It was obvious, before long, that the aim and interest of the Homskarters, including those at the king’s table, was to see how much native beer this outlander could hold before the actually rather weak alcoholic content of it could put him under that table.He pretended to be unaware of their design, however, and drank on, parrying questions about himself and the type of outland he came from, in its difference from Cohone’s, with the answer that he would tell them all at some future date when he had recovered from the excitement of his earlier duel.
In his turn, he studied those who drank at the king’s table. There seemed to be a number of relatives besides Witta, including one brother barely old enough to bear weapons and too young to be a serious claimant to rule the Homskarters. Clearly Witta was undisputed second-in-command. But Harb noted with interest that, outside of the authority he bore, Witta seemed to show little talent for the position he held.
He was obviously a plain, dull, physically-minded warrior—probably of unusual strength to judge by the width of his shoulders and the bulk of his body above the table. But though he showed none of the shrewd, if primitive, wit exhibited by the others at the royal table, all of the others, including the king himself, seemed to avoid making him the direct butt of any of their jokes and general horseplay.
Harb smiled to himself. The kingship among the Homskarters, his research had informed him, was theoretically hereditary—needing only to be ratified by a council of the chieftains. In practice, however, the survey had noted, inept heirs-apparent to the throne had a habit of dying off, or rejecting the crown, until the succession lighted on the most able of the royal family then of warrior age and capacity.
Thus in practice the king was actually chosen by the chieftains. So, also, was the second-in-command as the man next-best able to rule, although theoretically he should also be a member of the royal family. It would not be unusual under such conditions, however, noted the survey, for an unusually able claimant to the throne not only to get himself chosen king, but to control the choice of second so that the second should not pose the threat of usurpation that might well arise if the next-ablest man of the kingdom was continually sharing roof and board with the king himself.
Clearly, Rajn had chosen as harmless a second as he could. But, just as clearly, having chosen someone harmless, it was necessary to keep up appearances for the second-in-command. So, it was probably by will of the king that no one baited or teased Witta into any action that might betray his essential lack of personal authority and leadership.
Meanwhile, the drinking was beginning to tell on the rest of the Homskarters in the hall. One by one, they were succumbing to the native beer; they had compensated for its weakness by drinking tremendous amounts. Harb, although he was not in the least drunk, had filled and emptied himself half a dozen times over in order to keep up with them and show a proper capacity.
The only other individual in the hall not drunk, at least to a state of near-torpor, was the king. And this was another puzzle for Harb, since he had watched the king’s bowl being refilled at least as often as his own. It was the same size bowl as everyone else had,though more ornately carved, and it was hard to see how the king had stood up to the amounts he must have swallowed from it.
Yet . . . there are limits to any animal capacity, human or alien, and there came a time when even the king, who had been blinking sleepily in Harb’s direction for some time, dropped his head on his pillowing arms and did not stir again.
Chapter Five
Harb looked around him. As far as he could see,the hall was filled with unconscious warriors. Slowly,he got to his feet and picked his way up to the royal table. The king’s drinking bowl was sitting, half-empty, by his elbow. Curiously, Harb picked it up,dumped out the liquid still in it, and felt inside it.
Sure enough, though it took a bit of fingering to make sure of it, the bowl had a curving false bottom,clever enough to trick the eye alone, even close up,but high enough in the bowl so that it held not more than half what other drinking containers held.
Harb nodded and set the bowl back down by the king’s elbow. He went past the table back into the interior of the palace.
The layout inside was simple. Behind the royal tables were entrances to a huge kitchen, and what must be at least as large, if not larger, female quarters. The only other doorway opened on a flight of steep, circular stairs; and, climbing these, Harb at last came out on the top platform of the palace tower.He found himself on a circle perhaps twenty feet in diameter, with a breast-high wall, pierced with apertures, running all around it.
