I heard a man shouting: "I tell you it is sooth! I saw him. I saw him as he climbed up the side of the flying boat and the moon shone on his face. He wore the red. I would know that devil’s face anywhere, for did he not give me this scar on my own face, these many years ago!"
I halted in the press, at the back, unable to pass through, cursing to get on and yet halted by these words.
"It was the infamous Krozair himself! Pur Dray. The Lord of Strombor! Come back from the dead!" Other men shouted that how could Golitas be sure, and this Golitas with the scarred face bellowed that, by Goyt, he knew the most renowned Krozair of the Eye of the World when he saw him!
This made it more tricky. Golitas must have come in with the king, for he had not been about the camp. Had he been he would no doubt have taken longer to recognize me for the circumstances would have been far less dramatic. I had best place my white scarf about my face again, but my groping fingers encountered nothing where the scarf should be. Of course, I’d lost the damned thing somewhere along the way.
This was bad enough. But then — and I swear I was in so ugly a mood I might have done something I would have regretted for all the thousand years of life vouchsafed me — I heard two voices I just could not believe in, could not, for they were of another life and another place many dwaburs removed from the problems of the inner sea.
The first voice boomed out in a great Numim bellow.
"What a gang of onkers, by Krun! Can’t even guard a voller the empress Thyllis sends out of friendship!"
And the other voice tripped up and down the scale: "This is a wight leem’s-nest, Wees! We can’t walk all the way home, now can we, dear fellow?"
Chapter Fourteen
Rees and Chido!
Incredible. Impossible. But true.
The crowd swayed as guards opened a path through. In the uproar that roaring Numim voice of Rees’s blasted out again. He was upset. He didn’t mind who knew.
But — Rees and Chido! All the way from Ruathytu in distant Hamal, to the Eye of the World. They must have been with the voller. No other explanation was possible. I stood back, no longer pushing forward.
They had not seen me for over twenty years, but I had no doubts that I would be recognized. They’d know me. They’d be as thunderstruck as I was myself.
They’d know me. They’d know me as Hamun ham Farthytu, the amak of Paline Valley. They did not know their friend Hamun whom they had tried to make into a bladesman was the Prince Majister of Vallia.
What thoughts tumbled pell-mell through my dizzy mind! I had stepped back purely involuntarily. The onker Golitas was still babbling on about it being sure that he had recognized the notorious Krozair, the Lord of Strombor, and over that Rees’s lion-roar blattered against my ears.
"By Krun! What a bunch of onkers! Chido, old fellow, this is a right leem’s-nest!" And Chido’s light voice, turning all his R’s into Ws, a mode of speech I seldom attempt to reproduce, saying: "I suppose you can’t blame ’em too much, Rees. If this fellow who stole the voller is as good as they say-"
And a rumble from Rees, indicating to me that he had been learning wisdom in the years separating our last meeting. By Krun! But was I glad to know he and Chido were still alive! After the Battle of Jholaix in which Vallia had smashed the Hamalese Army of the North, anything could have happened to them. Maybe they were even back in the good books of the empress Thyllis. If they were, they were even more of an enemy to Vallia. .
The swirls in the crowd as the closely packed men reformed to let the high dignitaries through pushed me against a wooden post holding a peak of the side wall. I could see past the heads and shoulders of those moving in front. I saw Rees and I saw Chido.
They looked just the same.
Well, of course, twenty-one years made little if any difference to the appearance of a man on Kregen, once he had reached the age of his maturity. They looked great. The flaming golden mane that marked Rees for a Numim, a lion-man, glowed in the lamplight. His broad, powerful lion-face scowled and those tawny eyes caught the light and glittered. And Chido, just the same, popping with excitement, spluttering, his chinless face and pop-eyes bringing back the memories. Dear old Chido!
If they saw me they would call out in huge surprise. What explanations had they thought up to explain away to themselves the vanishment of their comrade and fellow bladesman Hamun?
I caught a quick glimpse of a black-browed fellow with a hard, blocky face beyond Rees. Across this fellow’s features an old scar showed livid as the blood flushed.
This must be Golitas.
If he saw me the next few murs would be exceedingly tricky and complicated. They might be interesting, too.
Maybe, maybe I might have risked it. For if this Golitas hauled out his sword and ran at me, and Rees and Chido saw that, might they not shout in shock and run to stand with me?
They might.
Somehow, I did not think they would.
My shock had been great at seeing them. They might put two and two together. I had plans for Hamal and I wished to preserve my identity as the amak of Paline Valley.
I turned my head away.
Yes, I, Gadak, turned my head away.
A table lay cluttered with cloaks and capes and scarves dropped by the officers and aides as they had entered. A green scarf, snatched up, covered my face. I do not disguise my own feelings of contempt for myself. But much, much more depended on my actions now; my freedom meant more than the freedom that has so often been denied me — it meant getting out of the Eye of the World and back to Delia. That must come first.
There seemed to me to be more than an inkling in my head why these two, Rees and Chido, had come to the inner sea with the voller for King Genod. I guessed they had fancied the adventure, no doubt feeling at a loss in peacetime Hamal. Had Rees’s estates of the Golden Wind all blown away yet? Was he now merely the owner of an empty title? How was Saffi, his daughter, that glorious lion-maiden I had rescued from the Cripples’ Jikai, snatched from the Manhounds of Faol?
The interruption in my progress, the check as the crowd surged back making way, the shock of seeing old comrades again, all conspired to thwart my plans.
Chido gesticulating violently, and Rees stalking on arrogantly, they passed through the crowd and on into the moonlight outside. I roused myself. The idiot Golitas would follow soon. After he had gone, would there be a chance to snatch Gafard and the king? "Ah, Gadak! Just the man!" I whirled about and my hand fell to my longsword. Gafard stared at me, and past me at the others in the canvas-walled anteroom.
"All of you! Out searching! The king is most wrathful. The flying boat has been stolen and stolen by no less than Pur Dray, the great Krozair. Stir yourselves!" He saw the movement of my hand. "Yes, Gadak. It is a time for swords — but only when we find the flying boat"
"Yes, gernu."
How easily I slipped into the ways of Grodnim that had encompassed me these past months!
My prime responsibility was to Delia. I had to get out of the inner sea and back to her. I had to get back alive, for she had warned me, long and long ago, that she would be cross with me if I got myself killed. Beside her anger at that kind of foolishness on my part, the anger of King Genod over the loss of his voller was as the mewling of an infant.
There were many men, both apim and diff, in the anteroom of the king’s tent. A guard party of bowmen stood with bows held up and arrows nocked, a part and parcel of the king’s security. Word that the Lord of Strombor had been seen was enough to make every man stand to arms and tremble, sweating in anticipation.
The events that had taken place since I had bluffed my way in here to hear Rees’s great Numim bellow to the moment when Gafard ordered me to join the search had taken practically no time at all. Words and thoughts and actions had tumbled one over the other.