a season or two with Hap Loder and my Clansmen of Felschraung out on the Great Plains of Segesthes.
He it was who had filled in the background picture of this city, this anachronism, this civilized survivor in a wilderness of barbarity. When the great empire carved out by Walfarg had fallen through dissension at home in Loh, here, in eastern Turismond, the cities had drawn their own culture tightly about them and resisted to their best the invaders from the north, away past the northern outskirts of The Stratemsk. Some had fallen and were now mere shells, inhabited by leem and plains-wolves and risslaca. Others had survived as cities but were now the homes of barbarians, of beast-men and half-men. And yet — some, some had retained all their old Lohvian culture and civilization and went on their own paths as cities and city-states, islands of light amid a sea of darkness.
Of Loh, they now knew nothing.
Legends and fables, garbled histories, and the occasional venturesome traveler alone provided any link with their ancient homeland.
I could foresee that both Vallia and Pandahem, the new, lusty, sprawlingly-vigorous powers establishing themselves on the eastern coast, would not find this country easy, their penetration a mere matter of barter and sword.
Hwang, to do him justice, tried to jolly me out of this mood of black depression.
“If not dancing girls, then come with me to the nactrix stables. I have had to buy fresh mounts-” He stopped talking, and coughed. I knew well enough why he was forced to buy fresh nactrixes.
“I thank you, Hwang — but-”
He halted me with an upraised hand. His bodyguard froze behind us in the shadows. Living was an everyday precious affair for the Lohvians of Hiclantung; they valued continued existence, always struggling against the seas of barbarism beating upon their ancient walls. These robes we wore now, old but finely woven and superbly maintained, were a part of that tradition. Loh had withdrawn and there was no way home for these people through the Hostile Territories occupied by beast and barbarian
— even had they wished to leave their own homes and hearths. So I was not as hard on young Hwang as I might have been. No other thoughts had much place in my skull at that time except agonized fears and mocking, now they were gone, memories of Delia of Delphond.
“Then,” said Hwang with youthful force, “we will go to see the corths that rascal Nath is trying to sell me.”
I perked up at once; then reality supervened. Nath is a common name on Kregen — already in my life at this time there had been Nath the Thief from Zenicce, and my old oar comrade Nath of Sanurkazz, and I was to meet more.
This Nath was a fat but jolly man with a stub-nose and liquid eyes and a kind of loosely-rolled turban that slanted down over one ear in which a whole pagoda-like construct swung dwarfing any normal earring. His robes were new, embroidered in the Lohvian way with serpentine risslaca and orchids twining with the moon-blooms, and his slippers — to my intense disappointment — were mere plain squat-ended herring-boxes. He should have worn slippers flaunting extraordinarily long and up-curled points.
“Lahal, Dray Prescot,” he said, when what passed for pappattu had been made — I did not have to fight him or give him obi as was customary on other portions, equally civilized, of Kregen — and he rolled his girth around and resumed his seat on a pile of trappings, cushions, gear, and flying silks. Hwang was already inspecting the corths, all securely chained up by wing and leg to their perches, beneath the arched roof of the corthdrome.
“A couple are to my liking, Nath,” he said, without any attempt at bargaining. They began to talk prices, and I wandered across to take a closer look at the representatives of the flying monsters who had menaced our flight through The Stratemsk.
The corth is a truer bird than the impiter, although not as large or fierce — I believe that only two other flying animals of Kregen better the impiter — and in general will carry no more than two passengers. These birds possessed the large round eyes, the sleek feathered heads, the deep chests and wide wings of faithful fliers, their legs short and sturdy and varying as to the amount of feather-covering in different species. Now they shifted from side to side and cocked their heads to stare at me first down one side of their beaks and then the other. In color they ranged through the spectrum, with patterns of variegated feathers lending a powerful beauty to their forms. Compared to the fanged and whip-tailed impiters with their coal-black plumage, the corths were indeed beautiful.
On a question from me, Nath laughed so that his array of chins and stomachs shook. “Oh dear me, no!
We would not allow our beautiful corths to perch on a bar outside our windows! Why — the barbarians would simply dive on them and kill them and then they would have the perch on which to land freely provided for them. We make it difficult for fliers to land in Hiclantung.”
“I had noticed.”
The corthdrome had been built at the summit of a high building on one of the hills of the city, on the southern declivity of which our villa lay. I thought of Seg, slowly recovering, of Thelda, keeping as she thought a vigilant night-time watch over my sick bed. They were good comrades. When we quitted the place, to Nath the Corthman’s wheezy: “Remberee, Dray Prescot!” and the chinkling of the fresh golden coin in his wallet, I was ready to turn in.
Hwang held me back. His face tautened. Looking down the long flight of stairs that led to the street, each section of twenty treads with a separate side wall looped for arrow-slits, I saw a body of armed men climbing the white stone that glimmered duskily pink and purple in the moons-light, for the twins were now wheeling across the sky after the maiden with many smiles.
Hwang suddenly laughed softly and I was aware of the rapid putting away of the longbows in the hands of his bodyguard.
The two parties met
“You are abroad late, Hwang.”
“Yes, Majestrix.” Hwang inclined. They inclined in Zenicce, and I had never liked the custom, so, as before, I merely bowed. Queen Lilah of Hiclantung looked upon me, there in the fuzzy pink moonslight.
“It seems I have pierced two impiters with a single shaft. I came to haggle for corths from that fat corthman Nath, and now I find the pleasure of meeting you, Dray Prescot. I had planned a more formal meeting, for I fear I have not thanked you enough for saving the miserable skin of my foolish nephew.”
Against that kind of polite nonsense, a plain sea officer and a fighting-man is usually out of his depth. I merely bowed again and said: “The pleasure is mine, I assure you.”
How long the inanities would have gone I do not know. This Queen Lilah stood very tall, her dark eyes on a level with my own brown ones, and her red hair had been coiffed into a high pile resplendent with gems and strings of pearls. Her dark blue gown, thickly embroidered and stiff with bullion and gold and silver threads, gave no hint of her figure; but her face was very white, unlined, her eyes picked out with kohl and her mouth painted into a cupid’s bow of allure. She gazed at me most intently as we spoke, and I gathered something of her power and her majesty, the immediate response she could always elicit, for that pallid face tinged with the pink radiance from the moons of Kregen and those darkly glittering eyes held a kind of hypnotic power, emphasized by the shadowing beneath her cheeks and the upslanted eyebrows, the widow’s peak of red hair over her forehead.
A man with her, elegant in dark green robes — dark green! — and with a powerful bearded face and eloquent hands adorned with many rings on the carefully tended fingers, was speaking of the lack of news of the scouts sent out to track the destination of the flying tribe who had so sorely bested the Hiclantung army and carried off Delia.
“But in a day or two they will return,” said this man, one Orpus, a councilor high in the Queen’s confidence. “Then we will know what to do.”
“I doubt not but they were employed by those rasts of Chersonang. Soon, now, our plans will be ready and then-” The Queen did not finish her words, and the inanities might have turned into some conversation more welcome to my ears, for Chersonang was a city-state of great power whose borders marched with those of Hiclantung and with whom, as was to be expected, there was constant friction, had it not been for the sudden and wholly unexpected slaughter caused by a shower of arrows that whistled down about our ears.
At the same instant a body of men in dark garments rushed upon us. The next second I was fighting for my life.
“Stand firm!” roared a Hikdar and went down screeching with a cloth-yard shaft in his breast. An arrow hissed by me and buried itself in the back of a bodyguard who had swung around to face the oncoming assassins.
