A Life for Kregen

by Alan Burt Akers

  But it did not stop the aragorn.

  As that avalanche of cavalry smoked down the hill toward the Phalanx it was the turn of the brumbytes. The aragorn rode the usual mix of saddle animals, but they modified speeds and kept together, rank on rank, so I judged they had been fighting drilled troops at some time recently. That was not altogether a marked trait among the aragorn. They liked to raid and slave and pen their captives in barracoons. If they met drilled and disciplined opposition they would decamp and set up shop elsewhere.

  I sweated, suddenly.

  Had I made a ghastly mistake? The onrushing host of aragorn were almost on the Phalanx now. The Phalanx was composed of green troops. Were these aragorn different from the usual? Were they about to topple my massed brumbytes into bloody ruin? I sat my zorca and I trembled. Pride, pride, what a stupid thing to do — and I had done it. I, Dray Prescot called Jak the Drang, Emperor of Vallia — Emperor of Nothing!

  But how splendid the Phalanx looked...

  With fierce down-bent heads, their helmets all in line, plumes nodding, the pikes thrust forward into a glittering hedge of steel — yes, yes, the old words, the old words. But, by Zair! How they stood, clamped to the earth, like a primeval cliff face, adamant against the sea. A song rose from their packed ranks, a paean, a soaring battle hymn. The words were the old words, and they set the blood to pulsing. With the front rank pikes firmly bedded in the earth, the next thrust over the first, and the next in two-handed grips, shoulder high, twelve men deep, the Third Vallian Phalanx took the shock. As the rolling thunders of the ocean break in spume and fury against those weathered cliff faces, so the aragorn foamed against the pikes. A welter of uprearing steel, of screaming animals, of blood, of noise and bedlam and then of a receding wash of sound, as the recoiling waves break and flow and surge away, rippling, spreading, so those Opaz-forsaken aragorn, damned slavers to a man, broke and fled.

  The trumpets rang out, crashing notes of silver urgency.

  The Phalanx formed, became a cohesive whole, surged upright, moved, advanced — charged!

  And on the flanks the Hakkodin hacked and slashed and carved a path through the fleeing cavalry.

  “Time for our cavalry, Volodu,” I said.

  Volodu the Lungs blew Cavalry, General Chase.

  The Vallian zorcas, totrixes and nikvoves leaped forward.

  Spuming down in their turn like the returning tide, they roared on after the fleeing aragorn.

  Everything now could be left to Nath. And here came a zorcaman, red-faced, exhilarated, racing down from the town, roaring out that the place was in our hands. I acknowledged him, shouted, “Well done!” and turned my zorca toward the mob of chained slaves crouched in long rows of misery.

  As I trotted carefully across I reflected that the aragorn had not known how heavily, man for man, we outnumbered them. The close-packed blocks of the Phalanx tended to conceal the numbers. But, for all that disparity, there had been a sizable crowd of slavers, and their captives stretched in row after row, chained, naked, hairy and filthy, crooning those soul-songs of misery and inwardness that pass beyond mere despair.

  The naked bodies sprawled on the dirt in postures of abandonment. Calloused elbows and knees, sores, scars, the brutal signatures of whips, the matted forests of hair in which lice roamed, miniature denizens of miniature jungles, yes, the trademark of the slaver is far-removed from the fictions written and believed by the willfully blinkered. Looking at those bare, bruised and begrimed bodies, exposed in nakedness, I was reminded of Jilian’s comments outside the marquee of Fat Lango. And, also, of nakedness I recalled what a dowager, quivering in repulsion and outraged moral rectitude had said, speaking with that plummy voice of conscious refinement. “Going naked,” she had said, “is disgusting. Why, if God had intended us to go naked we would have been born like it.”

  The contrast between these bundles of half-starved naked wretches in their filth and degradation, and the well-fed, smart and sumptuously-clothed men who had rescued them could not have been more marked. Everywhere the movement of crimson and yellow as the troops busied themselves about humanitarian tasks seemed — at least to me — to bring a glow of glory to the field. And my views on glory are well known and hardly repeatable in mixed company. Crimson is the imperial color. The cavalry attired in scarlet and yellow formed a kind of personal body — not a bodyguard — and the brave old scarlet struck a distinctive spark as Targon took the choice band trotting out.

