Beasts of Antares [Dray Prescot #23]

by Alan Burt Akers

  And he told me about the animals.

  He had a team of harum-scarum diffs and apims to assist. Some knew how to handle the beasts; others simply used the whip and the torch and lived scared half to death most of the time.

  “Get rid of them as soon as I can, Jak,” he told me. “Poor trash. You have to know how a beast feels to trap it, and then how to keep it alive. Some just curl over and die if you don't treat ‘em right."

  “You're making for Huringa, of course—"

  “Gotta pick up a consignment of thomplods first. Had ‘em shipped in to Hyrklana South. They'll fetch a fortune."

  He said thomplod, which is the vernacular for the animal I always think of as a haystack on feet. Twelve feet, six a side. And the smell—well, I can't smell it, not many men can. But other animals—well, now. That dung cart of the son of Strom Nevius that ran away with the band and the son of Trylon Lofoinen and the solemn procession of adherents of Mev-ira-Halviren, that didn't create half the stir among the neighborhood that a single thomplod could churn up among the animals of a sizeable town. No, sir!

  Not all the animals. Mostly saddle animals. Some riding animals seemed to be immune to the smell; most are not. Unmok was going to have to arrange transportation for his menagerie. The carts would be pulled by Quoffas, and those huge-faced shambling hearthrugs would patiently haul and not care a fig for the thomplods. But no one was going to ride a totrix or a marlque or a hirvel, not with a thomplod within sniffing range.

  Well, Unmok and I got along and pretty soon he was suggesting I might like to throw in with him. This often happens to me, on Earth and on Kregen. Delia and I had taken a few handfuls of golden deldys, one of the more usual currencies of Havilfar, and I had a walletful. I thumped a purseful on the table and Unmok sniffed and allowed that Havil the Green or some divine spirit had answered his prayers. He was a little short, did I see, and we were partners. We shook on it, in the Kregan way. As I say, I was surprised myself.

  I was to be a working partner.

  Captain Nath the Bows kept well out to the east giving the coast of Hamal a wide berth. Sailing direct to Hyrklana South was not so much out of our way, after all.

  “Those devils of Hamal can't pay for animals for their Jikhorkduns now,” observed Unmok. “That stupid war they've got themselves involved in. Oh, they have plenty of prisoners. But they're short of prime cargoes of animals."

  A few days later a voller passed high overhead, traveling fast toward the south. Unmok screwed his chops up and stared aloft, tense, hopping on his one good foot. Then he relaxed. A single glance had told us the flier was Hyrklanian and not Hamalese.

  “Thought it might have been a cage voller.” Unmok visibly relaxed, and the breeze blew the feather in his cap askew. “That'd mean tough competition.” He admitted, seeing I was now his partner, that he had been a trifle strapped. He had planned on selling a few beasts at the wharf side, and damn poor prices, too, to pay for the passage. “One day,” he said darkly, “I'll have me my own cage voller. Then you'll see!"

  As soon as we reached a stylor, he said, the bokkertu could all be written up in due legal form.

  “And if that was Maglo the Ears, why, I'll—I'll—"

  “Who's he?"

  “The biggest rogue unhanged since Queen Fahia grew her moustache.” Then he looked about swiftly, to see if anyone had overheard this flagrant example of lèse majesté, as they say.

  “Maglo the Ears preys on honest traders like me. He is welcome in the Jikhorkdun because he can sell at cut prices. Of course he can, the yetch! He steals what honest men have worked for."

  No matter what trade or profession you go in for, it seems on two worlds, there are always the fly-boys, the get-rich-quick merchants, the unscrupulous to twist a profit out of villainy. Unmok heaved up a sigh and cut phlegm.

  “And the Jikhorkduns can afford to pay. Hyrklana has never been richer. Hamal pours out her treasure for war and we profit. Mind you, they drive a hard bargain when it comes to selling a few hundred people for the arena. They have a good supply, as I said, and we still have to send out parties and scratch and scrape to find men suitable—"

  I started to interrupt, harshly, unpleasantly, and forced myself to calm down. But for his trade and its singularity, Unmok the Nets was a simple ordinary trader, wasn't he? Hyrklana needed men like Unmok. Others like him, probably much more unpleasant in their habits, would be out now scouring foreign countries for arena fodder.

