Beneath the thing’s foreclaws lay the sword of war.
I took the dagger out of my mouth and plunged it deeply between two claws. The leg wrenched back, taking the dagger with it. I seized the great sword.
A mere lump of steel. Blunt as a boxer’s chin. I took a breath. I could feel the foul gunk all over me. I poised.
Then I leaped.
The point of the sword of war penetrated the left upper eye. It burst in a showering of liquid. I slipped, fell, rolled, saw a flailing claw descending on me, and rolled on.
The talons hit the rock at my side, gouting up dust.
I leaped up and with a last and desperate thrust got the sword through the broken lower left eye. This time I did not pull it out. I leaned on it and thrust as hard as my muscles could push. I sweated and panted and thrust, my feet swinging off the ground as the beast reared. It was shrieking and I was yelling. It roared in its last agony, and I roared in my agony that it would not die before my Delia passed by. I felt the foreleg brush past me, felt the talons rip my tunic back. I felt, again, that white-hot line of acid scorch down my back.
My fingers slipped from the greasy hilt.
I toppled back.
The rocks came up, hard; but they did not knock me out, and I was able to claw up, ready to fight the thing with my bare hands if necessary.
I recall little after that.
I did hear a man shout, dimly and far off, “Hai! Jikai!”
But that held no meaning.
The thing was down, was gushing blood everywhere. I staggered back, bruised, cut, exhausted, empty- handed. Men surrounded me. I heard the clang of weapons. I heard a yelling, wrapped in the fog of nonunderstanding.
Then, sharp and clear, like a lance-thrust, words shocked out at me.
“That’s Drak ti Valkanium! Take the rast! The traitor will die, slowly. Take him and bind him with iron chains!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
They took me and bound me with iron chains, and our sorry coffle wended painfully down the mountain trails to the plains and so to the canal.
I knew what was in store. I suppose, given that all things come to all men in the fullness of time, I had always known I would become a slave hauler and haul an Emperor’s barge. This was fitting. This was the circle of vaol-paol complete.
The difference was that I and my comrades captured by mercenaries in the employ of the Emperor were noted brigands, outlaws, who had robbed the caravan of the Kov Vektor. The wedding gifts were lost and could not be found. I had no idea where they were, and — with a heartfelt relief that had nothing to do with the fact that I would not suffer — I learned that we would not be put to the question. Torture is commonplace in some areas of Kregen; it had been outlawed centuries ago in Vallia. The Emperor’s authority was autocratic, although some men did not obey him, but he could not flout the rules of civilized behavior in this. We were being taken to Vondium to answer for our crimes before a properly constituted court. I say being taken — we were in the chained gangs of haulers who walked all the way there on bleeding feet.
With the vanishment of the wedding gifts, the Princess Majestrix could only refuse the wedding itself. No one could fault her in that. Presents must be exchanged on both sides. It was a civilized custom. There was no dowry and nothing from the other side; there was no buying of a wife and nothing on the other side. There was an exchange.
We were treated abominably enough on that journey. We hauled the barges at a fast rate, fairly running under the lash and the knout. We slept on a barge reserved for the purpose, and it stank of stale sweat, urine, and fear. All day and all night we kept up that steady progress, passing narrow boat after narrow boat on the way. The stentor with his curled-spiral trumpet sounded the warning of our coming long and loud before us, and the tows went splash, splash, splash, into the cut, and the narrow boat skippers poled out to the center to leave a clear right of way.
We were not just ordinary slave haulers; we were going to a just trial and then an execution, or a lifetime as haulers. I felt that most of my hauling comrades would welcome the first. I will not dwell on that time of hauling. My hair and beard, which had grown unattended during my travels across Vallia in search of Delia, grew luxuriantly, like bushes, untidy, knotted, filthy, covering my face. The lacerations from the shorgortz’s talons suppurated, and I knew that if I had not taken that bath of baptism in the sacred pool of the River Zelph, I would have been a dead man. The whips of the slave-masters and guards wealed me so that I was truly jikaidered. Sores covered my feet. The disgusting rag that had once been a gray slave breechclout around my loins stank and crawled with vermin. I tried to wash it and was flogged for my pains. Fresh water was provided for those people who could not drink the canalwater, and dry biscuits, with a minced stew of vosk and ponsho leavings. Each day we had a handful of palines, and I believe these alone kept people alive and going, and, in many cases, controlled the degree of their insanity.
The branding with the Emperor’s mark on our right shoulders we all underwent did not unduly worry me, for I knew that a brand would, on me, slowly thin and vanish as subcutaneous and cutaneous cells rebuilt themselves. The painful part came in that I had to be rebranded. The scar tissue on a normal human skin usually remained permanently; but I knew there were many skills on Kregen. I had seen how a brand might be removed in Zenicce. But I annoyed the slave-masters, and they kept an eye on me, and lashed their whips and their knouts with special viciousness in my direction. I was, all in all, during that passage, down in spirit.
The talons of the shorgortz must have exuded a poison, or a toxic fluid in the effluvia in which I had been drenched had penetrated my skin like an acid, for the wounds refused to heal. The guards took a perverse delight in laying their whips accurately across the old cuts. I was jikaidered well and truly. Jikaida is played on a checkered board; my hide was crisscrossed with the checkers of the lash. As I hauled and tugged at the harsh tow rope I did not think even the archangel Gabriel would recognize me. I was in far worse condition than ever I had been as an oar-slave in the swifters of Magdag. Zorg, my old oar-comrade, now dead, or Nath and Zolta, my two rascals, could never have seen in this hairy, stinking, lashed specimen the man Dray Prescot they had known.
Of the country through which we passed I was aware only of the towpath. We slaves, in a ragged bunch roughly three abreast, clawed onto our leashes, knotted and spliced to the main tow rope, and pulled, heads down. I saw the muddy track beneath my feet. Also, occasionally, and with a relief that broke the monotony, I saw lock gates and the smooth wooden beams that had to be opened and closed. I was never allowed what would have been the pleasant diversion of turning the paddle handles. That was reserved for the favored of the slaves, girls usually, whom the guards pampered. Somewhere, in this despairing mass of humanity like a clogging mass of insects at the end of a jam-sticky knife, trudged Korf Aighos. I did not even know how many of us had been captured, although the how of it was easy enough. The laundry girl had been captured, and the noise of my battle with that confounded shorgortz had drawn the guards like a magnet.
I couldn’t feel enmity for Hikdar Stovang. But although I had borne him no malice, he had believed the worst of me, and here I was, hauling for the Emperor.
We were riding the various canals on our way back southeastward to Vondium. I hardly cared. We must have ridden the Vindelka Cut, for Vindelka lies immediately to the northwest of Vondium. Often as I trod after my fellow haulers I walked a sea of muddy blood.
Some damned alchemy of that reptilian monster’s foul acid-dripping ichor refused to let my body heal up. My mind was cloudy for much of that passage. Sores covered me. The daily lashings merely kept my body bloody. I still had strength, and could march; those of the ordinary haulers who fell were left to die, if they were dying, or had their throats cut if they feigned death after repeated floggings. Those of the haulers facing court hearings were