  Karidge’s Regiment streamed past heading up to the town to make sure of the place. We knew it from our maps as Yervismot, and I was damned sure Nath knew what he was doing when he’d brought the aerial squadron here.

  The totrix regiments and the nikvoves were distant figures under the slanting rays of the suns, dispersing the last of the aragorn. Their uniform colors varied, for according to long tradition the cavalry wore regimental colors distinct from those of the infantry. This practice had been allowed to continue. In the glittering group of riders surrounding me were representatives from all the regiments to act as messengers, in addition to my own aides de camp. So as I rode toward the slaves, where a fresh hullabaloo started up with a deal of chain swinging, I moved in the midst of a tapestry of color in which the scarlet and yellow predominated.

  A group of Gons who habitually shave their heads to leave bare and shining skulls were frantically digging out handfuls of mud and plastering it into that bone-white hair of which they are so ashamed. A person’s beliefs are a private affair, and who would deride a man for removing his hat when he enters a church, or keeping his hat firmly on his head and removing his shoes?

  There were so many slaves chained in their long rows that it seemed to me natural to guide my zorca toward the scene of the commotion. Here a fleeing posse of aragorn had tripped across outstretched chains. Steel against bare hands — well, there were dead bodies here, naked and bleeding; but, also, there were riderless animals and aragorn on the ground being beaten to death. The anger of slaves moves like a choked watercourse, a blocked drain, and when the obstructing filth is removed, the outburst smashes forth, unchecked.

  Grimed naked bodies slashed iron chains. Heads burst and limbs broke and ribs caved in. But swords bit deeply in return and I urged my zorca on more smartly. To lose one slave after we had liberated them seemed to me to be offensive to the order of life.

  The sword I drew was a Valkan-built weapon, brought by Delia from our arsenal in the stromnate. With master-smiths, and notably Naghan the Gnat, we had designed and built the brand. Owing much to the Havilfarese thraxter and to the Vallian clanxer, it also shared as much as I could contrive of the master-weapon, the Savanti Sword. Men called this new sword the drexer. I swung it forward as I rode, deeming it suitable for employment here, and jumped off the zorca to get in among a clumped group of aragorn who speared and slashed away at slaves who screeched and fell, bloodied and stumped, and could not break through to the slavers.

  The men at my back broke out in yells of concern.

  “Majister! Hold back. Wait for us.” And: “Emperor! You endanger your life.”

  The last of the light flared deceptively as the twin suns speared their emerald and ruby fires erratically through tortured cloud castles. The aragorn were confident against the naked slaves and were busying themselves in collecting riderless animals. Those who caught a steed mounted up and galloped off, although slaves hung onto them and lapped them in chains, and brought some down. It was all a shadowy, bloody, confusing fracas, the kind of nonsense in which a fellow can get knocked on the head and never know he was dead.

  Not all the slavers were apim, and I crossed swords with a Rapa, who went down as I jumped past. A bleg beyond him staggered back on his four legs, and a cham tripped him and another slashed his guts out, and I helped knock him down — for their four legs make blegs mightily resistant — and jumped on past to get at an aragorn who lifted a sword against two women, naked, screaming, hugging each other in a last paroxysm of terror.

 
; The aragorn turned to meet me. All about us men and women shrilled in horror, and chains clashed and the spears drove in. My men were still racketing away and coming on, for my last savage lunge astride the zorca had distanced them. The aragorn fancied himself as a swordsman; but I chopped him without finesse and saw another from the corner of my eye, and ducked, and swirled back. A naked figure, with a mass of dark hair and a superb body, leaped on the slaver and hauled a chain around his neck. Entangled like a wild beast trapped in iron nets, the slaver choked back.

  He went down and two more came at us, desperate now, determined to break past and get at the totrixes who stood, shivering in terror at the blood and noise. Together, the naked man and I met them. The drexer drank the life from one and the chains crushed the life from the other.

