“You speak too hard of the men of iron,” Blatt said. The wine was warming him to the conversation, recalling pleasanter times he had been in the tavern. He lifted a blue-tinted blown goblet, the kind which gave the place its name, and drank deeply. “They do nothing but fight, true, yet I think Jikar would never have been free if there were not the marshlands to our east. It was our curse that the iron men died in plague, their strongholds fell, and hordes swept past. Before that we had only to fight the few raiders who passed the great houses like thieves in the night. When their full force fell on us we knew it.”
“Knew it and won!” Hoorn shouted. “Ah, Trader, had you seen it. Our young men, the sailors from our fleet and the boys of the Guilds, standing with pikes leveled, never giving ground, while the barbarians dashed themselves against us. Glory to the Lord, the field was red with their blood. We took a hundred horses and many ayuks for our own.” Evidently horses and cattle had been brought to Makassar by the Old Empire. Now both ran wild across the plains, hunted by local predators unless protected by men, but managing to survive.
Some of the barbarians also rode the ayuk, a native beast which resembled a moose with long, semi-prehensile claws and an elongated prehensile snout. It lived on the hive-rat, warmblooded egglayers about seven inches long which lived in great colonies with only a few retaining active sexual powers. The hive-rat was one of the most dangerous creatures on Makassar, although it was not carnivorous. It ate the stone-hard local woods with ease, burrowed in the ground, and found any plant life edible by humans quite nourishing. It would fight when trapped, and when one was wounded, hundreds of them came to its aid in blind fury. More than one man had died through being caught by them in the open.
“A great victory.” Blatt nodded. “One which Master Hoorn could tell you more of, for he commanded for the Guilds that day. Aye, we broke them, but we could not pursue them. Most escaped. Had we forty of the mounted iron men to give chase, the victory would have kept the barbarians from our gates for a hundred years.”
“Ah.” Hoorn drank again. Then he smiled and shrugged. “We can agree the warriors know how to fight. Yet I have in my day seen them turned back from the gates of a city like ours. In open battle. The young men stood to their pikes, and the iron men Master Blatt is so fond of split about them on both sides, afraid to attack. They took no tribute from that city.” As Hoorn finished, a young man, dark of hair and tall for Makassar, once quite muscular but now thin like the others, strode arrogantly across the room, his head high in contrast to the locals MacKinnie had seen. He could have been twenty-five
Earth years, but he looked younger, and his clothes were subtly different. His trousers were of the rough-texture cloth worn by the villagers, but the jacket and cloak were of finer stuff, and Nathan noted that there were discolored lines at the collar, as if it had once been trimmed with something now lost. He recalled that cloth-of-gold collars and bands were the marks of the Guildmasters.
The tavern keeper gave the newcomer the glass of cheap wine and thick slice of bread which he served to all daily in lieu of his tithe to the church. The man began to eat without speaking to anyone.
“That’s who you should talk to,” Hoorn told MacKinnie. “We should send for him. If there is a man in Jikar who can tell you what you’ll find beyond the river and forest, Brett can. Or that warrior friend of his.”
“Who is he?” MacKinnie asked.
“His name is Brett,” Hoorn said. He lowered his voice. “He is said to have come from far away, some say the eastern coast. He comes carrying tales and songs, and will not discuss his ancestry. As for me, I believe he was born a barbarian.”
“Yet he speaks many civilized tongues,” Master Blatt said.
“Aye.” Hoorn pursed his lips in thought. “The barbarians do not come here often, so it is a thing not done here. But I am told that in parts where the plains riders are more common, the townsfolk often capture young plainsmen and keep them as slaves.”
“And you think Brett was one of those?” MacKinnie asked.
“It is possible,” Blatt said. “Although I do not envy anyone who would be master to the singer. I would rather have him as a friend.”
“Aye,” Hoorn agreed. “There have been other singers in Jikar, but none came as Brett. Most are on foot, but Brett rides a great war-horse, and has for companion one of the iron men with armor and lance and sword. Vanjynk his name is. He was driven from his lands to the south and now wanders as Brett to sell his abilities to any purchaser.”
A wandering mercenary, MacKinnie thought. As I once was.
MacKinnie studied the dark features of the man in question and approved. He might be down on his luck, Nathan thought, but he wasn’t defeated. Despite his youth he was more akin to the Guildmasters than the tavern loafers. “Call him over,” he said in a moment of decision.
“Singer,” Hoorn called. “At your pleasure, join us. Our noble friend is a willing host.”
The singer came to the table and bowed as Hoorn performed introductions.
“I am told you know of faraway lands,” MacKinnie said. He poured a glass of wine and pushed it toward Brett. “If you have the time, perhaps you can tell me of your travels.”
Brett made a wry face. “I have little but time.” He drained his wineglass at a gulp.
“You do not travel alone, singer?” MacKinnie asked, pouring more wine.
“Not for a yir. I teach Vanjynk poetry, he teaches me to fight. Now we are both good at both trades and the living is better.” He stared ruefully about the tavern. “Or was. But we will not leave our bones here for Master Blatt to put to earth.”
“You would like to leave Jikar, then?” MacKinnie asked.
“Trader, we would pay the man who allowed us to fight for him, be it only that he had sufficient men to cut through the maris. But the maris will stay until they have eaten and burned everything they can find, and as they are not so stupid as the Guilds hope, that will not be before the snows. Then they will leave. At that they will bring you a blessing, Guildmasters.”
“What blessing could a horde of barbarians — maris, you called them? — what blessing can they bring?” Blatt stood, his wide shoulders almost blotting out the youngerman, his great hands, hardened with brine and tanners’ liquor, on his hips.
“Calmly, calmly, you will alarm our host and the wine will stop,” Brett said softly. There was a hint of threat to the voice, a tone one did not take with Guildmasters. “I call them maris because that is what they call themselves. And the blessing is the destruction of the hive-rats. There will be few enough of them when they move on — in fact, that is why they will move on. The ayuks must eat many of them, which keeps the maris moving about the great plains. When the ayuks don’t eat, the maris don’t eat. Even here they’ll finish off all your Earth crops before the ayuks are done with the hive-rats.”
MacKinnie listened with interest. “The maris live off their ayuks?”
Brett looked at him in puzzlement. “Your speech is unlike any that I have heard in any land,” he commented. “Yet you are not native here, where the maris have not been. Where have you lived that you don’t know about them? Ah, the cities of the mountains of the north. Well, know, northman, that the plantain of the great flatland is as poisonous to us as most of the other plants on Makassar. It must be true, as the priests say, we came here from another star long ago, else why would God have put us where we cannot eat? But the ayuk can eat the plants, and men can eat the ayuk, and drink her milk, and, even as the maris do, drink the blood of their steeds. Their horses fare better, eating grasses which grow among the plantain, and some maris live from their horses alone, but the ayuk is better. It is not enough, though. Fed nothing else, they waste and die, even as these men here. In your north, you can eat the tallgrass, which they say came from Earth, and you eat the grotka. But did you eat nothing but grotka, and the swimmers from the sea, you would die also.”