A Life for Kregen

by Alan Burt Akers

  Jilian laughed.

  Her teeth were very white and even.

  The guards here were apim, slothful, over-dressed and arrogant to the point of stupidity. They did not interfere as Jilian lashed Lango.

  And, still, I carried the Krozair longsword scabbarded over my back.

  The painted and perfumed boys fled screaming from the wide pillow-strewn bed. Lango was bleeding. He tried to scramble away on all fours, like a dog, and the whip belted chunks of skin from his rump. Again Jilian laughed, drawing her arm up so that her whole body tensed, cracking the whip forward in a long raking slash that sliced all across Lango and made him shriek in agony.

  He fell face down, and now the whip rose and fell, rose and fell, and I saw the last of the guards run. I turned back.

  “Time to go, Jilian.”

  “I,” she said, panting only a little, magnificent in her barbarism, “have not yet finished.”

  “Then, lady, I must leave without you.”

  She looked up, and the whip trailed.

  “You would?”

  “Believe it.”

  “I do, Jikai, I do. And, I am ready.” With this she struck not, as she had done, in the pain-ways of the whip, but in the death-ways. I have described this vile kind of Kregen whip before, like a Russian knout or a sjambok. A thick, tapering instrument of agony and death. Fat Lango jerked, abruptly, rearing up like a praying mantis; then he slumped and he was dead.

  “Now,” said Jilian, and she coiled that thick rope of vileness along her white arm. “Now, Jikai, I am ready.”

  She moved like a stalking chavonth toward the cloth-of-gold entrance. I went the other way, toward the rear, where blue and green striped cottons covered the thicker material of the marquee. She stared after me.

  “I go this way.”

  The bloody rapier licked out and stripped away the cloth, ripped in a lunge and a twisting tear down, and then across and down again. An opening gaped onto the starshot night.

  “I,” said Jilian, with some amused acerbity, “will go with you, Jak the Drang, Jikai.”

  “You may call me Jak, Jilian. And I welcome you. You are, I think, a mistress of the Jikai Vuvushis.”

  “Yes.”

  Together, shoulder to shoulder, we stepped out. Guy ropes angled, glimmering whitely, to catch unwary feet. The commotion boomed away and the flames were still shooting up, orange and lurid, blurring the luminous stars. I headed directly away from the sumptuous marquee of the commander, the late and unlamented Fat Lango, and I kept my eyes peeled for sight of my men. The uproar was prodigious, and once away from the marquee and only four dead men to betray that anyone had passed, we were able to slow down. But there was no sign of my men.

  “Where, Jak, is your army?”

  We stood by a line of picketed hersanys, their white coats ghostly in that eerie light. Jilian looked completely composed, the red cloth wrapped about her waist, the rapier in her left hand held negligently, the whip coiled up along the right arm, ready to be shaken down in an instant.

  “Why do you think I have an army?”

  She smiled. “Men like you always command armies.”

  “That may be. But my army is not here. We must find mounts and ride.”

  She threw her head back and laughed. Then, abruptly, her head came forward and her face lowered on me, intense, demanding, challenging. “Yes, Jak. Yes. I think — I think I would ride with you.”

  I was turning away, ready to free the nearest couple of hersanys, and cursing one that tried to take a bite out of my arm. The six-legged beasts are as intractable as any of the trix family of saddle animals, but thicker in the body and, certainly according to my lion-man comrade, Rees, thicker in the skull. I gave the hersany a pat along the neck, soothing him, and swiftly freed the tether. I handed the rope to Jilian, not doubting that she could ride bareback.

  A Fristle guard came running up, yelling, his whiskery cat-face outraged. Jilian felled him with a single slicing blow from her whip. It had sprung from her arm and struck as though impelled by an inner life of its own.

  The Fristle fell against my hersany. I took the opportunity to wipe my rapier clean on the fellow’s tunic, before I thrust the blade away in its scabbard. And Jilian laughed.