  “Majister! Emperor!” The yells lifted and the men of my retinue were there, slashing aside a last frantic attempt by the aragorn. The light shifted, dying in an opaz haze. The dirt ran with blood. Naked flesh stained crimson. The slave with the dark hair and the body of a fighting man slumped, and he collapsed to his knees and I saw he was wounded, a jagged rent across his back.

  Half-kneeling, he looked up.

  The brilliantly attired soldiers of the new Vallia crowded about me. They were profuse in their expressions of concern. “Majisters” and “emperors” filled the evening air. And I looked at the slave, collapsed there in his blood and filth still gripping the harsh iron chains.

  “Majister — the risks you take... Emperor, we are here to protect you...” Oh, yes, majister this and majister that, emperor and emperor...

  The slave looked up and spoke.

  “Lahal, my old dom,” he said. “I might have known you’d get here — given time.”

  He coughed, then, and a spittle of blood trickled down his chin.

  It was extraordinarily difficult for me to speak.

  The babble of voices at my back, with their continual interlarded majisters and emperors... I straightened my shoulders. I found my voice.

  “Lahal, Seg,” I said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jikaida over Vallia

  We flew back to Vondium. The odd little thought occurred to me that had I known it was Seg Segutorio struggling all naked with his chains, I would have unlimbered the Krozair longsword and gone in raging like a maniac.

  And that was a demeaning thought, to be sure; but it adequately expresses my own confessed confusion in personal relationships.

  “By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom, but that is good,” said Seg as he took the goblet from his lips. His mouth shone with fine Gremivoh, and I instantly refilled the goblet for him. We sat in my study, with the books and the maps, and Seg looked more like my old friend than a sodden wrung-out chained-up slave.

  The doctors had seen to him and patched him up, declaring he needed rest. His first words after that typical greeting had been: “And Thelda?” Whereat I had shaken my head. “There has been no news of her, none at all.”

  “I went up to Evir,” said Seg, now, as we brought each other up to date with our doings since we had parted on the way to the Sacred Pool of Baptism in Aphrasöe. “I went into that damned pool with Delia and the emperor and the others, and then I was back home in Erthyrdrin.” He drank again, and shook his head. “Mightily discomposing, I can tell you.”

  “I know.”

  He looked up. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

  “So you made your way back to Vallia and went to Evir?”

  “Yes. If I’d been sorcerously transported home, then Thelda would, too — or so I thought.”

  “You were right.” I told him a little of the power of Vanti, the Guardian of the Pool, enough to allow him to understand that we had been caught up in a wizardly manifestation. He seemed satisfied with my explanation.

  “She’d been there. They told me. An uncouth bunch, all right, those Evirese.”

  “And?”

  He moved his left hand emptily.

  “I went to Falinur, then. After all, I am supposed to be their damned kov. But, for me, they can keep their kovnate and their mangy ways. I was taken up by flutsmen, and escaped, and then, being a trifle down, was easy prey for the aragorn. We’d been marching for days on end. I think — I’m not sure — I escaped a couple of times. But the lot I was with when you came up were the last.”

  “You are home now, Seg.”

  He gripped that empty hand into a fist. A Bowman of Loh, Seg Segutorio, for my money the best bowman on Kregen, and a kov, the Kov of Falinur. Yet he was the truest friend a man can have, and be thankful to all the Gods of Kregen he may call a friend. Now he looked down, shrunken, fearful of the terrors the future must bring.

  “Home — yes, Dray, I made Vallia my home. And, now — my wife, my children, where are they?”

  “You have returned. They will, too.”

  “I believe that. I have to believe that. But the whole business has been a nightmare.”

  He had heard the news, how the emperor’s life had been saved by his immersion in the Sacred Pool, of how all those who had taken him there had been sorcerously dispatched to their homes, of how the emperor had at last been slain in the final moments of the Fall of Vondium. He had listened stony-faced as the story of Kov Layco Jhansi’s treachery was told, and of how Zankov, the mysterious agitator, had killed the emperor. He heard about Queen Lushfymi of Lome, and expressed no great desire to meet her, despite that she worked hard and devotedly for Vallia. I knew that Seg loved his Thelda very deeply. For all her faults she was a good comrade and I often castigated myself for my treatment of her, for the supposedly funny remarks I made about her. She tried desperately hard to be a good friend to Delia, and Delia loved her, too, in her own way.