  Korero and I had been talking up in the prow of the voller when she smashed and I could only hope the others had been able to stick together. Certainly, if some slaving rast from the arena tried to capture my hundred lads, he'd be eating his teeth, and digesting a length of steel through his guts.

  If there exists a demand men will be found to supply it.

  That is no excuse, never has been. But Unmok cared for the splendid wild animals in his charge, mindful of not only their physical comfort but seeking ways of easing their rages at confinement. He disliked the whip. He checked a shaven-pated Gon who slashed a strigicaw, and the Gon sulked. Unmok heaved up one of his feather-whiffling sighs, and promised me he'd discharge the useless lumber, as he called them, and hire fresh beast handlers in Fanahal, the chief port of Hyrklana South.

  Unmok's chief assistant, a strong-bodied Fristle, whose cat's face was missing a sizeable portion of fur so that the membrane glistened pinkly, provided the strong arm necessary. This Fristle spoke little, spat often, and was called Froshak the Shine.

  Froshak saw my sailor knife in its sheath snugged at the back of my right hip, and asked to examine it. I let him hold the knife, and he turned it over, and felt the heft. Then he handed it back and whipped out his own blade. The knives were very similar.

  “Good,” said Froshak. “Good for slicing guts.” I agreed. Out of politeness.

  He gave no trouble that I had been taken in as a partner. As I say, I was a working partner. Unmok's system was simple and neat. One empty cage at the end was cleaned and swabbed out and provided with fresh litter. The gate to the adjoining cage was opened and the occupant of the second cage enticed, cajoled—whipped—into entering the first. Then with the gates shut the second cage was cleaned out. The process was repeated until the end of the line, when on the following day the end cage was prepared and the process repeated in reverse.

  I took my share. I cannot say I came to be overly familiar with the wild animals; but the education was formidable. Mostly I'd been on the receiving end, with a sword in my fists.

  Unmok had three leems. He was proud of them. No one else relished the idea; but they were valuable, and we needed to eat.

  Pens up on deck held tame livestock. Preparing them for the beasts’ dinners was not a pleasant job. On a long sea voyage rations were tightly arranged, anyway. Unmok had lost only two of his stock, as he told me sorrowfully, a fine graint and a chag, which had been weak anyway. He took particular care of the four splendid specimens of neemus. These black, vicious, treacherous beasts with their round heads and flat ears and slanting slits of lambent golden flame for eyes were to be sold to Queen Fahia. Unmok was confident of that. I could just imagine them, scented, pampered, chained with silver links, sprawled on the steps of her throne.

  And I must mention the werstings. These white and black four-legged hunting dogs were just about trained. They remained savage. Unmok owned five couples, collared with bronze, bearing his mark. I doubted if even a wersting would be able to check these wild animals if they broke free, but Unmok informed me that these werstings, toward whom he held an ambivalent attitude, were as much for his own protection against grasping rogues like Maglo the Ears as against escaped stock.

  He had no Manhounds, and I was not sorry for that, I can tell you!

  The Suns of Scorpio blazed down, the breeze blew, we made a good passage and came up beautifully to our landfall, making boards in to Fanahal, and we saw not a sign of another craft until we were in the coastal sea-lanes.

  The port gleamed p
ink and green over white in the blaze. The water glittered. A busy confusion of ships and boats congested the roadway. We were hauled in by a ten-oared tug manned by Brokelsh, and the local dignitaries came aboard to the ritual wine, bribes, and signing of papers. The noise of the wharves and the smells had to be adjusted to after the long windblown reaches of the ocean.

  I had arrived in Hyrklana.

  * * *

  Chapter eleven

  A Shot at a Swordship

  One thing you could say for Unmok the Nets—he was a businessman. He discharged the useless lumber—the shaven-headed Gon would have been a nuisance, but Froshak the Shine clicked his sailor knife up and down in the sheath. The Gon departed. Unmok worked at a high pressure. The thomplods were loaded into a second vessel, little more than a sailing steerable raft for coastal navigation, fees were paid, bribes were distributed, stores taken aboard, and we set off northward around the west coast of Hyrklana.

  Everyone was jumpy.

