Delia of Vallia (3 page)
He shouted. He roared in such a voice as would bring the very stars out of the sky.
“Do not touch her!” His lower right hand caught in Vogon the Amsant’s hair, and jerked the bulky mercenary back. He thrust himself on, sword lifted, dagger snouting. He was visibly shaking with passion.
“What nonsense is this?” screeched Hirvin.
Tandu the Djang drew himself up. His sword swept in the ritual salute to the woman and then flickered out, a bar of lethal steel, to menace Hirvin.
“You fool! This lady is my queen! The Queen of Djanduin!” The Djang sword darted for Hirvin’s throat. “This is the Stromni of Valka! The Empress of Vallia! Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains!”
The Djang Tandu and His Son Dalki Stand Watch
Deldar Hirvin staggered back, away from that reaching Djang sword. His eyes opened wide. His mouth thinned into a bitter line. He spat his words when he found his voice.
“The empress? What is that to us, now? If it is true, Tandu—”
The Djang swirled his sword to encompass the others. Young Nal, behind the bunk, froze, ashen.
“True? Aye, you nidges, it is true!”
“Then,” said Hirvin, spittle slobbering, “then we are all dead men. What I say is so!” He twisted away from the point of the sword, gestured to his men. “It matters nothing to us, empress or queen. If she lives — we die!”
“Down on your knees!” thundered Tandu. “Down on your faces in the full incline!”
He knocked the bowl of water over from the table, and sent the table flying after it. He bloated with the enormity of his own rage, his harness straining under the immense swelling of his ribcage. He looked — he was! — frighteningly formidable.
“Thank you, Tandu,” said Delia. She spoke levelly. She was in control of her breathing now, and fighting off the dreadful tiredness. She smiled.
At that smile Tandu almost exploded.
“Do we kill her first,” said Sly Oswalk, “or after?”
Tandu roared his contempt.
“First, nidges, you will have to slay me!”
“That, Tandu the Onker, we will accomplish,” said Hirvin, and leaped.
Delia threw the dagger.
Heavy, simple, cruel, it passed clean through Hirvin’s neck.
His eyes crossed as he vainly attempted to focus on the steel transfixing his throat.
“Hai!” bellowed Tandu, and then, remembering: “Dalki!”
Swords snapped up, and before Hirvin, tottering, fell under their feet, the men were at handstrokes.
It was a poor contest; when Dalki, a younger edition of Tandu, burst in raging, it was no contest at all.
Sly Oswalk, alone, managed to slip through the open doorway and escape into the night.
Tandu and Dalki were all for following and cutting him down without mercy.
“Majestrix! He deserves to suffer in the deepest of Herrelldrin Hells, to wander screaming among the Ice Floes of Sicce forever!”
“Aye,” said Delia. “Probably. But he snatched a bow before he left. I value you, Tandu, and your son Dalki, too much—”
Tandu, stumbling over a corpse, had the sense to make no otiose reply.
Delia sat herself down on the edge of a bunk. She put a hand to her hair, smoothing the wildness back. In that brown hair, caught and embellished by the lamplight, outrageous chestnut and auburn tints glowed. Tandu, breathing hard, beamed down on his queen.
“I remember you, Tandu. Yes, I assuredly do. It is Tandu Khynlin Jondermair, is it not?”
“Yes, majestrix, may Djan Kadjiryon have you in his keeping.”
“And you married one of our girls in Valka, I recall, when you came from Djanduin to train our young men to fly flutduins? Yes — Valli, I remember, beautiful Valli of the violet eyes. And Dalki is your son.”
Tandu breathed so that his bronze-studded harness creaked. “Valli died, majestrix. Slain by those Djan-forsaken cramphs of aragorn. When we fought in Valka.”
“I am sorry, Tandu. We have been through terrible times together.”
“That is true. But there is my son, Dalki—”
As Dalki, shorter, and by a fraction less formidable than his father, bobbed his head in awed respect for this famous and indomitable woman — the Empress of Vallia! The Stromni of Valka! — it was clearly apparent that he had heard of Delia of Vallia, heard of her and shared his father’s fanatical loyalty. Yet Dalki drew his harness over but two arms; he was not a true Dwadjang with four powerful fighting men’s arms. He was a miscegenation; yet clear-eyed, strong-faced, proud and upright, a true son to his Djang father and Valkan mother.