  And now she was missing and might be anywhere, not only in Vallia, either. Anywhere at all on Kregen...

  Seg fetched up a sigh. “Well, Thelda always means well,” he said, at which I shot him a hard look. “I just pray Erthyr the Bow has her in his keeping.”

  “Amen to that, Seg, and Opaz and Zair, too.”

  The doctors having told me that the Kov of Falinur needed a proper convalescence, which was not at all surprising, I made Seg see sense. In addition to seeking Thelda he wanted to know what had happened to his children, Dray and the twins. From my own bitter experiences of the past, and more recently in attempting to trace Dayra, I knew the wait might well be a long and agonizing one before any news was received. And, all this time, the work of preparing Vondium and the provinces loyal to us to resist the coming attack had to go on.

  I said to Seg: “I am particularly pleased that the Grand Archbold of the Kroveres of Iztar is now with us.”

  Seg showed a flicker of interest.

  “The Order has admitted a number of new brothers lately. The work goes on. It seems to me, as a mere member, seemly for the Grand Archbold to welcome the new brothers.”

  “Yes, my old dom,” said Seg, but he spoke heavily. “You are right. I value your words in this. You made me the Grand Archbold — for my sins, I suspect, as you so often say. But I will perform my duty.” He brightened. “Anyway, it seems to me a perfectly proper function of the KRVI to search out and rescue ladies in distress.”

  “Ah!” I said.

  If I thought then that this work with the KRVI might help Seg, I feel the thought to be just and proper. If, as I suspect may have been the case, I also thought it would get him out of my hair, the thought was not only unjust and improper — it was despicable. Still, as they say, only Zair knows the cleanliness of a human heart.

  Seg did say, with a flash of his old spirit, that, as for the new army, they were a fine, frilled, lavendered bunch of popinjays with their laces and decorations and brilliance of ornamentation. “I mind the days when you and I, Dray, marched out with a couple of rags to clothe us. Provided our weapons were fit for inspection by Erthanfydd the Meticulous, we didn’t care what we looked like.”

  “Ah, but, my old dom,” I said, somewhat wickedly, to be sure: �
�That was before you met Thelda.”

  Which was, to my damnation, a confounded stupid thing to say.

  Seg took himself off to meet the brothers of the Order and discuss plans and, no doubt, take a stoup or two, and I went back to the paperwork. Blue was a color not in favor in Vallia save in the northeast, where it had been adopted in provincial badges and insignia as a kind of silent insult to the south, and in certain seacoast provinces where the ocean gave ample reason for its inclusion. These color-coded badges and banded sleeves and insignia of Vallia can be lumped together under the general name of schturvals, and by the schturval a man wore you could tell his allegiances. Nath Orcantor, known as Nath the Frolus, came to see me, highly indignant, determined that the fine spanking regiment of totrixmen he was raising should wear blue tunics over their armor, and red breeches.

  Enevon Ob-Eye and Nath were in the room with me at the time, going over sumptuary lists, and they looked on, more than a little astonished.

  “Blue?” said Nath. “In the Vallian Army?”

  “And why not, Kapt Nath?” said Nath Orcantor the Frolus. “I am from Ovvend, as you very well know, and our colors were granted in the long ago by the emperor then.”

  “Oh,” said Enevon, and he smiled. “You mean sky-blue.”

  “Done, Jiktar Orcantor,” I said. “Your totrixmen may wear sky-blue tunics and red breeches — but let the red be more a madder, or a maroon, rather than a crimson.”

  Nath Orcantor the Frolus nodded, well pleased. He was not a whit put out that his regiment could not wear the imperial crimson, for that was an understood part of the hoary traditions of Vallia. The emperor said what was what, and crimson was the imperial color, and Nath the Frolus was raising a private regiment — for which, I add with great emphasis, I was most glad. We needed every man with us in this fight.