  Hyrklana is a large island shaped rather like a pear, or a flint arrowhead. From north to south it measures around thirteen hundred miles and across the broadest part just over eight hundred. The coast of Havilfar to the west curves in a bow shaped to fit the bulge of Hyrklana. The Hyrklese Channel is approximately three hundred miles across.

  These waters, wide though they were, were infested with pirates. Renders from the coastal countries of the Dawn Lands, ships searching for plunder, attacking and looting anything else that sailed the seas, the brethren were an odiferous bunch. A deal of policing had been done; but the current wars had made supervision too costly. It was every ship for herself.

  So we had taken aboard Unmok's hired guards at Fanahal to reinforce Captain Nath's Undurker marines. We made as fast a passage as we could, giving the contrariness of Whetti Orbium who under Opaz's beneficent hand runs the weather on Kregen. Propitiations were made, of course, and the low-domed temple with the ships’ figureheads set up outside in ranks and rows took in another tidy little heap of gold coins to the old-age pensions of the priests.

  Money began to figure now. My store of gold, although mere handfuls, as I have said, was in these circumstances considerable wealth. All the same, it would not last for ever.

  Unmok had been careful with his hired guards. They were mostly Fristles and Rapas. He had contracted to pay them five sinvers per sennight. Although, contrarily, I give the word sennight for a week of six days, it seems to me to fit. Across in the Dawn Lands I'd hired out for eight broad strebes a day, and even there a Fristle or Rapa could get the standard one silver coin per diem. Unmok, as I say, was shrewd.

  There were no Pachaks or Chuliks in the bunch we hired. Ten of them, and one Khibil. His fox-like face drooped instead of bristling with the natural arrogance of a Khibil. He had been given a nasty—a very nasty—blow in the middle at some time and it had broken some spiritual spring deep within him. He was an archer; but his bow, although compound and reflex and an admirable weapon, pulled lightly. But, for all that, he remained a Khibil.

  “I am a Khibil,” he said, as he stood before the table where Unmok sat with the leather bags of silver sinvers, some spilled casually out across the wood, glittering. “I hire out for nothing less than eight."

  Looking at this Khibil, Pondar the Iumfrey, I was forcibly reminded of the time I'd hired out over in the Dawn Lands, and of Pompino demanding more because he was a Khibil. The contrast between this Pondar before me now and my comrade Pompino could not have been more marked. And, by Zair, where was Pompino the Iarvin now?

  “The Rapas and Fristles have settled for five,” pointed out Unmok. “But, yes, you are a Khibil. I will pay you one silver sinver a day. No more."

  “Done."

  Pondar the Iumfrey affixed his mark.

  Men were not easy to find. Good men were scarce. But they still existed, carrying on in the old ways and refusing to be drawn into foreign wars. Hyrklana liked to be an island and cut off from the rest of Havilfar.

  So we sailed up the Hyrklese Channel and kept our eyes skinned for renders. Pirates are a pain in the neck. When we saw our swordship, her single bank of oars driving deeply, surging on toward us, sheeted in spray like a half-submerged rock, the old wailing cry went up, filled with horror.

  “Swordship! Swordship!"

  We were, therefore, in for a fight.

  I said to Unmok, “Is there a spare bow and a few shafts?"

  He lifted his shrewd Och head up above the companionway coaming. He waited for no man on his descent below decks.

  “Bows? Shafts? Jak, what are you dreaming of?"

  “We have to fight them off—"

  “They do, the hired mercenaries. We don't!"

  I didn't blame him for scuttling below. He was better off out of the coming fight. It wasn't even as though he had all his limbs, was it, now? But he shouted that there was a bow of sorts in his cabin and I was welcome to it.

  The bow proved to be a compound job of wood and sinew, with a little horn, and the reflex curves made only a halfhearted stab at the double-reflex curves of the bows of Valka.

  But I took it up and strung it and heaved on the string. The shafts were iron-tipped and fletched with the yellow feathers from hulfoo birds, a kind of Hyrklanian goose. They looked to be reasonably straight.

  On deck, having seen Unmok stowed away safely below, I found the Khibil, Pondar, arguing with a heavyset Rapa, whose red wattles congested and whose dark eyes snapped anger.

