mastered the zhyan with all that consummate skill of hers. But this girl was no Delia.
I, Dray Prescot, am an onker, a get-onker! What girl in two worlds can ever match Delia, save my Delia of Delphond!
Almost in the saddle, the girl moved with a clumsy lurch that snapped the self-control of the zhyan. It lashed ferociously at the two handlers, first left, then right, cutting them with that deadly razored beak, stretching them senseless upon the muddy ground. It fluttered its two pairs of wings, a massive and -
even in the abrupt horror of the moment — a beautiful movement. The girl pitched off. She screamed. She tumbled in the useless flailing straps of the clerketer, twisted and fell beneath the hooked beak of the zhyan.
The bird’s bright intelligent eyes told me that he would take his revenge for past insults now. Well, it was no business of mine.
The men were yelling and one jumped forward, a flying-stick uplifted. Flying-sticks are the invention of any of a hundred foul devils of Kregen. I never used one. If a flying mount needed a lesson, as they sometimes did, in obedience, there were other and less unpleasant ways than to thrash the poor beast. This man was caught across the face by the slashing hooked beak. He had no time to scream. He spun about and bright blood spouted from his ruined face.
Uproar burst about the perching tower. Men were yelling, women screaming, and the mud churned as the zhyan clamped his massive claws down. The girl dangling beneath him encumbered him. In the next second he would either rip her slender body to pieces with his claws, or tear her head from her shoulders with his beak. The pandemonium grew — and yet after the awful finish of the one who tried, no one else showed the determination to rush in to help.
Still, it was no business of mine. .
I ran forward.
“Help! Help me!” the girl screamed.
She dangled there, half upside down, her brave clothes spattered with mud gobbets thrown up by the claws of the maddened bird. His beak flashed toward me, hissing.
Dodging that lethal beak on its long serpentine neck was something like slipping an arrow or a spear. I checked in my rush, so that the beak struck where I would have been. I thumped my fist against the side of his head, feeling the solid thunking sledge of the blow. I grabbed the girl. She was incoherent with fear now, a gibbering shrieking bundle. My sailor’s knife whipped from the sheath over my right hip and slashed through the tangling lines of the clerketer. I kicked the zhyan in the belly, and kicked again. If he took off now we were done for.
He hissed. I crooked the girl in my left arm. If I had to kill this beautiful white bird, I would have to do so; I would prefer to let him live to recover from his fit of bad temper. There was no way past his beak. He curved his head down on that long neck, beneath his body, and darted at me again. The girl hampered me, but I flashed the knife at his beak, and chipped the side, and he hissed, and withdrew. With a savage lunge — and savagery was needed here to spring us clear — I went out from under the bird, rolling head over heels, clasping the girl, feeling her heart beat in panic against mine, her fair hair clouded about my face.
Hands grabbed me and pulled the girl away.
“We’ve got her, dom!”
I let her go, heaving up on a knee, ready to flash the knife before me and so keep off that wickedly darting beak.
There was no need.
That gorgeous bird, that scarlet-billed, scarlet-clawed, pure white zhyan, lay jerking in the last throes of death.
Crossbow bolts showed uglily in his feathers, studding his white breast obscenely, with red blood befouling all that beauty. He hissed, and shuddered, and died.
I stood up.
The girl had fainted. Her women were caring for her.
The men with the crossbows were stowing their weapons away alongside their saddlebows. The fine-clothed gallants were shouting and gesticulating. The landlord was wringing his hands. The scene sickened me.
Here came Nulty with the mirvols.
“Mount up, Nulty. Let us drive into the clean air, away from this — this-”
“Yes, master,” said Nulty.
We took off astride our mirvols, and soared up into the clean air of Kregen.
Chapter Six
Ruathytu, the capital city of the Empire of Hamal, was a place where, if you were reasonably wealthy, you might enjoy a sumptuous time. Of course, if you happen to be wealthy in almost any place and at almost any time you may enjoy a sumptuous time, so you may think it unnecessary for me to call your attention to the matter. The truth was, in Ruathytu at that time, I came across an altogether too familiar and horrible phenomenon of our Earth that, until then, I had not encountered on Kregen. In Sanurkazz, in Magdag, in Vondium, in Zenicce, all wonderful cities of Kregen, there were lords with incredible wealth; their retainers and followers, who were sufficiently provided for; and fat shopkeepers, innkeepers, and the superior craftsmen; then there were slaves.
In Ruathytu there were guls running the gamut from master artisans to laborers only a step removed from slavery. Beneath the skilled guls a great mass of poverty-stricken free men existed in Hamal. They were free, and they took a pitiful pride in that, but they were poor and in an ill season they would die of starvation or disease, and few of them could afford a doctor, even of the faith-healing sort. Slaves performed most of the truly unpleasant tasks, of course, as was common on Kregen; but many and many a free man or woman desperate for food would labor alongside the slaves. So it was that as Nulty and I stabled our mirvols in a public perching tower where they would be under cover, and took our first sight of the city, I was struck by the marked divergence of fortunes here, many races intermingled in every walk of life holding their own converse rank by rank, and each section sundered from the next by iron barriers of wealth.
This may seem so common a fact of life on two worlds as not to merit comment; but my experiences of Kregen had shown me that a man might progress on that marvelous and yet terrifying world: progress materially and spiritually, gaining not only wealth but prestige and affection and a place in life that did not necessarily put down another fellow being. The slaves made this easier, of course, and I do not seek to deny that unpalatable fact. However, it does not deflect me from the perhaps impossible task of erasing slavery altogether within a foreseeable time. The clums of Hamal were not slaves; no man might enslave them without just cause or rivet an iron collar about their necks; the clums were free men and women. That they did not have the slaves’ advantages of a place to sleep and food from masters with their welfare at heart made no difference to them. Better a clum than a slave!
Human beings of any race were constantly needed to feed the insatiable demands of the Arena. The clums would volunteer for the Jikhorkdun only in extremis. Willing hands were constantly needed to keep running the many ever-flowing, artful fountains; clums would do this work for a pittance. They would do whatever they had to, to survive; but, all the time, they were clums, free and not slave. One of the ever-present dreams of a clum was to gain wealth and skills enough to become a gul. Nulty, once a gul and now a faithful servitor to a noble, turned up his nose at the city.
“The place stinks, master.”
I knew what he meant.
“It smells pleasant enough, Nulty, with all the fountains and the armies of cleaners. There are flowers and
fragrant bushes everywhere, and the white walls are scrubbed each day-”
“That, Notor, was not what I meant.”
