He grunted and lurched forward and his rapier skewered the floorboards as he smashed on past, the blade vibrating backward and forward and the hilt seesawing like an upside down metronome. As though hypnotized by that rhythmic motion I went to my knees, toppled slowly forward, and so came to rest beside the leem-hunter — and all of Kregen fell on me in blackness.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tilda would not tell anyone — not even me — any other name by which she might be known in Pandahem. Tilda was her professional name, her stage name, and by it she had become famous. What personal tragedy lay as the cause of her moldering, as I termed it, here in a distant colonial port city she also would not reveal. I gathered this had something to do with her husband, and of him all she would say was that he had married her against the wishes of his family. As a soldier he had been posted to Pa Mejab and, leading his squadron one day, had been slain.
She was fanatically proud and possessive of Pando, who was, as you have seen, an engaging imp of a rascal. She fretted continually over his safety and welfare, constantly chiding him for not wearing enough clothes, for not eating enough, for fighting the other children thronging the busy streets. But, in all this, she never lost sight with a clearheaded practicality that Pando was the son of a soldier, that she must look to him one day, and that he must develop as a man.
I confess that I grew to a better liking for both of them with each day that passed. My room at The Red Leem had always a vase of colorful flowers, and the sheets and sleeping furs were changed with hygienic regularity. Old Nath, the landlord, recovered of the knock on the head, consented to allowing me a reduced rent when I went on the guard duties by which, perforce, I earned my daily crust. He was only too well aware of the business Tilda brought into his inn. In the evening when she sang and danced, when she gave recitals of the great parts in Kregen drama, tragediennes and comediennes, performances so moving in both cases that they brought tears to the eyes of her audiences, rapt in silent admiration, Pando and I would sit companionably together and listen.
Pando, at nine years old, had the most fanatical admiration for his beautiful mother. For, as I have said, Tilda was a beauty with her ivory skin and ebony hair, all swirling and glowing, with her firm figure that had no need of the theater’s contrivances to drive men’s blood singing through their veins. Her violet eyes and her voluptuous mouth could melt with passion, could become stern and regal, could blast all a man’s hopes, could urge him to fire and ardor and unthinking gallantry — and all this on the tiny scrap of stage mounted at the far end of the main room of The Red Leem!
Pando is a familiar name for children of Pandahem, the great rival trading island to Vallia. It was only on the second day of my stint as a caravan guard that he was discovered hiding among the calsany drovers. The overseer, a tough and chunky man with a cummerbund swathing the results of many a night at The Red Leem, and, probably, all the other inns and taverns of Pa Mejab, hauled Pando out by an ear and ran him up to me where I strode along on the left flank of the leading flight of calsanys.
“Dray!” roared the overseer, one Naghan the Paunch. “Dray Prescot! Look what has dropped with the nits from the hides of the calsanys!”
I sighed and stared at Pando with a greatly feigned air of complete despair.
“We have no room for passengers, Naghan. Therefore he must either be slain at once, or sent back alone — or-?” I cocked an eye at Naghan the Paunch.
He pondered deeply. “To slay him now would probably be best, for he would never reach Pa Mejab against the leems and the wlachoffs who would rend the flesh from his bones and devour him until not a morsel was left.”
Pando, squirming against the brown hand that held his ear in so tight a grip, looked up, and the whites of his eyes showed.
“You wouldn’t do that to me, Dray! What would Mother say?”
“Ah!” said Naghan the Paunch, enjoying himself. “Poor dear Tilda the Beautiful! Tilda of the Many Veils! How she will grieve for this limb of Sicce himself!”
“Dray!” yelped Pando.
I rubbed my beard. “On the other hand, Naghan, Pando did run with his dagger to protect Tilda the Beautiful when she was attacked by leem-hunters. If he could do that, might he not thus also attack the leems themselves?”
Naghan twisted the trapped ear. “Have you a dagger, boy?”
Pando was thoroughly aroused now. He tried to kick Naghan. “Had I a dagger, oh man of the Paunch, I would have stuck you with it long before this!”
“Oho!” quoth Naghan the Paunch, and laughed.
And I laughed, and so — I, Dray Prescot, laughing! — because we could not send Pando back across that dangerous land we had perforce to take him with us. He was a bright lad, full of wiles and mischievousness, and yet with an endearing streak of pleasant loyalty and quickness of wits, and a readiness to learn that I knew would stand him in good stead on Kregen, where a man must be a man if he wishes to survive.
His greatest vice was his inveterate untidiness. Nothing he touched could be found in the same condition, and even to enter his tiny cubicle-like room in The Red Leem was usually impossible for the chaos strewing every surface and the floor, unless one did as he did and took a flying leap onto the trundle bed. The caravan, with its long lines of calsanys head-to-tail in their stubborn purposeful swaying movements and with the smaller numbers of plains asses separated from the calsanys, pressed on toward Pa Weinob in the northwest. Pa Weinob was an outpost town, part of the spreading web of influence the men of Pandahem were spinning along the seaboard and hinterland of eastern Turismond. There was set a definite limit to their western expansion as the same limit was set for all the peoples seeking to extend westward here. The Klackadrin with its cold hallucinations and its Phokaym waited out there. I have spoken a little at my chagrin at finding myself in a port city of Pandahem when I had wished to reach Port Tavetus, of, failing that, Ventrusa Thole, both colonial port cities of Vallia. The difficulty of finding a ship at all to take me to Vallia had been further compounded by this enforced arrival at a port locked in mortal combat with Vallia. Mention of Vallia here was — almost — as mad as mention of Sanurkazz in Magdag, or of Magdag in Sanurkazz. There was a faint gleam of light in that I detected less vicious acrimony between the men of Pandahem toward Vallia, more a kind of grudging respect and a direful determination to do them down, than the out-and-out obsessional hatred on the inner sea between the red and the green.
Tilda often wore a green gown; and I was used to that now.
Naghan the Paunch kept Pando very busy about the calsany lines, and the youngster learned very quickly not to be anywhere near them when they became frightened. Naghan himself rode a zorca — a fine powerful specimen of that graceful riding animal. It had been a long time since I had seen a zorca -
a long, long time. In the lands fringing the Eye of the World men rode sectrixes, and in the Hostile Territories they rode the near cousin of the sectrix, the nactrix. I looked at that beautiful zorca and I felt my hands clench in envious longing, for I had to pad along on my bare feet. This zorca, like all the breed very close-coupled and with four impossibly tall and spindly legs, possessed a particularly fine horn, twisted and proud, flaunting from the center of his forehead. I would march along and look at the zorca and think.