Delia of Vallia (4 page)

“Has there been any report of leems lately?”

“Not one.”

“I am relieved to hear it. On the morrow we take all the totrixes and march downriver for Mellinsmot. There we should be able to find a flier, or zorcas if they have no airboats.”

“Whatever the folk of Mellinsmot may have, they will gladly yield it for their empress.”

“That, I hope.”

“Oh,” said Tandu, easily, “they will.” In the star-shot darkness the lights of the moons shadowed on his hand, instinctively reaching for a sword hilt, without thought. Delia half-smiled and half-sighed.

“The Hikdar will be surprised,” said Tandu, out of nowhere.

“The Hikdar?”

“Aye. He brings a patrol along the bank, on a regular schedule. Just to see we are not all dead or run off.”

“Oh!”

“Hikdar Leomer ti Vindheim will expect to see Deldar Hirvin and us — and he’ll find another audo of guards.” Tandu made a small breathy sound on the night air that was as near a laugh as a sentry would permit himself. It was clear that to the Djang this was a great jest. Delia felt pleasure in Tandu’s enjoyment of the situation. This was a simple enough example of one of the reasons she loved her Djangs so.

They lived in Djanduin, a sizable country in the southwest of the vast continent of Havilfar, down south of the equator. Up here in the north, the large island of Vallia with the clusters of smaller islands around the shores, had seen the coming of many Djangs since the Strom of Valka became King of Djanduin. This free movement and mingling of peoples was a dream near to the heart of the Emperor of Vallia, for he foresaw the time when all of this grouping of continents and islands, known as Paz, must fight for life against enemies from overseas, the detested, despised and dreaded Shanks. So if anyone thought to question why one man should at once be strom, kov, hyrkov, king and emperor, the answer did not lie in the reply that the man was a remarkable person. He was, of course, and Delia had married him; but deeper than that, more touching the core of the future on Kregen, lay this determination to resist enemies and create a whole, free, full life for all.

A dream. Of course, a dream. But without a dream you are without everything.

The night passed. Delia said: “Before we ride for Mellinsmot there is a task I must perform. We will take all the totrixes and all the water we can carry.”

A fighting man grasped the meaning without fail. A warrior maiden, a Jikai Vuvushi, probably understood even more rapidly.

Tandu cocked an eye aloft as they finished up the first breakfast of the day.

“Yes, Tandu. I know. Rippasch will be there before us. But — I must.”

So, with all the saddle animals loaded with skins bulging with water, they set off into the badlands, out across the Ochre Limits.

Chapter three

A Burial Is Completed

Delia and Tandu stood, heads bowed, looking down at the wreckage of the airboat and the strewn bones. Dalki stood in a respectful way; but his eyes did not stare downward. His right hand rested comfortably on his belt beside the feathered shafts in their plain quiver, and his left hand, held down, grasped a bow. He looked up.

Presently, her private commendation to Opaz for the ibs of her friends completed, Delia said: “It is sad. But we will give them a proper burial. They will surely reach the sunny uplands beyond the Ice Floes of Sicce.”

“Without doubt,” said Tandu.

Scraping a grave was simple enough. It would blow streaming sand, later on, no doubt, and the graves might be stripped for the bones to lie bare and bleached under the radiance of the suns; later on, the sand would blow back.

Tandu moved with caution inside the wreckage of the flier. He only knocked a few broken things over. He came out with Delia’s box which he and Dalki strapped onto a totrix. That contained, besides a fine dress and other feminine essentials, wedding gifts. An earnest only. She had determined to let Vomanus see she was not pleased with him. Later on the full and lavish caravan stuffed with wedding gifts would be sent to Delka Ob. Later on.

She felt relief she had managed to persuade herself to return. Her friends had to be buried, and their ibs commended to Opaz, although such a commendation had no need of bones, corpses or graves. She controlled her shudder. She detested illness, sickness, the stink of the sick room, the fatuous smiles of people watching friends die. When her father had been ill — poisoned by secret enemies — she had managed to hold on long enough to attend to him. But if there was a flaw in Delia of Delphond, a failing, it was this, that she had to force herself into the tasks expected of people in dealing with sickness.