  As we mounted up I reflected on her intense and brooding face, almost fierce — not quite fierce, I remark, but intent and concentrated — and compared that with the wild passion of her laughter. This was a girl whose inner spirit held much within her opaque depths. Maybe no man had plumbed her fully yet. Well, that was no job for me. I had not envisaged rescuing a girl, anyway, in this night’s work. And that, of course, brought to mind the other girls chained to their posts, terrified and shrieking in their nakedness.

  I turned the hersany’s head back.

  Jilian said: “You may be a Jikai, Jak; but your bump of direction is sadly misplaced.”

  “Your friends,” I said, most mildly. “I think I should see if their chains may be removed.”

  She stared at me, and, I think for the first time, saw me as other than a hulking warrior.

  Silently, she turned her hersany too, and together we trotted back to the marquee.

  Many a time I have ridden quietly through a shrieking bedlam, an uproarious furor, and marveled at the maniacal things poor crazed wights will do in times of stress. We saw sights that would have amazed your solid stay-at-home citizen; men yelling and crying, women rushing about with streaming hair oblivious to anything, anything at all, so that they ran all a-crying into blazing tents, animals driven mad with fear and trampling down men too crazed to step out of their way. Other things there were too that it would be kinder not to talk about. Through it all Jilian rode with that intense, lowering look on her face that was not a frown, not quite. We reached the marquee and saw how the guards were.

  A windrow lay in blood. Others were reeling and staggering, desolated by wounds. The shambles showed a fight had raged here that must have been terrible in its ferocity. Among the corpses I saw a twisted figure, wearing the brave old red and yellow, and I dismounted and turned him over gently. It was Yallan the Iron-throated, a good comrade, who had ridden with us since the Battle of Sabbator. A spear had penetrated between the hooped plates of his kax tralkish and done for him.

  Jilian dismounted and walked across to stand at my side.

  “One of your men?”

  “Aye. Just the one. The wounded would have been carried off. That is the way my men are.”

  She said, “There are many dead here. Yet you mourn just the one?”

  The flash of feeling I experienced shook me. We had just met and I had thought — and now, how little she knew of me! I knew nothing of her, save that she had courage, and a beauty to set a man’s pulses thumping, and a cool appraisal of life that, I suspected, had brought her through many a dangerous turn.

  So, just as gently, I said, “I mourn for all men slain in battle or dead in bed. Yet some must, I think in nature, mean more than others. Is that so strange?”

  “No. But they look so — so pathetic. Like the offal a butcher throws to the dogs.”

  I marked her words.

  She was right. And, by saying that, she revealed more of herself.

  Inside the marquee we found more dead guards, blegs and numims and Fristles, and all the slave girls had gone. The chains had been parted by savage blows, the cut edges of the links bright and glittering. So I knew Barty and the others, looking for me, had taken the time.

  “We must leave. My men have saved your friends.”

  As we mounted up — and the whip chopped two Rapas who would have taken our mounts, as the rapier snicked the life from a third — she said, “I pray you, Jak. Do not call them my friends. They were poor little shishis, slave-girls by nature. I am not as they are.”

  I restrained my anger.

  “No one is a slave by nature unless they are told this. A baby is born and must learn—”

  “Slaves are born slaves.”

  “On thi
s, Jilian, you and I must have words later.”

  “With you, Jikai, mayhap words will not be enough.”

  The tip of the rapier snicked up the warrior-cloak from a body, and a flick sent it sailing like a zizil of The Stratemsk toward Jilian, who caught it deftly and wrapped its blue and green check folds about herself. Another blue and green check enfolded my red and yellow. We turned the hersany’s heads away from the marquee and the windrows of dead, as soldiers with torches ran across from the bivouac lines, shouting.

  Into the shadows we rode, but gently, gently, restraining the impulses of our mounts to gallop in frenzy from the bedlam.

  The noise of genuine combat floated up in a clangor of iron from the east and that, therefore, was the way my men had gone and the way I must go, too. I glanced at the girl.

  Erect, she sat her steed, bareback, grasping the coarse rope with a slender hand that, I could guess, would have a grip of steel. She looked across at me and the redness of her mouth, purple plum in that light, curved into a smile. And then her eyes widened and she stared across my shoulder.

