Mazes of Scorpio (12 page)

“Oh, oh, by Beng Sbodine, the Mender of Men! I am dying! My lungs burn—”

“A sip of wine, master—”

The woman in some magical way while brandishing the sprig of lapinal produced a spouted wine jug. This the man seized and upended and glug-glugged. We could see his nose was of a splendid size and proportion, a ripe glowing plum color. His whole face partook of pleasure, ripe cheeks, full lips, merry eyes, now squeezed shut as he drank. He enjoyed the good things of life, did this one.

As for the woman, fussing over him, she was not slave, for she wore a decent blue gown, with a bronze-link belt, and the comb in her long dark hair glittered. Her face held a look that might take many years to fathom, and then, when you had descried what she thought, you would be back with your first impressions of half-humorous but dedicated service to the man. And to say she fussed is to do her a disservice. She handled the man well, insuring that what he called for in the way of medicaments and wine and comfort was instantly available.

After he regained his composure, he said, “Why do I risk my health by venturing out here when the rains fall?”

He shivered. Then he said, and his voice no longer whined, “Strom Ornol, it seems you have no use for these two men, therefore I shall take them on.”

The noise of the rain on the roof had not ceased all during this farcical scene. Now, in the silence after the words spoken by the man whose glowing nose was once more concealed by the yellow kerchief, the rain beat down. To a fainthearted soul that thunderous rolling barrage might well have sounded like the knell of doom.

“They are of no concern of mine, save that they must be punished for striking my servants.”

Seg started to boil up at this, and I put a hand on his forearm. He lowered the bow. The yellow kerchief twitched, so the man had witnessed that little byplay.

“As they are now in my employ, I would not take kindly to their punishment by another hand.”

The young lord, pale-faced rigidity personified, reacted in a way that half-surprised me. I fancied I had some, at least, of this particular relationship worked out.

“Very well, Exandu. The matter does not touch my honor. Just see they are punished.”

“But, Ornol—” said the Lady Ilsa.

Strom Ornol took her arm. It was a familiar gesture.

“It is a nothing. And you should not have embroiled yourself with the lower orders. Come inside.”

I bent down and helped heave Hop the Intemperate to his feet. He rubbed his chin through the hair, and winced.

“You have a fist, dom,” he said.

“You have my apologies, Hop. The blow was unexpected. Otherwise you would never have — ah — fallen down.”

He rubbed again and shook his head.

“As to that, I am not sure.”

So, you see, somewhere along the way the world had turned and I could use the words “I apologize” to someone other than Delia. A thought worth ruminating on, that...

Exandu sneezed again, and the woman went through the pantomime, and the spluttering volcano subsided. He blew his nose, hard, and sniffed, and wiped his eyes.

“Here am I like to catch my death, and all because of two rascally paktuns. Well, Hop, see to them, there’s a good fellow. I must find a warm corner and a potion. Shanli! I shall need a double potion of your Special Blood Warming Lightning. As Beng Sbodine, Mender of Men, has turned his face away from me!”

“Now, now, master,” soothed Shanli, taking his arm with one hand and waving the aromatic smoldering sprig of lapinal under his nose with the other. “I shall take care of you. I have a warm shirt in the oven, and Old Mother Babli’s hot honey punch, with three measures of Harnafon’s Fortified—”

“Three measures! Shanli, you do look after me. You are a treasure.”

They walked off, and Hop wheezed and sniffed, and rubbed the hair over his chin, and jerked a thumb.

“Come on. If master Exandu wants to take you on, you’re in luck.”

We disentangled the two Gons, and helped them on their way inside. Their uniforms were of the grand style, with many dangling ribbons and straps, and, somehow, Hop wound up with a goodly length of gilt wire in his fist.

Seg laughed.

“A boon comrade, I swear it!”

“Maybe. You’d do best to keep a watchful eye on that lord. Strom Ornol.” Hop looked about. “A right nasty package, that one, due for the unraveling one fine day.”

“All the same,” said Seg to me as we started off along the stoop after Hop. “All the same, we strolled along here to join the expedition, not to be hired on as paktun guards.”