She had not in her life escaped those tasks.

She had been born a princess, married a prince, who had made her a queen and an empress. But she had been slave. She had emptied the golden chamberpots of those who enslaved her, and had, on and off, chopped them up into diced meat for it.

The simple ceremony over, her belongings piled on the back of a totrix, a last look at the smashed airboat, and she nodded to Tandu and they set off.

Away over the scorching wastes of the Ochre Limits lay the Dragon’s Bones, a vast collection of monsters’ bones of many descriptions. The place was a giant cemetery for giants. There a notable fight had taken place, where her husband — before they were married — had saved the life of her father the emperor. She thought of those long ago days as the totrixes waddled along with their six-legged gait, and she sighed. Life had been — simpler — then.

And, for all that, it had been complicated, too, Opaz knew! Just that the size of the problems these days was so much greater. Now they had half a world to ponder over.

She itched. She was used to discomfort as well as comfort; but the wash she’d managed in the river to rid herself of the mud had not been sufficient. Now dust caked over all. She longed for a wallow and a brush and a soak and a swim in the Baths of the Nine. Mellinsmot would boast such an establishment, no doubt a provincially grand place, full of gilded stout statues and flower garlands. But it would boast, also, piping hot water and steam rooms and freezing pools and an exercise salle. Yes, she closed her eyes and fought the itches, refusing to scratch, yes, she much longed for a session in the Baths of the Nine.

When the line of little dots appeared in their rear, high in the sky and winging strongly on, Delia frowned.

Tandu said, “Damned Djan-forsaken flutsmen.”

The skein bore on, and Delia counted six of them.

If the flutsmen wished to attack there would be no escaping them. The Ochre Limits extended in barrenness all around. If they attacked, if they did not attack, all were as one to Tandu and Dalki.

Dalia said, and the note of crossness in her voice was not unremarked: “Why in the name of Vox do we allow these thieving murdering flutsmen so free a rein? Does not the Kov of Vindelka sweep his province clean?”

Hesitantly, Tandu said: “I know nothing of these high matters, majestrix.”

“But you can see the flutsmen up there?”

“Yes, majestrix. They have grown worse just lately—”

“I thought we’d cleansed the land of them, and the aragorn and the mercenaries. I thought all our enemies were being driven back into the north. I don’t know what Vomanus is playing at.”

Tandu and Dalki might not worry, one way or the other, over six flutsmen — for themselves. But Tandu caught his son’s eye, and for a moment they reined in to ride knee to knee as Delia trotted on ahead.

“The empress does not care for flutsmen, father.”

“So I gather. I do not care, either. But we have the empress with us — so—”

“So we protect her. I know that.”

“Shoot as many of the devils as you can before we come to handstrokes. After that — it is the empress, alone, who matters.”

Riding up ahead, Delia wondered if the two Djangs were laying bets in the way her husband and Seg Segutorio had the habit of doing. Thoughtfully, she drew out her longbow. This was a Lohvian longbow built by Seg, who was, in his friends’ opinion, the finest bowman not only in all Loh but in all Kregen. She had thought she was a good shot having been trained up by the Sisters of the Rose, until Seg had given her of his learning and experience and expertise. Seg had trained her to shoot, as he had trained her children. She had no doubt she could feather two of the flutsmen up there before they landed; but the flutsmen would shoot back.

They’d use crossbows.

Delia half-turned.

“Crossbows,” she said. She spoke in that cross way, reflecting her worries, and then instantly hoped the Djangs would not think she was cross with them. Some empresses of Kregen, in this situation, would blame their retainers for any misfortune.

“We will shoot them, majestrix, before they land.”

“Before they shoot us!”

“Aye, majestrix. As you say, before they shoot us.”

The thought of cruel iron bolts punching into the bodies of the Djangs upset Delia. It was bad enough to think of quarrels smashing into the totrixes. In all the marvelous diversity of life on Kregen, Delia joyed in the warmth and variety and very profuseness of life, each one precious. Except, perhaps, for inimical forms who wanted only to rip her up and eat her. Then, of course, she had to harden her heart and see they did no such thing.

Now, and with a heavy heart, she gave her orders.