  I switched around on the beast’s back and saw riding among torches carried by a body of zorcamen a man in armor who glittered like a golden idol, resplendent, radiant, his sword lifted high as he bellowed orders. The zorcamen surrounding him looked more competent than any of the soldiers I had yet encountered in this army. They rode hard and they trampled down anyone and anything that chanced to get in their way.

  It seemed prudent for us to sidle into the shadows of an undamaged tent until this formed body of hardened veterans passed.

  Jilian’s face screwed up into a fist. The whip snapped free. Her naked heels lifted out. I reached out and grabbed for the rope and her heels kicked in and the hersany leaped.

  My clutching fingers missed the rope. The animal bounded away. Jilian made straight for that body of zorcamen and straight for that shining golden figure. The fury in her face was colder than the Ice Floes of Sicce.

  “By the disgusting diseased liver and lights of Makki Grodno!” I yelled, clapping in my heels. “Can’t you control your temper, girl!”

  With Jilian in the lead we hurtled toward the zorcamen.

  If the Fates, who play with us poor mortals as children play with insects, inspecting a wing here and a leg there, had a hand in it I do not know. But Jilian’s hersany caught a hoof in a guy rope and staggered sideways, twisting, hurling her from his back. The beast went down thrashing and I had time only to haul my own away. I checked him with a vicious tug on the rope and swung down. Jilian lay winded, glaring up with such a look of vindictive hatred as would make a man’s innards turn to treacle.

  “Kov Colun,” she said. She spoke in a whisper. “I have sworn to have his manhood and have it I will — I will make him into a nithing, a mewling spineless ninny, and then perhaps, if it pleases me, will I kill him.”

  The zorcamen rode on, not seeing us in the shadows, our falling commotion merely a part of the greater confusion.

  Jilian stood up with my hand under her armpit. She breathed deeply, magnificently. “The bastard came from that marquee, the unburned one with the golden flags. He has something of mine I would have back.”

  With that, without a look at me or another word, she started for the marquee. The cloth-of-gold was not as lavish as that festooning the marquee of Fat Lango; but everything spoke of wealth and refinement and a lavish expenditure of money and the labor of slaves. Jilian’s whip lashed the life from two Rhaclaw guards, their heads shining, domed and as wide as their shoulders, bursting under the impetuous ferocity of the lash. Jilian ran on past them and entered the marquee, the whip black and cutting striking before her.

  Whatever was so important as to warrant this risk was no doubt somewhere in there, if she said so. This Kov Colun had looked a different prospect from the others of this army and I deemed it expedient to stand on guard by the marquee entrance. Jilian would find what she wanted, so I contented myself by a harshly shouted: “Hurry, girl!”

  She re-appeared and color stained her cheeks like flame.

  “By the Rod of Halron and the Mount of Mampe!” She spoke in a breathy whisper, as though drunk, and yet she moved with a sureness that told me she was vibrantly alive with her own personal triumph. Under her arm she carried a silver-mounted balass box, about eighteen inches long. The rapier in her left hand snouted parallel to the ground and even with the box under her arm I fancied she could give an account of herself. The whip was recoiled up her arm, and her white skin was blotched and stained with blood.

  I said: “You are quite ready?”

  “More ready than those cramphs within.”

  “No doubt,” I said, handing her across a couple of corpses and a pool of spilled blood. “They are also without.”

  She laughed.

  “Aye! Without much.”

  The blue and green checks swathing us would serve for a space yet. But the sounds of distant strife wavered on the night air, faded and were gone. A silver trumpet note sounded, tiny and far, signaling the “Recall” and the “Reform.” The way the notes trilled told me that was not Volodu the Lungs but one of the trumpeters of Karidge’s Regiment. They had done well, for the army encampment was in a leem’s mess; but we were left here, alone, and must make shift to get out of this ourselves. In thus pulling his men out, Nath Karidge was strictly obeying my orders. I took Jilian’s arm again and we moved silently into the shadows between the tent lines.

  “Zorcas, I think,” I said.

  “With a saddle this time, Jak.”

  “Aye.”

  With a bitterness she made no effort to suppress, she said, “You marked that tapo in the golden armor?”