  They were arguing as to who was to be Jiktar of the mercenary guard. Of course, Jiktar was just a name, a kind of Kregan relative to saying the captain of the guard.

  I said, “You know your posts. Take them. Pondar, take the stern. Randalar, take the bows."

  The swordship looked as though her captain meant to hit our port bow. The Rapa and the Khibil wanted to continue their argument, but I told them to get on with it, and they did.

  We possessed but one varter. It looked as though it might fall to pieces the moment the windlass was wound, even before the missile was discharged. Captain Nath stood looking at it and pursing his lips.

  “Well, I don't know..."

  Without a word I started to wind the windlass. The old wood creaked and groaned. But the plaited string inched back and the bow bent. I did it cautiously, I may add, out of respect for my own hide. A broken varter string can whip out your eye better than a diving blood-lance.

  I won't go into the details of the fight, mainly because there were so few. Even this antiquated and dangerous varter could out-range a bow. Before the two ships closed the range for archery I swung the varter on its swivel and lined up the ugly beak of the swordship. We were going up and down and the renders’ vessel was pitching like a maddened totrix.

  Froshak the Shine dumped a chunk of rock into the chute. I waited until Pearl of Klanadun rolled, and pulled the trigger. The rock flew.

  Just what it did I do not know. But the swordship stuck her bows under the next wave and the sea washed back in an unbroken green tide and she didn't right herself. She just went on and in, with all her oars driving lustily.

  We sailed on, and it was as though the swordship had been just a bad dream.

  We didn't even stop to see. That would have been very difficult with a plunging, wide-beamed and unhandy argenter.

  The outcome of that was that the men started calling me Jak the Shot. I'd given the name Jak, for obvious reasons. I made no demurral on the Shot business, just let it ride.

  Swordships are cranky craft at best, and seem to spend as much of their time under the water as above it. “Now if that had been a Vallian galleon...” I said to Unmok.

  “Oh, them!” He sniffed. “I've been married a couple of times and one of my sons went off to Vallia. Never got to be a paktun, got himself killed somewhere in Pandahem, so a comrade told me. My lad said the Vallese are a strange lot. Haven't got a soldier among ‘em. All pot-bellied money-grabbers. Then he laughed. “Like me—with pot-bellies!"

  I forbore to bring Unmok
up to date. But I warmed to his honesty. What he did he did because that was the way he made his living. Among his chatter he spoke often of buying a cage voller, of making his fortune and going into a new line of business. This varied with each recital of his dream.

  Froshak the Shine came up. “Varter's busted. We were lucky."

  We looked. That ballista would never loose again. One of the arms was cracked through, and the wood was black rotten for three-quarters of the crack, and pale yellow the rest.

  “Lucky,” said Captain Nath the Bows. “I'll have to replace her. Money, money, money...!"

  “Praying again,” I said, and—refreshingly—we all laughed.

  Huringa, capital of Hyrklana, stands on the south bank of the River of Leaping Fishes, some thirty dwaburs up from the mouth. The river is not navigable past about the halfway mark, so we had to hire quoffa carts to take us the remainder of the journey. Hyrklana is a civilized country. As civilized, that is, as any civilized country on Kregen.

  “We ought to be in the city in good time, Jak,” said Unmok as Pearl of Klanadun and the coaster unloaded, the carts carrying the cages lumbering along, the men yelling and the whips cracking, we started. “But there is the Forest of the Departed to pass through."

  In these gloomy woods uncounted numbers of past inhabitants of Huringa and the surrounding country had been interred for centuries. The place was a forest, yes; it was also a giant mausoleum. Froshak picked his teeth, spat, and said nothing. I eyed Unmok.

  “Maglo the Ears?"

  “Him, and a score of drikingers almost as bad."

  Bandits are bad news anywhere.

  Those drikingers I had employed in Vallia, clearing out aragorn and slavers and the iron legions of Hamal, had been driven to banditry against their foes. Your hardened, throat-cutting, purse-slitting bandit is a different matter.

  Naturally, the mercenaries demanded extra pay. Unmok started to chitter-chatter, and I said, “Pay ‘em,” and so we did. We were eating bread sliced thin already. No sense in throwing the loaf away because of that.