Harb walked over to the wall and leaned on it, breathing deep of the cold night air. Above, the stars twinkled. Below, the town was a dark splotch between the hillside and the lake—which was just now beginning to silver farther out, with a single, large moon rising over the hill behind the town.
“What do you see, Outlander?”
Harb whirled around. The voice had come from behind him, from the direction of the stairway. It had been thick, but thoroughly understandable; and as he turned, he saw the king walking slightly unsteadily but purposefully toward him. Immediately, Harb tensed. But then he saw that Rajn was unarmed, while Harb himself still had his sword at his belt—to say nothing of a dagger and several other, more inconspicuous and powerful modern weapons in his jacket pockets. Harb made himself relax. He leaned back once more with an elbow on the wall behind him.
“Nothing much, O King,” he said. “Just the moonlight, the lake and your town.”
“My town—yes.” Rajn came unsteadily to the wall, leaned on it and turned toward Harb, bringing his dish-shaped face into the moonlight. The skin above his nose was deeply wrinkled in the native equivalent of a smile. “You hold your drink well, Outlander.”
“Some might say so,” answered Harb. The truth of the matter was, in fact, that he had not held it at all. Before coming to this world he had ingested afungus-like strain of stomach bacteria that converted any alcohol he swallowed almost immediately to sugar.That particular digestive conversion, in fact, had been as nothing compared to the extended series of hypo-immunization shots he had taken in order to make it safe for him to ingest the native foods at all without massive and immediate allergic reactions.
“You’re no small drinker yourself, King Rajn,” Harb added.
“I’ve got a magic bowl,” said the king, and coughed a short, drunken cough of laughter. “As perhaps you noticed, when you picked it up just now in the hall.” He stared in the moonlight into Harb’s face. “What brings you here, Outlander?”
“I told you, King.”
“And I told you I had a magic bowl,” replied Rajn, thickly. “No, Outlander, you’re a warrior and a drinker, such as I’ve never seen; but you’re here for some purpose you aren’t telling me. And I don’t intend you to leave until you do—” he broke off and coughed, as Harb stiffened instinctively. “You’ve got your sword, Outlander; and I’ve got nothing. Were you thinking of cutting my throat and getting away in the night? But the guards on the main door and the gate aren’t drunk or asleep; and some hours back I sent word they weren’t to let you out.”
He peered at Harb.
“So, do you want to tell me now?” asked Rajn. “Or some time in the future—why you’re here?”
“All right, King,” said Harb. “As you see, I’m an outlander. Like the other outlander you know, I want to get your people started growing grain.”
Rajn coughed, and the effort made him stagger.
“You’ve got a good feel for a joke, Outlander,” he said, straightening precariously, and turning toward the stair. “We’ll talk about this more tomorrow, you and I, or the day after tomorrow... or the next...”
He reached the head of the stairs and Harb heard him stumbling down out of sight. But the king stumbled carefully, evidently, or else with the benefit of long practice on those stairs, for there was no sound of falling.
Chapter Six
The next day, Harb put on a casual demonstration of
how a wooden shield could be split and broken by a karate hand-blow. That evening, reciting a translation murmured into his ear by a small unit hidden there and in radio contact with a recorder computer in his right upper jacket pocket, he gave the assembled hall a poetic rendering of the legend of Beowulf.
The success was gratifying. For the first time, the Homskarter warriors began to gather around him and in the next few days that followed, he gradually became a celebrity second only to the king and Witta.
Meanwhile, Harb was observing these two royal individuals closely. The more he saw of Rajn, the more convinced he became that this was someone who in native intelligence and basic open-mindedness was far above the rest of his tribe. In contrast, the more he saw of Witta, the more Witta seemed to stand out as all that was representative of the brainless adherence to habit and custom among the Homskarters. If a contest had been held to choose atypical Homskarter, in terms of sword arm, physical appetite and refusal to consider anything outside the accepted pattern, Witta would have taken the prize.