“So we’re in luck. We go along — and we get paid—”

Seg’s look would have melted down the finest gold coin in all of Kregen. “You’re a mercenary hulu, you really are—”

“We’ve both been slave, we’ve both been paktuns, we’ve both been hungry and thirsty — and we’ve both been fine lords. You take what comes.”

“That’s right, by Vox!”

“And if you can nudge fate along a little bit—”

“All the same,” said Seg, cutting in, having thought this thing through. “Fine lords, you say. We’ve been fine lords, and we still are! And, you’re—”

“Yes. But it will surely suit our purpose better to be simple paktuns hiring out to guard this expedition? Surely?”

Seg sniffed. “Going along as minions? Very well. As you say, we take what comes.”

So, into the back entrance of The Dragon’s Roost we went to join up with the brave expedition venturing into the jungle-choked slopes of the Snarly Hills.

Chapter eleven

Of Another Fist

The smells of cooking wafted deliciously from the back quarters of The Dragon’s Roost. The scurry of slaves intruded an unpleasant note into an idyllic scene; but all in Opaz’s good time we would remove the blot of slavery from Paz. We followed Hop the Intemperate through a room stuffed with sacks and boxes of food and hanging garlands of vegetables, and along a corridor. The kitchens lay ahead, and my mouth watered.

Hop opened the door and motioned for us to go through.

Seg went first.

I followed.

As I turned to look back for Hop an object of considerable hardness, some size, of rugged knobbyness and traveling at a goodly speed slap-bang-crashed into my chin.

I went over backwards, upsetting a pile of copper pots.

Girls started screaming. Steam filled the air. I sat up on the floor in a lake of half-cooked cabbages and stared at Hop.

He stood just inside the door, rubbing the knuckles of his right fist. He looked — through the hair — mighty pleased.

“That, I think, makes us even.”

I moved my jaw. My eyes watered. I did not shake my head. My chin had click-clicked twice under each ear as I moved it.

“You, Hop the Intemperate,” I said. “Have a fist, also.”

“Aye.”

Seg said, “It is just as well this is all friendly, for you should know, Hop the Rash, your insides would have been strewn across the floor for the cooks to inspect, had I so wished.”

That, for Seg, was a long speech.

Hop chuckled.

“You are no paktuns, wandering for hire. I heard from mistress Tlima but did not realize at first. You are rip-roaring lords out for adventure, and I own to some simple pleasure in feeling the tingle in my knuckles.”

So that settled all our devious schemes to hire on.

We were accepted into the expedition as members. The unpleasant Strom Ornol had to acquiesce in the wishes of the majority, otherwise he would have been out of the expedition. Exandu expressed sorrow that he had not hired on two fine upstanding rogues to protect him, for, as he said between sneezes and sniffs at the aromatic fumes, and swigs of herbal and honey concoctions: “I am not long for this world. My bones are too frail to support my body, and my poor old heart strains to keep me alive. Why do I venture into so rash an undertaking?”

Privately, Hop said to Seg in a whisper, “The old fraud is after the gold and jewels, that’s why.”

We were introduced to the other members of the party. The spoils were to be divided into six. Seg and I now came into one share. Strom Ornol and his retinue, including the lady Ilsa, would take another. Exandu would gasp and wheeze, no doubt, while pocketing his share.

When we sat around the circular table in the window alcove corner of The Dragon’s Roost, bottles and jugs nestling on the polished sturm wood, Kalu Na-Fre wrapped his tail hand around his flagon. Before lifting it to his lips, he picked up a single paline from the dish in each of his two left hands. These he popped, and chewed with relish and then the tail hand brought the flagon to his lips. With his right hand he pointed to the map, opened among the litter of bottles.

He took the flagon away and said, “The distance is not great as the fluttrell flies.”

Strom Ornol, pale-faced as ever, showed his disgust.

“You are in Pandahem now, Kalu Na-Fre.”

The Pachak popped two more palines with his two left hands. The right hand described circles on the map.

“My point precisely.”

“It,” said Exandu plaintively, “will prove a sore trial for my poor old bones.”

