Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  “She’s built about right for it,” Abner agreed. “You know the Pontos Axeinos is Amazon country. But why didn’t she tell us?”

  “Why didn’t I ask her? We could have turned around and gone home from Pretannion!”

  Amber was coming in too slowly to make expenses. Of course, we might be able to pick up a little tin on the way back past the Cassiterides. But if Hatchi was who I thought she was, Uncle Hiram could save his charter, and the king would be off our backs for a while.

  There was skim ice in the fjord already. I’d been gambling on one more storm so we could get at least enough amber to pay our docking fees before freezeup. If we didn’t get out before then, we’d be stuck here until spring. But now “All hands start loading,” I yelled. “We’re going home!”

  The stockade was a jumble of organized confusion when our palefaces came stampeding back. “Trolls!” their headman babbled. “Kill mans. Take womans. Got pants woman, too!”

  “What in Sheol was Hatchi doing out there?” I roared.

  “Maybe she wanted to earn her keep,” Abner said.

  I suppose I could have been more pleasant to her. If only she hadn’t talked so much.

  “How did it happen?” I asked the paleface.

  “Come from woods. Us on beach.”

  “Couldn’t you drive them off with rocks?”

  “Got axe and spear.”

  I looked at Abner. These ogres must be smarter than I’d thought. I wondered if we could do business with them. The palefaces insisted it was impossible. They had tried, but the ogres accepted neither treaty nor tribute. I wondered where they’d come from. With Centaurs moving out of the east, only the gods knew how many peoples they were pushing like a bow wave ahead of them. How long before we had to worry about Centaurs, too?

  But mainly I wondered if we could get Hatchi back before they ate her. Of all the lousy luck! Why couldn’t I have found out how valuable she was a day earlier?

  The paleface was still waiting. “We’ll figure out something,” I reassured him. But what? We didn’t know where the ogres hung out, and we couldn’t chase around looking for them in all that snow.

  Abner gazed at me with agonized eyes. “Worth her weight in amber,” he moaned, “and they’ll eat her just like any other paleface. Wait till your

  Uncle Hiram hears the good news!”

  “Uncle Hiram! What do you think the king will have to say? If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go fall on my axe.”

  “Wait,” Abner said, “there must be something we can do. How about a trap?”

  “Trap, shmap. You think we’re after mice?” How in Sheol are we going to build a trap?

  Abner shrugged. “You got a better idea?”

  I thought a while and decided I didn’t.

  What could we lose? The ground wasn’t too frozen for digging. We dug. Not a pitfall, just a ramp so one walked through the gate along a trench to another gate. When it was ready we walled the trench with sharpened stakes and left the gate open. I told the palefaces to act sick, but it sounded just like the singing that went on every night.

  When the gate had stood open a while, three young males peered cautiously inside. We watched through peepholes as they sniffed the delectable odors of rotting salmon. Just as I was sure we had them hooked, they turned and went humping off into the forest. “They’ll be back,” Abner promised.

  He was right. In less than an hour more came. They were the same things we had killed last summer: naked, with shambling, fuzzy bodies and yellow manes. But this time they didn’t carry stone celts. Their axes were chipped sharp and bound to handles. They had flint-head spears. I wondered if those of last summer were a different clan or just out for a picnic without weapons.

  We held our breaths while they moved toward the gate, wrinkling noses at the smell of our bait. Finally they came shambling down the narrow trench toward the second gate. “Now!” I yelled, and both gates slammed shut. I’d hoped to save a few and see if they had enough brains to answer questions, but I hadn’t counted on our palefaces.

  The males went about their extermination in businesslike fashion. The females and children were more messy. I wondered if the shambling things in the trench could be worse.

  Then abruptly a tremendous gabbling wail broke out. “I think we’re in trouble,” Abner yelled.

  I looked over the palisade and was inclined to agree. A wave of ogres came loping out of the forest, clearing the snow in clumsy looking but incredibly swift leaps. They outnumbered us two to one, and some of them were dragging poles.

  Our palefaces spread about the catwalk with lances. My men prodded fires and readied hoops on the blockhouse platforms. Uncontrollable as usual, the palefaces were throwing stones and making too much noise, wasting ammunition before the ogres even got in range. A moment later the ogres arrived and placed their scaling poles against the blockhouses where disciplined Tarshishim waited out of sight.

  An ogre loped up a pole, his long arms carrying him faster than I’d expected. I pulled a tarred hoop from the fire and quoited the flaming ring neatly over his head. He howled and fell backward. Two more poles slammed against the blockhouse. We played ring toss until we were out of hoops, then my oarsmen went to the pitch pots with ladles, sticks, and anything else that would serve as a torch to hold the sticky stuff and leave a gob of it burning wherever it was poked in some ogre’s face. We were running low on fuel, and I was wondering if they’d ever stop coming at us with those scaling poles, when abruptly it was over. Palefaces went streaming out the gate after the retreating ogres. I went out after the palefaces and pulled the headman off a still-bleating troll he was slicing. But it died, so I still had nobody to question.