“Can we stay here tonight, Tandu? I am tired.”
Instantly, Dalki was at the bunks, picking up blankets, bashing straw-filled mattresses, hauling all the pillows about to find the finest.
“You are hungry, majestrix, thirsty?”
“I could drink the whole of the Sunset Sea, were it sweet water.”
“A meal! Dalki, a meal for the queen!”
The mercenary frontier riders provided poor food; but the Djang and his half-Djang half-apim son rustled up the best. They brewed strong Kregan tea and heaped a pottery dish with the golden yellow paline berries. Delia sipped the tea and chewed a paline as the meal was prepared. She leaned back against heaped pillows, and looked with her brown eyes level and curiously unimpassioned upon the scene. She had come through a bad ordeal. She had done so before. No doubt, in Opaz’s good time, she would do so again.
The corpses were thrown outside to be cleared away in the morning. Tandu and his son would not sleep all this night. Not, by Zodjuin of the Silver Stux, when their queen slept and they stood guard.
Simple though the ingredients might be, the meal Dalki cooked up smelled delicious. It tasted very fine, also; although Delia would probably have chewed on passe biltong and sour water with her hunger. She did not consider it strange that the Djangs had not asked her why she was here, marching out of the Ochre Limits, instead of living in her great palaces — any of them — surrounded by luxury. They knew she was a woman well-used to the hard trails of life.
That lack of curiosity on their part did not make her quench her own curiosity about them. When she had finished the meal, which she had insisted they share, she said: “Tell me, Tandu. You came to Valka to train young men to fly flutduins. You were an ord-Deldar, I believe. At any rate, you would soon have passed out of the Deldar grade to become a Hikdar commanding your own pastang. Why is it that you are here, riding guard on the Ochre Limits, chasing bandits for the Kov of Vindelka?”
Tandu let his gaze linger briefly on his son. His broad, high-colored face suddenly took on lines Delia had not noticed before. Tandu looked, for an instant, sad.
Then he said: “Because I married my Valli.”
Delia felt the shock.
“In Valka? Where I am Stromni and my husband is strom? In our Valka?”
“Aye, majestrix. In the Time of Troubles, when you were away fighting our enemies. A few people only, but enough.”
“My husband and I much mislike folk who do not look on all Creation as one. Djang, apim, we are all Opaz’s creatures, all men and women under the hand of Djan.”
Softly, Dalki said: “You suffered under many enemies then, majestrix.”
His strong face, so like his father’s and yet inlaid and softened by his apim ancestry, betrayed the awe and elation he felt at actually speaking to the Queen of Djanduin and the Empress of Vallia. Delia smiled.
“You were not born, then, Dalki, I know. But, you are right and have learned the lessons of history correctly. But, in one thing, there is more to learn. I have many enemies still.”
“May Djondalar of the Twisted Staff strike them all low!”
“A happening devoutly to be wished,” agreed the queen. She did not so much yawn as indicate that she would have yawned if she allowed yawning to figure as a part of what she tolerated in life. Instantly, the two Djangs — for Dalki thought and talked more like a Djang than a Valkan — fluffed about preparing the best bunk and smoothing the pillows and spreading extra blankets. Then, tactfully, they withdrew so the empress might complete her toilet in privacy.
Delia put her head on the pillow and went at once to sleep, confident in her Djangs and their strong right arms, all three of them. As ever, her last thought was for her husband who was — well, who the hell ever knew where he got to?
He was probably out somewhere outlandish bashing hostiles over the head with his great Krozair longsword and, as ever, thinking always of her.
What a pair they were! And then she was asleep.
Outside the guard hut the Kregen night breathed easy in the glitter of stars and the golden and roseate light of She of the Veils, soon joined by Kregan’s first moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles. The Djangs prowled watchfully. Any beast or human of evil intent would find short shrift at their hands.
Shortly after the hour of dim, which is the opposite to the hour of mid on Kregan, Delia awoke. She stretched and knew instantly where she was. She sat up. She stretched. Then she stood up and girt on her rapier, which Dalki had carefully cleaned, and went outside the hut.
Instantly, like a black shadow, Tandu stood at her side.
“Majestrix?”
“I’ll stand a few burs’ watch, Tandu.”
[1]
“But, majestrix—”
“Dalki needs his rest.”
Tandu mulled this over. He had heard the stories concerning Delia of Vallia, so many of them true, so many far-fetched as to be fantasies; but, this!
