'That is all I wanted to know,' said Ayari.
Kisu and I bad located one guard apiece. The others had apparently joined in the investigation to the east.
'I do not understand,' said Mwoga.
With the flats of our shovels Kisu and I struck the two guards senseless.
Mwoga had informed us that there were only two to concern ourselves with, and that we might proceed with dispatch. He had been quite helpful.
Mwoga looked from his left to his right. Without speaking further, or attempting to draw his dagger, he leaped from the planks into the water, falling, scrambling up, and plunging away into the darkness.
The chained slaves who drew the platform and were sitting and crouching forward, on its surface, bad, cautioned by Ayari, remained silent.
The darkness was loud with the drums.
'I cannot sleep,' said the Lady Tende, emerging from the small, silken shelter, one of two, one for her and her slaves, and one for Mwoga, pitched aft on the platform.
Then she saw Kisu.
24
We Obtain A Canoe; Kisu Makes Tende A Slave
It was getting light.
We thrust the mud raft ahead of us.
Some askaris straggled past, some wounded. A canoe, with bleeding askaris, half drifted, half paddled, passed us, a hundred yards away, on our right.
Mare than an Ahn ago we had passed the point at which the prison raft, from which we had escaped, had been anchored.
'There were raiders,' said Kisu.
'It was a good night for them,' said Ayari.
We continued to push the mud raft ahead of us. The dawn, a rim of luminescent gray, lay before us. On Gor, as on Earth, the sun rises in the east.
An askari limped past, moving painfully through the thigh-high water. 'Do not proceed further,' he said. 'There is action in the east.'
'My thanks for your advice, my friend,' called out Ayari. 'Prepare to turn about,' he said, loudly, to us. We, pushing from the sides, turned the heavy raft, heaped with piled mud, slowly about. When the askari was some seventy-five yards away we turned about again and continued eastward. He was not, I am sure, aware that we were not following him. If he was, he was in no condition to pursue us.
Concealed by a thin layer of mud on the raft were two shields and two stabbing spears, which Kisu and I had taken from the two askaris we had subdued on the platform of Tende. Our shovels lay in plain sight on the mud heaped on the raft.
We continued to push the raft toward the east.
Ayari looked up at the sky. 'It must be about the eighth Ahn,' he said.
'How far ahead is Ngao?' I asked Kisu.
'Days,' said Kisu.
'It is hopeless,' said Ayari. 'Let us make for shore.'
'They will expect us to do that,' I said. 'And if we are seen, we may fall to hostile natives or, if they be allies of Bila Huruma, be taken, or our position indicated by the drums.'
'Listen,' said Kisu, suddenly.
'I hear it,' I said.
'What?' asked Ayari.
'War cries, ahead and to the right,' I said. 'men fighting.' I climbed to the surface of the raft. Kisu followed me.
'What do you see?' asked Ayari.
'There is an engagement there,' I said, 'in canoes and in the water, some hundred askaris, some forty or fifty raiders.'
'There may be numerous such engagements,' said Ayari. 'Let us avoid them.'
'To be sure,' I said.
Kisu and I clambered down, splashing into the water, and again thrust the raft eastward.
Twice more, before noon, we scouted such engagements. It had rained heavily about the ninth Ahn, but we. drenched, had not ceased to push the raft toward the western shore of Ngao, somewhere ahead of us.
'Down!' said Ayari.
We crouched down in the water, our heads scarcely above the surface, shielded by the raft. On the other side of the raft passed two canoes of askaris returning to the marsh camps of the west. They had seen, from their point of view, only a mud raft, loosed and drifted from the work area.
'Askaris are returning,' said Ayari. 'The raiders have been driven away.'
Kisu lifted the headdress of an askari from the water, and threw it from him. 'Not without cost,' he said.
'We are safe now,' said Ayari.
'Keep a watch for tharlarion,' said Kisu. He reached under the water and pulled a fat, glistening leach, some two inches long, from his leg.
'Destroy it,' said Ayari.
Kisu dropped it back in the water. 'I do not want my blood, pinched from it, released in the water,' he said.
Ayari nodded, shuddering. Such blood might attract the bint, a fanged, carnivorous marsh eel, or the predatory, voracious blue grunt, a small, fresh-water variety of the much larger and familiar salt-water grunt of Thassa. The blue grunt is particularly dangerous during the daylight hours preceding its mating periods, when it schools. Its mating periods are synchronized with the phases of Gor's major moon, the full moon reflecting on the surface of the water somehow triggering the mating instinct. During the daylight hours preceding such a moon, as the restless grunts school, they will tear anything edible to pieces which crosses their path. During the hours of mating, however, interestingly, one can move and swim among them untouched. The danger, currently, of the bint and blue grunt, however, was not primarily due to any peril they themselves might represent, particularly as the grunt would not now be schooling, but due to the fact that they, drawn by shed blood, might be followed by tharlarion.
The spear, slender, some seven feet in length, hit into the mud near my hand.
'Raiders!' cried Ayari.
We heard screaming.
Kisu tore at the mud, scratching for one of the shields and stabbing spears.
A fellow leaped to the surface of the raft. I slipped under the water.
I thrust my way through submerged marsh grass. A spear struck down at me. Then I managed to get beneath the canoe and stood up, suddenly, screaming, tipping its occupants into the water. There, suddenly, over the waters of the marsh, roared the war cry of Ko-ro-ba. I dropped one man lifeless, his throat wrenched open, into the water. One man thrust at me with his spear and the others, startled, stood back. I tore the spear from him and kicked him from it. He slipped and I thrust the iron blade into him and thrust him down, pinning him, blood and bubbles bursting up, to the bottom of the marsh. I regarded the other four men, standing back, who faced me. I saw they did not move to attack. I pressed the body of the man under the surface from the spear blade with my foot and drew the weapon up. The body, twisting, now head down, emerged in the grass.
I stepped to one side. The men facing me were standing still.
Kisu stood on the raft, like a black god, the shield on his arm, a bloodied stabbing spear in his right hand. In