Harb silently congratulated Rajn on picking such a second. If such a thing as respectability existed among the Homskarters, then Witta’s endorsement of anything put the stamp of respectability upon it. A king who was more unorthodox in thought and action than most of his people needed someone like Witta around to assure the common herd that everything the king did was just as it should be.
With Witta himself, Harb made little headway. There was nothing particular about Harb to which Witta could object except that he was different. But that was enough. Harb’s one or two attempts to scrape up an acquaintance with the second-in-command were rejected by Witta with dark suspicion.
Meanwhile, however, a wordless communication had been set up between Rajn and Harb. Both were clever individuals, and they began to draw closer to each other as the date of departure for the summer raiding approached. The night before leaving, they spoke frankly to each other once again. And on this occasion, too, the king chose the privacy of the tower for their conversation, just at twilight.
“Outlander,” said Rajn. “The time has arrived for a meeting of minds between us. You come here to trade for something—I can smell the bargaining on your very breath. Now, the last time we spoke, you still insisted that what you want is for my warriors to give up the sword-trail and grow grain through the summer months. This is it, truly, what you have come for?”
“Not give up the sword-trail, exactly, King,” said Harb. “But the grain can make you a mighty race.”
Rajn came close to him and his flat face with its bridgeless nose looked grimly into Harb’s. This time the king had come to the tower armed, and Harb became suddenly conscious that the small of his own back was pressing against the edge of the wall around the tower platform. As close as they were now,modernity of weapons was not the advantage it might have been otherwise. One shove from the king’s powerful arms could tip Harb over backward to fall forty feet to the stones of the courtyard below.
“Farmer-work make you a mighty race?” Rajn snorted.
Harb gazed steadily into the gray eyes, deepset under the heavy brow ridge.
“King,” he said slowly. “Take my sword and try it on something.” Slowly, to remove any appearance of threat from the action, Harb drew his sword and handed it over, hilt foremost.
The king grasped the hilt, stepped back, and looked around. He took off his own helm, set it on a stack of stones piled up ready to be heaved down on the head of possible attackers of the tower, and lifted up Harb’s sword.
He brought it down in a whistling cut. It clanged loudly, splitting the helm in two and cracking apart the rock just beneath. Rajn lifted up the sword and gazed at it in the last rays of the alien sun.
“Ah,” he said softly, as if to himself, “a magic sword to match my bowl.”
He did not offer to return the weapon.
“No, King,” said Harb, almost as softly, “a magic hand. It has been said that whoever holds that blade shall have a magic hand for combat—provided only that the previous owner has worked certain necessary spells in making a free gift of the blade to the present owner. Otherwise a magic fire will slowly begin to consume the unprivileged hand that held the sword, until after some days there is nothing but a blackened stump.”
Rajn stood quite still. Harb, watching closely, saw the king’s hand loosen slightly on the hilt. This was not exactly surprising, for Harb had thumbed a small pressure point on the hilt in passing it over, and now a power-source linked to a strip of metal underneath the surface material of the hilt was slowly beginning to warm toward a temperature that would eventually make the hilt too hot to handle.
Absently, almost indifferently, after a moment, Rajn passed the sword back to Harb.
“Perhaps, before too long,” he said, “you may be moved to make a proper gift of that weapon to me, Outlander. It would be a gift to bind the friendship between us.”
“Assuredly, King,” said Harb. “As soon as we have passed through the present spring and summer into next winter when the weather shall be cold enough to make safe the working of the proper gift-giving spells. I take it, then, you’ll be willing to let me accompany you to the plains after all—as a story-teller, of course, privileged to be free of such things as wielding a paddle or other duties which might interfere with my art as a story-teller.”
“You will be welcome,” said Rajn, almost dreamily. “But I wonder what benefits there are in your coming with us?”
“For King Rajn,” said Harb, “there is, of course, the fact that I may soothe your cares by the occasional private telling of stories. Stories which may sometimes have knowledge in them you might find useful at the moment, in war and on the sword-trail.” Rajn looked at him with narrowed eyes.