“My queen, to stand a watch like a common swod—”
“Swods are not common, Tandu. And I have stood sentry go before.”
Tandu, for one, well believed that.
“As my queen commands.”
Dalki wanted to be mutinous until his father told him the queen commanded. Then he went into the hut and threw himself onto a bunk, and went to sleep dreaming of Delia of Delphond.
The high star glitter picked out the familiar constellations of Kregen. Delia sighed. Her husband had told her of other constellations and stars that he saw from his own funny little world with only a single yellow sun and a single silver moon and only apims, as he and she were, and not a diff in sight. Odd! Perhaps, one day, if the Star Lords ordained, she might herself go to that funny little world he named as The Earth. Odd.
They stood watch, queen and swod, scanning the riverbank and the trees and aware of the changing patterns in the rustle of leaves in the breeze, the smell of river and mud, the tiny scuttlings of creatures of the night. And to Tandu Khynlin Jondermair came the absolute conviction that to stand a guard duty with his Queen Delia was to confide half the safety of their mutual watch into hands as strong and capable as the toughest Djang in all Djanguraj, in all of Djanduin. He breathed easy, did Tandu the Djang.
Presently, in a soft whisper that reached only the Djang’s ears, Delia spoke.
“And you never returned to our Djanduin, Tandu?”
“No, majestrix. I thought — I did not think my son Dalki would be... be well received there, either.”
“Mayhap you were wrong in that”
“I do not know.”
“I trust you were. One day, Tandu, we will put it to the test.” She did not look at Tandu as she spoke; rather she kept a lookout along the river and the trees, watching for others like Hirvin or Sly Oswalk, who had escaped, to come seeking their fortune with the queen in the guard hut “And so now you serve Vomanus, the Kov of Vindelka.”
“Aye, majestrix. I had a letter from Panshi, the strom’s chamberlain in Esser Rarioch. Kov Vomanus received me kindly. But that was just of him, and as he was—”
“As he was?”
“Times have changed in Vindelka, majestrix, as they have elsewhere in Vallia.”
“Before those damned flutsmen brought down my flier and killed Pansi and Nath the Jokester, I was on my way to Delka Ob. I chose to fly over the Ochre Limits, for that was the shortest route. I am sorry, now, that I so chose. But I must get to Delka Ob. Vomanus is to be wed, and I must be there for the ceremony.”
She did not add that when Vomanus, her half-brother, had been wed the first time she had not only not been invited, she had known nothing of it until later. Of that union had been born Valona, who was not Valona the Claw. Vomanus’s wife, Saenci of the Locks, had died. Delia had felt grief at that, even though Saenci had not been of the Sisters of the Rose. Her daughter, Valona, was of the SoR. Now Vomanus was to be wed again, to a woman unknown to Delia. Natural curiosity as much as family pride impelled her to attend this wedding and, in a pathetic time-binding way, perhaps, make amends to Saenci of the Locks.
“I must get to Delka Ob, and quickly.”
“We hear little out here, majestrix. We performed the ritual mourning for the kovneva. We do not know that the kov is to be married again.”
“Well, he is. So, good Tandu, first thing in the morning I set off for the capital.”
He turned, slowly, to regard her.
“Yes, Tandu. You and Dalki shall go with me.”
He said, simply: “You do me honor, majestrix. But — what of our guard duty?”
“At your back is the River of Shining Spears, and across that the zorca grasslands of the Blue Mountains. At your front the Ochre Limits. If bandits appear, they will do little before the men we shall send arrive.”
“Quidang, majestrix!”
[2]
Not for a four-armed Dwadjang the puzzlements of command or the complexities of operations. Give a Djang his weapons, point him in the right direction, and very little if anything in the whole world of Kregen would stop him and his fellows from trampling on. But present him with a conundrum, a difficult problem in logistics or operations, strategy, and he was lost. Then he would turn to the two-armed Obdjangs with their gerbil-like faces to make the decisions and to take the command. Obdjang and Dwadjang, they lived together in fraternal friendship in Djanduin.
A long screeching cry cut through the night.
Delia cocked her head.
“A wherezik has found its prey,” quoth Tandu. “Poor victim, swimming in the river at this time of night.”
“No doubt,” said Delia briskly, “the victim’s belly was stuffed with its own victims.”
“Aye. Aye, majestrix. That is the way of the world.”
