With a convulsive snatch I managed to get my dagger out and into play. That made two blades against three. But this Kildoi was a master bladesman. The swords wove their deceptive patterns of steel. He knew every trick I essayed. He showed me three or four I’d never come across and only by desperate efforts I managed to escape, and even then I believe he let me, for the fun of it. Once a swordsman sees a trick he knows it — as I have said — otherwise he is dead.
I learned.
But I knew that he knew more than I did. And, all the time, his two left arms poised prettily and the hands hung gracefully. If he wished, he could bring two more blades into the fight. Well, to take some ludicrous credit, after a space he hauled out a short sword with his upper left hand, and pressed me. I knew now I was fighting for my life and any thought of merely hitting him over the head was long flown. I rallied and fought back, and the swords clashed and clanged, and then, and I saw the fact as proof of something and as a final death warrant, his lower left fist pulled out a long dagger. So now he had five weapons against my two, and some of the smile was gone from his handsome face with the golden beard blowing.
Could Korero, I wondered, fight like this?
I’d have to see when I got back to Vallia.
And then… The truth was I wasn’t going to get back to Vallia… Not after Prince Mefto the Kazzur had finished with me.
As some fighting men do, he talked as he battled.
“You are good, paktun, very good. I would love to talk to you about your victories, your instructors. But I am a prince and I do not tolerate your kind of conduct.”
He cut me about the left shoulder and I swirled away and then used a risky attack to land a hit on his left shoulder. I saw the blood there, a smear in the light. We both wore light tunics, having doffed our armor. His face went mean.
“You think, you rast, you can better me? Me, Mefto the Kazzur, who fought his way to a princedom over the bodies of his foes? Fool!”
Well, yes, I was a fool, right enough.
I hit him again, a glancing blow across his face and severed a chunk of his beard. Those two hits were the only ones I scored.
He pinked me again and I slid two of his blades and a third and fourth chunked a gouge out of my right side.
He was beginning to enjoy himself.
He didn’t like the cut on his face. I hoped it left an ugly scar, the rast. Swordsmen have their little foibles. He had me in his toils, right enough. But as we fought and I tried the old trick of dismembering him piecemeal, being unable to finish him with a body thrust, I began to pick up hints as to his favored techniques. The trouble was, it was not just that he had five blades, or that his technique was well-nigh perfect, but that he was just supremely good. He was not quite as fast as me; had he been I’d have been stretched lifeless by now.
So I began to work out a last desperate gamble that would break all the rules and would make or break. Truth to tell, I had little real hope. The moment I began the passage I fancied he would detect instantly the attack and know the correct counter. But desperate situations demand desperate remedies. I was bleeding profusely now; but all the cuts were shallow and I knew he but toyed with me. He was chattering away as we fought.
“I joy in this contest, paktun! By the Blade of Kurin! You are indeed a master bladesman.”
Maybe — but I was like to be a dead bladesman, master or not…
With a sudden and ferocious passade he began an attack aimed at slicing off my left ear — I think. I defended desperately, and gave ground, and faintly I heard screams and guessed Sishi and Pompino were riveted by this spectacle.
Time for the last great gamble… I positioned myself and a long arrow abruptly sprouted from Mefto’s right shoulder, between those cunningly swiveled double joints.
He screamed.
He fell back, screeching, and he dropped all his weapons.
Another arrow hissed past my head and went thwunk into the painted wood of Scatulo’s carriage. Without a thought I dropped flat and dived under the coach.
Well — yes.
The drikingers had played us and now they drove in to finish us completely and steal all we had. Logic indicated they had chosen their time well. We were at rest, we were short of water, we were tired and apprehensive, and we ought all to have been asleep but for the sentries, and they, poor devils, would no doubt be sprawled with slit throats. The fight had given the bandits pause and some intemperate hothead had loosed at us and so the alarm was raised.
The drikingers were blessed by me, then, I can tell you.
And, to be honest and all the same — that second arrow would have pinned me but for the instinctive move I’d made when the first one shafted Mefto. Speed — that was all I had as advantage over Mefto, and it was speed of reaction that in the end had saved me.
The caravan roused and the paktuns turned out and Bevon took up his sword from Master Scatulo’s carriage and we fought.
The fight was savage and unpleasant with much carving up of leathery hides and stripping of bright feathers; but at last we drove the drikingers off and collapsed, exhausted. These skirling events were just those I had been missing as emperor in Vallia… How far removed this brisk little encounter was from the ordered and planned evolutions of the Phalanx!
But, death attended both in equal measure.
In the morning we buried our dead or cremated those whose religious convictions demanded that ingress to the Ice Floes of Sicce. Various gods were apostrophized for good fortune for the ibs of the departed. As for the drikingers, we found only three of them, twisted in death by the wagon wheels, and these, too, we buried. They had been lean hardy men, apims, with leathery skins and ferocious bunches of hair dyed purple, and with scraps of armor looted from previous caravans. Of the other bandit dead, they had been all carried off by their comrades.
So, groaning and protesting, the caravan moved off and safely reached the water hole and from then on the journey across the Desolate Waste proceeded as such a journey should — filled with alarums and excursions but with a happy arrival at the end.
The country opened out and grew fat and rich once we crossed the River of Purple Rushes. There was a ford and a strong fort and parties of warriors of Aidrin to escort us in. They greeted us in jocular mood, making light of our problems, telling us of the troubles that previous unfortunate caravans had endured. There were caravans that set out from Songaslad, the town of thieves, that never reached the River of Purple Rushes. White and yellow bones scattered over the Desolate Waste marked their endings. From the fort by the ford, Prince Mefto was carried swiftly ahead of us, with his men, to Jikaida City. He left the caravan. He had not spoken to me and was reputed badly injured — and at the time I suspected that an arrow in the cunning double-joint had done more harm than it would do to a fellow with only two arms to fight with. I had kept a strict watch for revenge; but nothing transpired. What honor code he followed, if any, I did not know. But I had the strongest — and nastiest — suspicion that I had not heard the last of Prince Mefto the Kazzur.
If I do not dwell overmuch on my reactions to that fight I think you will respect that. I had had a shock, all right; and, too, I had grown in understanding. In future, fights would not be quite the same again; but I fancied I knew enough of Dray Prescot to guess what he would do. One is as one is, and like the Scorpion, must hew to nature’s path.
The Wizard of Loh, Deb-Lu Quienyin, was overjoyed to have reached his destination safely.
“I shall seek out San Orien at once. He, I feel sure, I hope, will be able to cure me — to retrieve my powers.”
Saying remberee to him I brought up the subject I had been harboring for long. “I am confident he will do everything he can to aid you, San. Tell me, do you know of a Wizard of Loh called Phu-Si-Yantong?”