"This is rightfully yours. You floored me."
I wanted to be canny. "More by luck than judgment." I hoped that would pass. "Still, a bet is a bet, and I need the cash." I took the money. Pride and I had fallen out.
The truth of the matter was that I held for this big man the same admiration I held for a zhanticlass="underline" the wild, untamed savagery on the Zhantil’s part matched by the controlled docility of the savagery on Duhrra’s. The apparent dichotomy is only apparent. The idea that he would accompany me pleased me. But that was all.
Duhrra lifted his stump swathed in bandages and stared at it critically. "I must wait for my hook. Tell me what you think best. There is Shazmoz ahead, but it is besieged. They could fix my hook there." My mind was made up in the time a zhyan strikes.
"We go to Shazmoz. There is a man there I must see. After that it will be the Akhram."
Chapter Seventeen
Making our way into Shazmoz was not going to be easy.
We eased our sectrixes on the rise and let them blow gently while we looked down the long slope toward the army of Zairians encamped below. The sea glittered blue to our right. Not a speck of sail broke that wide expanse. The sky lifted high, high above, blue and distant, and the radiance of opaline light streamed mingled down about us.
"I hear there are thirty thousand," said Duhrra.
"And how many have the Zair-forgotten Grodnims?"
He waved his stump, still wadded in bandages. "No one knows. Men talk. Uh. . sixty thousand."
"But they must lay siege to Shazmoz and at the same time front our field army. It is not easy for them."
"May Zair rot their bones and turn their livers green."
Shazmoz itself was distantly visible at the end of an inlet, a vision of white cupolas and towers, long white walls baking under the suns. Over there the bestial scenes of siege were being enacted; below us the camp seemed to slumber in the light.
I had heard that the general in command here was a certain Roz Nath Lorft.[5]Men spoke well of him. He was not a Krozair. His task, relieving Shazmoz, appeared daunting and I held the shrewdest suspicion that this Nath Lorft would keep his army in touch, feeling the enemy, keeping them in play for as long as he could. Then, when Shazmoz fell, he would fall back. It seemed the Zairians had lost the ability to meet the Grodnims in the open field with any hope of success.
Scattered parties of men were about the eternal tasks of soldiers. Very few people chose to live close to the shore of the Eye of the World; from time immemorial raids have devastated the inland coasts. If there was no secure fortress very close at hand, the coastline would lie empty and deserted under the suns, so these men were totally dependent on the supply trains. They might try to send forage parties inland, but the hated green ruled there by virtue of its greater numbers and this devil-inspired confidence of winning any open encounter.
Duhrra waited my commands. His assumption of my mastery irked me. I found him dour and taciturn as a rule, which suited me as I was alike in the matter. But I wanted him to feel and act the part of a companion. This he was either unable or unwilling to do. I shook the reins.
"Let’s go down and make a start."
The camp merits no detailed description, being an army camp, except for the one particular that it was a camp of men of the red southern shore of the inner sea, and therefore a camp of highly individualistic Zairians. I doubt there was one single straight row of tents. Higgledy-piggledy, set down in the best site available, to the Ice Floes of Sicce with regimentation — this was the attitude of the Zairians. Oh, they were formed up in formations as to title and number and function, and no doubt in some dusty office of the Pallan responsible papers were to be found with the details scribbled down. But the Zairians fought as they lived, sprawling, rambunctious, riotous, each man anxious to get to hand grips with his opponent. The cavalry would lower lances and charge the instant anything approached they considered chargeable. The footmen would rave and yell and boil over in their efforts to keep up. Only the varterists held some discipline, and this because the craft and science of their art demanded rule and order. Swashbuckling — aye, that is a good word for Zairians.
We trotted our sectrixes down the slope. Duhrra had come into all of Naghan the Show’s possessions, and the cash was used to buy what was necessary for our journey. I found I still did not like the sectrix. This was the first of that species of six-legged saddle animals I had encountered. The nactrix is found in the hostile territories. The totrix in the lands of the outer oceans. Poor Rees! What had happened to his regiment of totrixes? And to Chido? I must not think of them — twenty-one years must have destroyed the last vestiges of their feelings for Hamun ham Farthytu. I imagined Nulty at Paline Valley would be the Amak in all but name by now. These dusty memories enraged me, so I bashed the sectrix in the flanks and we went careering down the last of the hill and flying into the camp. A group of men were formed into a ring and as I went up and down in the saddle to the awkward, cross-grained gait of the sectrix, I saw dust flying up from the center of the circle.
"Stand away there!" I bellowed. The sectrix was maddened now, its head rearing up and sideways against the bit. On we thundered. The backs of the ring of men came nearer and nearer.
"Out of the way! Stand clear!"
Now one or two faces turned my way. The noise was really rather wonderful. The swods yelled. The ring of red backs switched around. Faces contorted, mouths yelled, arms and legs swayed up and out -
and I was rolling past in a bellow of noise. Then the stupid sectrix tangled all its six legs among the gang of men struggling over the open ground and down we all came in a whirling flurry of collapsing bodies. Head over heels and away, rolling among a welter of red uniforms and naked chests and a Pachak’s tail-hand gripping my arm and a pair of studded marching sandals beating a tattoo on my head and — I surged up, gulping for air, stood there with the Pachak bellowing angrily, the swods toppling aside, the dust and noise in the sunshine perfectly splendid.
"Silence, you pack of famblys!" I roared. I took my left hand to my right and removed the Pachak’s tail-hand. He coiled his tail over his head and glared about ferociously. His red uniform was torn. He had a few cuts on his face. I saw the faces of the swods, so I knew what was going on here.
"Who in the name of Zogo the hyr-whip are you, you rast?"
I jumped for the swod who spoke, took his throat in my hand, squeezed — only a trifle — and bellowed: "Who I am is my business, you nurdling onker. But you speak to me with respect, or I’ll ring Beng Kishi’s Bells so loudly in your skull your brains will spout out your ears." A couple of the men liked that image. They laughed. I let the man go and stepped back. To the Pachak I said, "Now is your chance to walk off with dignity."
Pachaks are diffs of middle height, with two left arms, a whip-like tail equipped with a hand, straw-yellow hair, an intense loyalty and a fighting capacity that has caused great argument among the professionals of Kregen.
The Pachak said, "I shall stay and fight them with you."
I said, "I do not intend to fight them, dom."
"A pity."
Then Duhrra rolled up on his sectrix and started edging the animal in through the ring. The dust was settling. An ord-Deldar appeared and began bellowing, as all Deldars bellow, and the men shuffled off. They cast longing looks back.
"You," I said to the Pachak, "will have some recreation if those fellows get off early tonight."