holy frog seemed quite happy in Spraa, where it subsisted on prey like muskrats, voles, and herons. The priests spread nets and essayed to lasso the frog; they tried to herd it with drums, horns, and other noise makers. But Gorgolor evaded their efforts with ease. It was even proposed to harpoon it; but this plan was rejected on the ground that, resenting the injury, the divine batrachian would surely visit disaster on Tarxia.
"After months without results, the Theocrat received a secret message from Doctor Valdonius. Through his partisans, the wizard had kept in touch with events in Tarxia and knew of the failure of the priests to recapture Gorgolor. For a modest fee and a guarantee of his own safety, Valdonius offered to come back and cast a counterspell.
"After some bickering and dickering, it was arranged that a brace of temple officials should go to Govannian and present themselves to the Hereditary Usurper as hostages for the Usurper's kinsman Valdonius, who would then return to Tarxia to perform his spell. And so it was done.
"On a propitious day Valdonius, the Theocrat, and other interested parties assembled on the margins of the swamp, and the wizard cast his spell. Gorgolor warily watched the proceedings from a patch of open water, in which he floated with only his eyes and nostrils showing. The sky darkened, lightning flashed, the earth shook, and the air came alive with the rustle of wings of unseen presences. And Gorgolor turned instantly back into a lion-sized frog of solid emerald.
"That was all very well, but neither Valdonius nor Kylo had considered the physical properties of swamps, since neither was familiar with nature in the wild. When the giant frog turned to emerald, it recovered the weight it had possessed when it squatted on its plinth in the temple. Hence it sank at once to the bottom and kept right on sinking into the ooze and soft mud beneath the water. None knows how deeply it sank ere coming to rest. The priests tried sounding for it with poles without result. For all anyone knows, it may be buried half a league below the surface of the swamp.
"The Theocrat, a kindly and rather simple old man, was vastly vexed. Some of those present had to remind him of the hostages in Govannian to dissuade him from commanding his guards to seize Valdonius and do him to death in some ingenious way. The wizard was suffered to depart without his fee, and the priests returned sorrowfully to their temple.
"Without their emerald god, however, the cult of Gorgolor lost its hold upon the masses. Within a year, its rule was overthrown by another revolution, wherein Valdonius played no part. The last I heard, the factions were still quarreling and fighting over the form the new state should have: a republic like Vindium, a limited monarchy like Kortoli, a dictatorship like Boaktis, or an archonship like Solymbria with the Archon chosen by lot. And that is the tale of the holy frog of Tarxia."
"Pretty good," growled Captain Malgo. "How about another?"
"Captain!" came a voice from the darkness. "Cannot we bugger him now?" But others cried: "Story! Story!"
"One thing at a time," said Malgo. "It will be time enough to have at him when he runs out of stories. Go on, Kerin."
So, as the half-moon sank towards the horizon, Kerin told the tales of King Fusinian the Fox and the Teeth of Grimnor, and Fusinian and the troll Vuum, and Fusinian and the Boar of Chinioc, and King Filoman the WellMeaning and the golem general, and Filoman and his ghostly prime minister, and King Forimar the Esthete and the waxen wife, and such other stories as he could call to mind.
For a while, as he finished each tale, some pirates cried out for more, whereas others demanded that the grand sodomy begin forthwith. With each tale the voices of the lechers, though still in a minority, waxed louder, and Kerin was sure that after the next story they would become a majority. But then the voices at the end of each account began to die away, so that each time there were fewer shouts either to stop or to continue.
Although it was hard to be sure by the fading firelight, Kerin saw that the pirates were, one by one, dropping off to sleep. He did not know whether to allow himself a spark of hope, that they would all go to sleep instead of using him in the revolting manner indicated, or to be affronted that they found his storytelling too boring to keep them awake. When he finished the tale of how King Forbonian had nearly drowned in trying to consummate the union with his mermaid bride, not a sound of approval or otherwise came from the sprawling mass of pirates. When Kerin fell silent, he heard instead a chorus of snores.
Kerin jerked as something touched his arm. Peering through the moonlight, he saw a knife come out of nowhere and cut the lashing on his wrists.
"Be quiet!" whispered the invisible Pwana. The knife went to work on the cords around his ankles.
