At one time ships from Ng’groga used to call regularly at Djanguraj. The first time I had seen one of the tall, fair-haired Ng’grogans I had jumped forward with joy, expecting to find Inch; and then sober sense returned. Here in Djanguraj we were a mere three hundred or so dwaburs almost due south from Ng’groga. But the ships, simple single-decked brig-rigged craft, seldom reached in past the pharos of Port Djanguraj now.
The days of my enforced imprisonment limped past. And each day it seemed to me the state of the country worsened. If the army suffered a reverse now, Djan Himself knew what would happen. The Lady Lara Kholin Domon still wrestled me and one day, so occupied was I with my miserable thoughts, I forgot what I was doing, and caught two of her wrists. I twisted and pulled and sent her flying beautifully through the air to land with an almighty thump upon the mat. Three of her hands punched down to spring her back to her feet while the fourth rubbed her bottom, and then I was on her and tying her in knots and pressed my foot on her windpipe.
She glared up in a fury, and so, remembering, I let my foot slip and then she was on me like a leem and belted me down until I yelled quarter.
Even the zorca races were poorly attended, the lavish hippodrome, which they call merezo on Kregen, sparsely filled and the bets poor.
Lara had introduced me to her cousin, Felder Kholin Mindner, who was a Jiktar of the aerial forces and therefore as highly placed as a Djang had any right to expect in the military services. He had been wounded in an affray and was home convalescing. What he told me of the army convinced me that if the emergency at home was not speedily ended, then the army would simply march on the capital and compel some sense into the politicians. What that would do as regards the Gorgrendrin situation was not something any Djang would wish to contemplate.
There were few fliers in Djanduin, but the Djanduin Air Service, being manned by Djangs, was as smart and efficient as any other. Felder Kholin Minder was a Jiktar of the flyers,[3]riding a saddle-bird peculiar to Djanduin, called a flutduin, a powerful bird with wide yellow wings and a vicious, deadly black beak. We discussed the military situation; but he burst out with the usual realistic Djang observation: “May all the devils in a Herrelldrin hell take me if I understand strategy, Notor Prescot! How Chuktar Naghan does it I’ll never know. But he peers down at his maps and he measures up with his ruler, and walks his dividers across, and then he thinks, and then, by Djan! we’re all flying off helter-skelter and, as neat as you like, there are the Opaz-forsaken rasts of Gorgrens all lined up ready for us to belt into! I tell you, Notor Prescot, these Obdjangs are powerful clever fellows!”
“Both races of Djanduin get along well,” I said. “I feel it a great shame that the country suffers so. If you Djangs accept the Obdjangs, as they accept you-”
“Absolutely right, Notor Prescot! We do and they do!”
“-then it seems that Kov Nath Jagdur is a mischievous man.”
“I’d like to see him in the Ice Floes of Sicce!”
The use of the name Djang for either of the two peoples is quite correct; the little gerbil-faced fellows are often called Obdjangs. Very seldom are the four-armed warriors called Dwadjangs, which is a name to which they are entitled.
Eventually I came to find out why I had not come across a crossbow when I had rifled through the dead outside the inn on the occasion I had arrived in Djanduin. The Djangs use the curved compound reflex bow, a very similar weapon to those used by my clansmen and by my archers of Valka. The crossbow is a weapon they manufacture; not well, and they generally import examples for their crossbow regiments. So an arbalest is one of the first weapons a Djang soldier will snatch up on the scene of battle. We went swimming in a scented indoor pool and Lara’s parents joined us, laughing and splashing. I was invited to stay for supper, an invitation I accepted with alacrity, for although I had a sufficiency of money I had no influence, and the Kholins had both, and so could secure supplies. We were halfway through an extremely fine meal, although Lara’s father, Vad Larghos, would keep apologizing for the meanness of his table, and her mother, a woman still beautiful with her coppery hair bound with silver moon-bloom petals, kept throwing him reproachful glances as though the emergency and lack of the usual abundance of food were all his fault, when the majordomo announced a messenger.
“For the Notor Prescot, Lord of Strombor!” he boomed out.
Dolar stumbled in. His gray trousers, his dark blue cloak, the shirt visible beneath his lorica, were hideously splashed with blood. He looked exhausted. We all leaped up and I pressed a golden cup of wine into his hands. He drank like a leem.
“The Pallan!” he cried out, when he could get his breath. Then, remembering his manners, he said:
“Lahal, Notor Prescot. The master and mistress! They send for you. Chuktar Naghan Rumferling is dead, assassinated, and they need all loyal help.”
CHAPTER NINE
Wild alarums and excursions and mad dashes through the night sky of Kregen, well, they have been a pretty constant part of my life on that beautiful yet terrible world. The Maiden with the Many Smiles floated high above us as we saddled up, strapping the clerketers tightly over our flying silks and leathers, and sent the flutduins lunging into the air.
Chuktar Naghan Rumferling, who was now dead, had been visiting a base camp at Cafresmot, halfway to the Mountains of Mirth. Pallan Coper and his wife had visited him there; I wondered, as I stretched forward along the neck of the giant flying bird and battled through the rushing air, if that visit had to do with a kingly crown and throne.
Pink moonlight washed over the steadily beating wings of the flutduins, and their sharp black beaks jutted forth ready, it seemed, to impale any obstruction. We flew on, with a steady remorseless wing-beat to lull us into a false sense of security. Wounded though he was, although much recovered, Felder Mindner had insisted on coming with us. Lara, too, had borne down all opposition, and her father, the Vad, had thereupon announced that he valued Naghan Rumferling highly, and the Pallan Coper, also, and would come with us, Nundji take him if he didn’t!
Dolar, the faithful servant to Coper, in his turn hadinsisted on rousing the other loyal friends he had been bidden to summon. Much of the blood spattering him, dried and caked as it was from his flight from the Mountains of Mirth, was not his own. He had merely said, “They would have prevented me leaving, Vad,” when Vad Larghos questioned him.
Truly, the Djangs have thews of iron and a simplistic view of life!
So we knew there were others in the sky this night, outward bound for the base camp of the army of the east.
If the Gorgrens got wind of this night’s doings, and decided to attack, who would there be capable of reading their plans and scheming to defeat them? So many of the Obdjangs had been slaughtered by this maniac, Kov Nath Jagdur, that the High Command was decidedly thin on the ground — or in the air. Cafresmot stood a good long way from the fighting front, the Mountains of Mirth rise something like halfway between the Yawfi Suth and Djanguraj and have in the past proved the final insurmountable obstacle to armies invading from the east. That is why they are called what they are. How many and many a time, so I had been told with a chuckle, had proud and confident armies burst through one of the tortuous routes around the Yawfi Suth or the Wendwath and marched through Eastern Djanduin, full of hopes of easy conquest and glory now they had broken into the country. And then, they had seen rising before them the sharp and narrow peaks of a mountain range that extended north and south and curved in a bow that faced them. Not overly grand or full of hauteur, the Mountains of Mirth, standing no comparison whatsoever with The Stratemsk, and yet many and many a time they halted enemy invasions in relatively poor country, and turned them back. The shock had proved disastrous to many armies, not least the Gorgrens on the single long-ago occasion when they had managed to reach the mountains; and the men of Djanduin had roared their merriment.