She swayed toward me. My mind was a jumbled amalgam of Holly, and Natema, and Mayfwy — and then, swamping them all and clearing my head and setting my whole being blazing, came the vivid memory of my Delia of the Blue Mountains stepping so lithely down the rocks clad in those magnificent white ling furs, her figure perfection, her eyes glowing on me, her every aspect so far more beautiful — so
— words fail me here. I thrust Susheeng from me so that she staggered. She dropped to her knees. She amazed me even more. In one hand she had hidden a crumpled gray cloth. Now, moving with a frenzy I found fascinating and appalling, she stripped the emeralds from her so that the strings broke and the gems rolled and scattered wildly about the room. Stark naked she stood, her hair down and the jewels shaken from it. Then — then she wrapped the gray cloth about her thighs, drew it up between her legs, and knelt before me clad in the gray breechclout of the slave!
I didn’t want to touch her.
But I didn’t want her crouching there at my feet, dressed up as a slave girl, demanding from me what she must know I would not give.
“Get up, Susheeng!” I said. I made my voice harsh and she jumped and flinched, and her naked shoulders shook. “You look ridiculous!”
It was, of course, the end.
Slowly, she stood up. Her breast heaved and she gulped to control herself. She succeeded. Calm, icy, deadly, she stood before me, naked in the gray breechclout.
“I have offered you everything, Kov Drak of Delphond. You have seen fit in your folly to refuse me. Now-” Her eyes glowed molten on me in the lamplight. She was incredibly beautiful and evil now that her pretensions had been stripped away. On Kregen there is an expression which means roughly what
“my dear” means on Earth, with all the sinister, hating, murderous connotations involved. She used that now, as she turned like a she-leem and glided toward the door.
“You will be sorry, ma faril Drak. Oh, so sorry!”
I knew I had less than a handful of murs to get clear. The mailed men she was even now whistling up would not know I had a sectrix saddled and waiting; and so I stood a chance. But it was a near thing. As I clattered out of that secret court where a sleepy slave padded his way back to his quarters, I heard the sounds of the hunt rising behind me.
As it was, I got clear away. I belted hard for the warrens and, with the die cast, felt a great lightening of my spirits. Susheeng would no longer enter my calculations to ruin all that I was attempting. So I thought as I reentered the ghetto.
The first person I met as I ducked into the familiar hovel was Holly. She stood up as I went in and her slight figure in the rustling light from the candle sent a quick pulse of futile anger through me. She smiled. We had scarcely seen each other alone since that first greeting. Now she came toward me shyly, but with the firmness of character and resolve I knew she possessed.
“You’ve been avoiding me, Stylor!”
The incongruity of it all hit me. I gaped at her.
“Stylor! What-?”
“Holly, dear Holly. I have work to do here. The plans must go on-”
“Oh, fiddle the plans! Can’t you see-” She stopped herself. The direct approach was not, in general, Holly’s way.
Then, thankfully, Genal, Pugnarses, and Bolan stalked in. They were annoyed because a good smith had been whipped since his production of iron nails was down — because he had been forging pike heads for us.
“We will have to spread the load,” I said. “There are, after all, enough slaves to make production light enough-”
“But he was
“All the more reason to use him carefully, Pugnarses!” I spoke sharply. Pugnarses gave me an ugly look, but I stared him down. “We are a band of brothers, Pugnarses. We must fight together, or go to the galleys together!”
“We will never do that!” flared Genal.
“Very well, then. Now, listen. We come now to the single most important weapon in our armory.” I held their attention; even Holly stood, her hands pressed into her breast, listening. I told them, then, what the sleeting hail of the arrow storm could do.
“We have a few archers,” Pugnarses said. “But few men know the bow. We can make them easily enough, and arrows.”
“That is the small straight bow,” I said. And I laughed. You who listen to these tapes will know I do not laugh lightly.
It is not exactly true to say that the long English yew bow is the peasants’ weapon. Of the famous longbows, only about one in five were made from yew, the others being mostly ash or elm or witch hazel, and only the best and most experienced archers were issued with yew bows. I wished I had the men to use those bows. Their deadly accuracy, their armor-piercing piles, would have laid low the overlords in great droves. As it was, I must make do with what a slave economy could provide.
“It takes years and years of training to make a longbow-man. You must start almost before you can walk to pull a bow, to draw it to the ear, to attain that instinctive accuracy and that uncanny speed. Do not think of the longbow, my friends, unless there are men of Loh among you.”
“We have a few — some are redheaded, most are not.”
“Good, Bolan. We will make longbows for them. But for the main archery strength I shall use crossbows.”
My wild Clansmen with their own curved compound reflex bows had some respect for the powerful crossbows of the citizens of Zenicce. I would not be making bows quite like that, not yet, here in the slave warrens of Magdag. I had handled and used the crossbows of Zenicce many times. I knew their virtues and their weaknesses.
“Crossbows?” said Bolan, wonderingly.
“Crossbows,” I said. I spoke firmly, decisively. “We will make crossbows and with them we will smash the overlords of Magdag into the dust!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The mere manufacture of crossbows and the quarrels they would shoot would not, of course, as with any other weapon, settle the overlords of Magdag.
The men who would use them must be trained.
I insisted that the training be carried out with a great deal of the efficiency and spirit of emulation and success, if without the rewards for failure, that I had applied training my guns’ crews aboard the seventy-fours and frigates that sailed other seas four hundred light-years away from Kregen. Volley shooting would be a necessity. Sufficient accuracy should be obtained from individual marksmen so that a wide swathe of the bolts would fall upon the charging overlords’ cavalry. Production was begun as soon as the first crossbow I had designed and seen through its development stages, helped by the slave and worker craftsmen without whom the venture would have been impossible, had been tested and had passed. We began with a simple hand-spanned bow. Once those whom we selected for training had grasped its essential principles, and could put a group of bolts into the targets set up in the alleys of the warrens, we progressed at a jump to bows spanned by windlasses. As a sailor I could handle the simple calculations necessary to arrive at a satisfactory ratio series. The biggest innovation, and one I felt some pride in developing, was what I called the sextet. One of the main problems with the crossbow is its slow rate of discharge. I have previously mentioned that bows do not fire their arrows or bolts. In every respect the crossbow is inferior to the expertly handled longbow. So men believe. I had so to arrange my crossbowmen as to nullify as many of the disadvantages as possible. We would be fighting from behind barricades. That was essential, as I saw it. So I took a group of six people. The sharp end was the shooter, he who actually loosed the bolt at the foe. To his rear