"What's toward?" murmured Kerin.
"What think you? I am not fain to let them roast me without protest."
"Why not release the girl, too? She's a captive."
"A good idea; one cannot have too many folk under obligation. Then we must needs cut the throats of these rascals, for they will not remain insensible for aye. I had but little of the drug I put in their beer."
"Slay sleeping men? That were—were—"
"Try not your silly Western notions of chivalry on me, youngling! Wouldst live or die? These scoundrels do far worse; for sport they gouge eyes and burn off private parts. Besides, they defied my well-reasoned logic. The only good enemy is a dead enemy!"
"But—but—"
Pwana snapped into full but naked visibility in the moonlight as he peeled off the tarncap. Kerin leaned forward to examine the object. It seemed a cap made of metallic mesh, like chain mail but of much slenderer links, such as might make a lady's purse or ornamental coif.
Pwana picked up and did on his sarong. Wadding the cap into a ball and tucking it into the garment, he snarled: "Then watch whilst I do the deed, milksop!"
The hermit first cut the young woman free. The twain spoke in low voices; then Kerin was shocked to see the girl step to the nearest pirate, pull out the man's knife, and go to work. She and Pwana went from man to man, seized the hair of each, tipped back his head, and drew the knife firmly across his throat. Then the throat cutter stepped quickly back from the widening pool of blood."That, my dear, is that," said Pwana in his everyday voice as, having cut the last throat, he wiped his blade on the corpse's kilt. "What is the late news from Salimor?"
"Sophi Dimbakan died," said the girl, "being succeeded by his brother Vurkai."
Kerin said: "That name is familiar. Is it not the name of the man who overthrew the previous dynasty, when the reigning Sophi was slain in the riots that followed the fall of his great tower? I've heard tales of that."
"Aye, Master Kerin," said Pwana. "The late ruler was the third of that name. The revolution came about from meddling in our affairs by an exiled Novarian king named Porimar, or Forimar in your tongue; just as you call our ruler the Sophi whilst we call him the Sohpi. I believe this Forimar hailed from your own Kortoli. He persuaded the Sophi to build a lofty tower in Kwatna, ignoring Salimor's many earthquakes. At the next severe quake, down came the tower.
"During the disorders that followed this catastrophe, this first Dimbakan, a sea captain, gathered a following. He announced that he would set up a government of the Western kind, a republic, with officers chosen by the votes of the masses. But for all his talk, he never brought this strange system into being. Instead, he declared himself the ne
w Sophi, and his line has ruled Salimor for above a century.''
For an instant Pwana stood silently, absently pulling his whiskers and fiddling with his knife. Then he said: "Kerin, send your sprite out to the ship, to report how many now man it."
"Belinka!" called Kerin.
"Aye, Master Kerin?"
Kerin passed on the order from Pwana, and the little blue light danced out to sea. While Pwana asked more questions about affairs in Salimor, Kerin recovered his sword from among the dwarf palms. Belinka returned saying:
"I could find but one man aboard, and he asleep in the stern."
"Kerin!" said Pwana. "The fools have left but one lookout. If we take the ship, canst sail us to Salimor?"
"If weather stay fair, methinks I can manage the craft somewhat, having sailed small boats and watched Huvraka's men. For foul weather, I should need more crew. For direction, I know only that Salimor lie south of east."
"Good enough," said Pwana. "Gather your gear and lead me to your boat."
"Mean you to return to Kwatna?"
"Aye. The gods have laid upon me the duty to spread my message of enlightenment. First, help me to strip these losels of such articles as might prove useful, or at least salable. This fellow's hat might save you the need to borrow mine."
"We cannot carry all our gear and a pile of loot as well," said Kerin. "Let me fetch my boat whilst you strip the bodies."
"Why not use the pirates' boat?"
"Too large for one man to handle."
"I will go with you," said the girl.
"Humph," grunted Pwana. "Ever the fair prefer the young and callow to the old and wise. Well, go your way; and I hope you can handle that sword more featly than you did with the late Captain Malgo!"
Kerin and the girl set out along the beach, silvered by the low half-moon. Little ghost crabs scuttled away. Kerin said: "Your pardon, madam; but did I hear the pirates call you 'Princess Nogiri'?"