  This one had a leather waistband, which made him technically less naked than the others. I turned him over. The waistband had a bronze Tarshish buckle.

  I left the men to watch the store while Abner and I took out after our palefaces. The trail was practically a road from the number of feet that had beaten the snow down coming and going. I thanked the gods that the Myrtos weather was on its best behavior for once. The sun danced on snow and created dazzling halos about the icicles that drooped from heavy-laden pines.

  All that morning we followed the packed, blood-tinged trail across the frozen creekbed, across the now white meadow where I’d killed my first ogre, to a steep bank above a lake. Then I saw it was not a lake. We had passed clear across the headland to another bay north of the stockade’s fjord. Halfway up the bank a fire smoked.

  We climbed the bank up a narrow trail and saw that behind the small mountain of ashes, charred bones, and garbage was a cave mouth. I wondered if we could save a cub. Maybe they could be trained. Also, I wondered melancholically if there’d be enough left of Hatchi to recognize.

  Our palefaces boiled out of the cave, dragging bloody ogres, clubbing savagely at those who still moved. One carried the upper half of a female. She had been one of our amber pickers, and the paleface who carried her was weeping.

  Another female burst from the cave. It was Hatchi—and very much alive. “Hanno!” she shrieked. The goatskin trousers clinched in a scissors that deflated me. “You came for me!” she babbled. “You did come!”

  It must have been the excitement or maybe the gods just wanted to play a joke on me. I caught myself saying things no man in his right mind would ever say to a woman. By the time I could clamp my mouth shut, I was afraid it might be too late. I offered silent prayers that Hatchi had been too excited to hear me. She stumbled along in a kind of daze, so I guessed the gods would be kind to me just this once.

  Abner pointed below us to where waves broke sluggishly against the rocks. There was a litter of shattered planking above the tide marks, and a well-worn trail led from it to the cave mouth. “That’s not driftwood,” I said.

  “No,” Abner agreed grimly.

  I snatched a torch from a paleface who paraded about happily, swinging a head by its tangled blond hair. Abner and I lined the palefaces up and inspe
cted the loot they’d ransacked from the fetid cave. Odds and ends of trade goods could have been looted from the stockade. Then Abner came up with three cylinder seals, and that clinched it. At last we knew what had happened to the rest of Uncle Hiram’s missing ships.

  “But I still don’t get it,” Abner said. “Howling savages, barely down from the trees, and they took five Tarshish ships one after another?”

  It was beyond me. Then suddenly I understood, and then I felt sorry for the simple brutes in spite of all the damage they had done us. They’d had the rarest kind of good luck. And what had their good luck brought them? “Come outside,” I told Abner, “down to the beach where the ships wrecked.”

  He followed me, and we stood staring up at the cave entrance where the cooking fire still smoked. “Gods of Shinar!” Abner breathed.

  With the beacon fire gone out at our stockade after the Egyptian sickness had killed everybody, it would have been all too easy in stormy weather to miscount the number of headlands.

  Even the best navigator would go on at least to the next inlet before turning back. And there waiting would be the familiar fire and smoke.

  And the unfamiliar rocks.

  “Never even knew what they were doing,” Amber mused. “That fire lured ship after ship on the rocks while they thanked some irresponsible god who kept bringing them trinkets and Tarshishim to eat.”

  It shook me.

  It was cold that night, and the Phoenician Star glittered high and unmoving over a curtain of northern lights. It was going to be close, but I thought we’d be able to get out before the big freeze. I sat a long time in the steam bath, soaking the blood and sweat and cave smell away. When I went back, the carpenter was lashing poles and hanging a curtain of bark cloth around my bed. “What’s going on here?” I demanded.

  “Nice and warm this way, skipper, and kind of privatelike.”

  “Now he thinks of it, when we sail in the morning. And when did I ever give a flatulation for privacy anyway?”

  Abner’s evil face split into a grin, and he pointed. Hatchi was scrubbing herself on the far side of the warehouse. She’d shed the breeches, and I had to admit her long, straight legs were not bad. While I watched she oiled her breasts and combed her hair down loose until it surrounded her like a black cloud. She seemed less skinny, and her shoulders were no longer white. I squinted through the smoke inside the warehouse, and as she swayed toward me, I could have sworn she’d just stepped out of Assurbanipal’s load of Egyptian girls.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you,” she said, “but where I come from, a girl likes to pick her own teacher.” She turned and walked slowly away.

  “You may remember,” Abner pointed out, “that the king and your Uncle Hiram were looking for a pigeon.”

  As Hatchi crossed the warehouse and stepped into the newly prepared compartment, Abner grinned. “Looks like you’re the pigeon,” he said.