  “You called him Kov Colun.”

  “Yes. A piece of dirt that walks about on two legs. Colun Mogper, Kov of Mursham. Never turn your back on him, never trust him. If you can, try to stamp his face flat in the mud — after I have done with him.”

  “Mursham,” I said. “In Menaham. That explains the difference, for if he is one of the Bloody Menahem then he would be affronted by the sloth of this army.”

  Her bitter anger had been partly mollified by her success in recovering her property, and my words finally brought her thoughts back into some kind of coherence. “You know Menaham?”

  “I have fought the Bloody Menahem before. They are one people of Pandahem we will have trouble with in the future—”

  “One! All of the rasts in that Opaz-forsaken island.”

  “I do not think so.”

  “You think because this army is a farce they are all like this?”

  We passed beyond a smoke pall from burning forage and the Maiden with the Many Smiles shone out, plunging between cloud wrack, the moon shedding down her fuzzy pink light upon scenes of desolation and death. We saw zorcas moving and headed that way, ready.

  “No. There is something almighty strange about this little lot—”

  “Of course. They are the dregs of the gutters and the Wharves, dressed up as soldiers. The Chulik paktuns they have engaged as drill instructors left en masse, disgusted. There are no Pachaks and a few Khibils in this sorry army. Pandahem breathed easier when these cramphs were shipped out.”

  These words gave me serious concern — more than concern, an all panic stations alarm. I saw it — not all of it, but a deal of it and the core of it. The plan against Vallia... This army was the decoy, a rabble dressed up in fine fancy uniforms and taught to march together and then let loose into Vallia. They were expendable. They had been provided with a cavalry screen composed of men who had once been soldiers and who had been told off for this duty probably for dire misdeeds, or indiscipline or some fault. There are always these men who take the letter of Vikatu the Dodger and fail to see the spirit of that archetypal old sweat of the armies of mythology. That explained the conduct of the patrol we had ambushed. It explained why the army was as it was. But it did not do one very vital and overmasteringly fearful thing.

  This knowledge newly gi
ven into my hands did not tell me where the real armies were, where the blow aimed to destroy us all would be struck at Vallia.

  Chapter Nine

  The Whip and the Claw

  Jilian kept singing snatches of a silly little song as we jogged along in the suns shine the next day. We had all the world to ourselves, it seemed. The sky stretched emptily and the unending grassland was studded only with small trees and bushes, a wide heath that was, in truth, deceptive, for it extended merely between towns here in eastern Thadelm. The song concerned the comical efforts of a little Och maiden and a strapping young Tlochu youth to sort out the twelve limbs they possessed between them. I found Jilian’s song silly but enchanting. It is called The Conundrum of the Hyrshiv. The eventual solution the Och girl and the Tlochu boy worked out for themselves is ironical and funny; it is touching and true, though, for it illustrates that despite difficulties love, what is sometimes ludicrously called “True Love,” will find a way around problems of this physical kind.

  She broke off singing and with that graceful turn of her head looked across at me and said, “You could, at least, Jak the Drang, Jikai, have found us zorcas.”

  Her use of Jikai here was entirely sarcastic.

  We rode hirvels. Now the hirvel is a perfectly good saddle animal. He is a stubby, four-legged beast looking not unlike a nightmare version of a llama with his tall round neck, cup-shaped ears and shaggy body and twitching snout. But he will carry you along if not as fleetly as a zorca or as powerfully as a nikvove in some comfort and despatch.

  I said, “There has been enough killing for one night.”

  “Deaths don’t frighten me.”

  “I saw that. Can you tell me where you were trained?”

  By my phraseology she understood that I was circumspect about the sororities. She laughed.

  “There is no secret about where, Jak. That was at Lancival. Oh, a wonderful place, all red roofs and ivied walls and the gentle cooing of doves and the sliding gleam from the water well, that is a long time ago now.” She sighed and her laughter died. I judged that to a man with a thousand years of life, as I had awaiting me, her memory of a long time ago might seem as yesterday. Or not, given the terrors and the pains of the intervening period. She flashed her eyes at me. “But as to how, that you may ask and never get an answer.”