“Dismount. Make the totrixes lie down. I do not like this; but it is a thing known and done.”

The Djangs knew, had done it, and instantly understood.

Even then, it was nip and tuck.

The flutsmen swept on, the wings of their fluttrells beating with a pulsing rhythm that drove them through the air and sent them diving down at the little party on the sand. The totrixes didn’t mind in the least that they should stop trotting along, and were no doubt highly pleased that they were actually being allowed to lie down. But, being six-legged saddle animals of contrary natures, they wanted to lie down where they wished, and not where their masters intemperately pushed and pulled them.

“Giddown!” rumbled Dalki, hauling a totrix around so that his head jutted over the rump of the one ahead.

“Stay there!” roared Tandu, as his totrix started to lumber up and move to a different place where, it was altogether probable, the sand was much softer and more comfortable.

Delia laughed.

“We must make a comical spectacle!”

“Aye, majestrix. And here come the flutsmen.”

Three bows lifted and three arrowheads snouted up.

The Djangs did not have the Lohvian longbow; but their Djang bows were superb in their own fashion. Shooting at a flatter trajectory their shafts could carry almost as far as those from a longbow, and at shorter ranges they were deadly.

Delia shot in her longbow first.

The leading flutsman, his feather-streaming hair blowing wildly behind him in the wind of his passage, his accoutrements glittering, his tall aerial spear slanted up and aft, screeched. The rose-fletched shaft pierced him through his face. Delia did not stop to congratulate herself on a fortunate shot, for she had aimed at his body, but whipped out the second arrow.

Tandu loosed and then Dalki.

Neither Djang missed.

Five in ten, six in twelve, were gone.

Four crossbow bolts thudded viciously into the sand and two of the totrixes. One animal was killed instantly; the other, screaming, reared to his feet and tried to bolt, and fell over tangled legs all fouled up in his reins. Delia shut her ears to the sounds.

If these reivers of the sky were the same as those who had slain Pansi and Nath the Jokester, then her heart would harden even more. Either way, she shared most of the philosophy which attempted to stop people from killing her.

Her second shot was flailed away by a stupidly flapping wing. Tandu scored no better and Dalki’s arrow skewered into the feathered underside of a fluttrell. The bird toppled forward. His rider went feet-first over the bird’s awkward head vane, hit the sand, and was up, raging.

He was the first to land and whip out his sword, abandoning crossbow and bird, and come racing across the sand toward the three in the meager cover of the saddle animals.

Delia put a shaft clear through his bronze-studded leathers. He stopped running forward, yelling like a demon, waving his sword. He stopped. He stood up, the arrow through him. Then he fell down.

The remaining two flutsmen leaped from their birds in gouts of ochre sand. Their faces, hard, grimed, contorted with fury, bore a vague resemblance to human faces. Delia with those faces before her eyes was in no further doubt or wonder that these two had not flown off when their comrades had died. These flutsmen were driven to kill, they had been using kaff, and they were drugged past all reason. They spat foam and screeched, and rushed.

Delia’s hand lifted to her right shoulder. Her hand, unblemished by a single ring, snapped forward.

The terchick crossed the lessening distance to the first charging man in a blurred streak of steel. The little throwing knife, sharply-pointed, cunningly balanced, left Delia’s hand and sped through empty air and pierced through the right eye of the flutsman. The steel skewered on into his brain. He gyrated for a few foolish moments before he fell down.

The last one barely hesitated — if he hesitated at all — before Tandu’s swords went through him and chopped him, both together.

Dalki said, “You always were greedy, Father. I was about to loose — I could have shot you.”

Tandu roared, and wiped one of his swords in the sand. “My hide would have turned your shot, Dalki!”

“Well, Father, and mayhap. Next time, allow me to get a look in.”

Delia refused to feel faint. After all, what were six dead men more or less in this world of suffering? She was well aware that flutsmen had kissed their families good-bye long before they took up the aerial reiving trade, and the only folk to mourn them would be the members of their own marauding band.

Still, once upon a time, under a certain moon, each one of them had had a mother...

For the sake of Pansi and Nath the Jokester, Delia felt no incongruity in wishing that those mothers had never conceived, or had miscarried, or had drowned their babes in infancy...