“The outlander would give me advice?” he said. “And what benefit is there in that for the outlander.”
“The excitement of the sword-trail,” said Harb, smoothly. “And of course, there is the matter that if Rajn becomes great in war and a great king, it is to my credit; both here and in that far-off place from where I come.”
He hesitated slightly before adding a few more words. Ordinarily Rajn was too shrewd an individual to be taken in by flattery. But this was not so much flattery as a truth both recognized.
“It is my feeling that a king like Rajn is rare among rulers,” he said. “And much may be done by him impossible to lesser men. I would be close to such a king.”
Rajn coughed with humor.
“And it comes to me that if nothing else, you might sing me to sleep nights along the sword-trail, Outlander, with such pretty words.” He turned away,adding over his shoulder, “You may come.”
So the annual foray to the plains commenced. The thousand-mile trip to the lower edge of the forest country was a wild and thrilling adventure even to Harb, who came from worlds that knew star travel.The forest warriors moved in a pack of high-sided, high-ended, fifty-foot-long cargo canots, by lake and river and over forest portages between these water-ways, picking up more canots and adventurers from other settlements that they passed. By the time they paddled forth onto the now-wide river that had carried them out of the last of the shadows of the forest country into an open land of grassy meadows and rude, small farms, there were nearly eight thousand of the raiders.
Now they were approaching the arena of probable conquests. For some time the land had been flattening out around them. The rolling hills that had flanked them during the first few days after they emerged from the forest had begun to recede toward the horizon some time since; and now they looked out on flat territory stretching back from either bank of the river. It was territory mostly divided into farms or grazing areas, and with only an occasional clump of trees to break the monotony of level ground. Both land and air were dryer, and the temperature was warmer. The forest tribesmen threw off whatever they wore byway of clothing and went naked except for a minimum harness to which were slung their weapons and their most valuable smaller possessions. They sweated free
ly in the lowland heat and stank mightily. And they grumbled.
“How long, King?” A daring, if anonymous, voice called from one of the neighboring canots, one hot morning.
Rajn, who headed them all in authority over the chiefs and lords of the lesser forest tribes who had joined them along the way, pretended not to hear. The common warriors were growing impatient. Already they had passed by several of what could only be described as semi-prosperous villages, secured by palisades of vertical sharpened logs at least double the height of a warrior.
It was always a fine art for a leader like Rajn to know how long he could hold his raiders in check. Let them loose on upstream villages like these too early and casualties would diminish his forces for the richer targets farther downstream. Hold them in too long, and he could well have a mutiny on his hands and find both himself and his villagers slaughtered by those anxious to appoint a more aggressive warlord. Harb worried a little about Rajn holding back too long. If the mass of the raiders turned on the Homskarter king and his villagers, they would turn on the outlander who was of their party. And with all the sophistication of his secret weapons, not even he could deal with some seven thousand blood-hungry native fighting men all at once.
Rajn, however, was apparently reading signs in the behavior of his own people that Harb was not knowledgeable enough to perceive. Without warning, Rajn called his stentor. “Pass the word,” he said. “We attack the next village.”
The stentor, a Homskarter chosen for his powerful voice, shouted the decision to the immediately following canots, from where it was relayed to those further back. A roar of approval followed in its passage.
The canots erupted with a bustle of preparation. Bladed weapons were resharpened, and all other panoply of battle re-oiled, restrung, or refurbished.
There was a whoop from the first canot. A new village had been sighted. The canots moved downriver steadily for it.
As they got closer, it seemed to Harb that some sense—it might in fact be the defenders’ sense of smell—had warned them of what was coming toward them. As the canots approached the river bank below the village, above the standing logs of the palisade, headgear and faces were thickly visible and busily in movement. Rajn stood in the prow of the foremost canot, talking loudly about the wealthiness of the particular village they were approaching, although Harb could see no significant differences between it and the villages they had bypassed until now.
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