The Pachak, Kalu Na-Fre, brushed back his long yellow hair. He used one of his left hands and his right. Before their movements were finished his right-handed tail hand lifted the flagon. These wonderful folk of Kregen with more than an apim’s miserable allotment of two arms and two legs must, it is clear, be endowed with lobes in their brains that enable them to coordinate their intricate movements. As for the cunning interlocking shoulder jointing, these are marvels of bio-engineering, in all the different systems found in Kildoi, Pachak, Djang and all the others.

“You do not have a suggestion, then, Kalu?”

“Only that we will have to walk once the animals can go no farther.”

Exandu sniffed and consoled himself with a swig of Mother Babli’s Home Brew, strongly laced, I fancied, with an expensive wine.

Kalu Na-Fre and his people would come in for their sixth share.

Any puzzlement we might have had that the booty was to be split six ways between the principals, despite the numbers of people they brought as minions, was resolved, at least in my mind, by what I surmised of the relationships here. Strom Ornol, a feckless younger son of a noble house, had been kicked out by his father to make his own way in the world. He was up past his ears in debt to Exandu.

Seg and I had put in our contribution in good Hamalian golden deldys. That currency was well-known down in the south of Pandahem, very well known. We made it crystal clear that we were not Hamalese, and backed that by our appearance as adventurers out in the world and no longer owning allegiance to any one nation.

Over in a corner the patrons of The Dragon’s Roost were playing dice. The game was Soshiv and the click of the ivory cubes rattled as a background to our decisions. Soshiv — the word is one of the common ways of expressing the number eighteen — so times shiv, three times six — entails using six dice each per player. Three are thrown, the highest total being eighteen, and then the opposing players take their turns to throw against point. There are complicated betting arrangements and conventions ordering the reading of the dice. The click click and the calls as the numbers fell accompanied our deliberations as we prepared for the expedition.

Skort, the fifth member of the party, said very little. As a Clawsang he was well aware that his appearance could so unsettle and upset some people that at best they would be sick and at worst — well, Skort the Clawsang wore armor and carried weapons.

As for myself, and Seg also, as I knew, Clawsangs were merely another form of human life in the world. If you imagined that their skull-like faces, covered with a tightly stretched pebbly skin of grey and green granulated texture, blunt of jaw, the roots of the teeth exposed, the nostrils mere sunken slits, the eyes, overhung by bony projections, of a smoky crimson, if, then, you imagined this face emerging from a freshly opened grave, you could be pardoned for the thought, unworthy though it was. It was not the Clawsangs’ fault they looked as though they were decomposing.

Mind you, even the stoutest hearts might flinch if they bumped into a Clawsang on a pitch-black night of Notor Zan with only the erratic illumination of a torch to pick out the rotting teeth and the decomposed nose and the glaring crimson eyes...

Yet Skort was not ashamed of his appearance. Why should he be? This was the way the gods had fashioned him. Perhaps he found the jolliness of a full-fleshed ruddy countenance as offensive to him; a bloated bladder of blood.

The Clawsang’s voice sounded like the rustle of bat wings from a Herrelldrin Hell as he spoke. He did so infrequently. He kept his weapons handy about him. His people maintained a sharp lookout.

Skort said, “We must march. Why do we hesitate?”

The lady Ilsa could not bear to look on Skort. Strom Ornol, over his shoulder, said, “We wait for the sorcerer.”

“And if he is not here soon,” said Exandu, “I shall retire to bed. I feel faint, and I am sure I have an infection in my right ear. I can hardly hear that side.”

The business of the tavern went on, and ale was quaffed and the dice players threw and presently a girl came in to dance. She was a Sybli, and lusciously beautiful in a vapid way, and when she had finished a handful of copper was thrown, and one or two silver pieces. She picked them up gracefully and departed, and the ale went around again.

The local brew, made from plants tended with loving care, was a fine straw-yellow, very clear, not over strong, an ale made for quenching the thirst and not for fighting on.

Had this part of the forested area of Pandahem lent itself to hops production as I knew it, the brew would have been improved considerably. As it was, Seg and I drank a little, and talked, and sized up the people of the party with whom we would soon be risking our lives.

As Seg, speaking quietly behind his ale jug, said, “I judge the Clawsang to be a fighter, and the Pachak, clearly. This Strom Ornol could be useful if he is not wounded. Exandu?”

“He really believes he can catch all the illnesses sent by all the devils there are. But he looks healthy enough.”