hard. Many men professing faith, men of integrity, can make out a good case for slavery. One useful test to put to them is to suggest that they take a turn at slavery themselves, put on the torque, the chains, the thongs, the yoked stick, carry out hard and unrewarding tasks with a beating for wages. I believe they might then suffer a change of heart, that if they were slaves they would see the old custom in a new light.
But. . this was not my business.
I had not been bidden here by the Star Lords to save anyone from a cruel fate, so I needn’t fear their punishment for failing that task — to be thrust back to Earth, four hundred light-years away. I was a free agent. The decisions were mine. In this matter I was not a puppet.
Like old customs, old habits die hard.
I took up the great Lohvian longbow given to me by Seg Segutorio, who had himself built it with loving care, built it as only a master bowman of Erthyrdrin can build a longbow. I had practiced with this bow, and I knew her ways. I could split the chunkrah’s eye at unbelievable ranges. Each arrow had been manufactured under the intolerant eye of Seg. Each shaft was true, as near the others in weight and balance and size as any skill could make it by hand, without the standardization of mass production. Each shaft was fletched with the brilliant blue feathers of the king korf. Each head was of tempered Kregan steel, for Seg would acknowledge that high-quality steel did, indeed, possess advantages over his well-tried flint. There were heads for different purposes: wide- cutting flesh-slicers, narrow and heavy bone-smashers, thin bodkins for deep penetration, even a few blunted shafts for bird-ratching. I eyed the flutsmen.
So absorbed were they in their evil work they did not see the silent approach of my flier. Their fluttrells curved against the sky, swooping down. Ropes flew, barbed with cunning iron, and snagged screaming fugitives, upending them, dragging them through the dust.
The flutsmen had set the place afire, but the rain squall had swirled upon them, and now they were busy trying to bring their slaving activities back to the order I guessed they usually experienced. The rain had given the village a chance. I frowned. I could see no resistance. With a chance. . surely there were men below with weapons, men who would fight for their women and children, for their own lives and liberty. The shafts were set before me, arrayed in their quick-draw sleeves along the rim of the voller. I took the first shaft between the fingers of my right hand.
This was no business of mine.
I should let the wind drive my craft on, past the burning village, past the flutsmen, past the shrieking people. If I was killed here, what good would that do my Delia, my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains? How would that give the protection I owed to my young twins, Drak and Lela? How would my death here bring the prosperity I so urgently desired to my people of Valka and of Strombor, of Djanduin, and of the clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm?
At last I saw the foolishness of the question, for those wild clansmen are so perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, there on the limitless expanses of the Great Plains of Segesthes, and with Hap Loder to chivy them along when necessary, that I could, and did, Zair forgive me, leave them to their own rascally devices for seasons at a time.
No, with or without the Star Lords, with or without the Savanti, with or without all the duties I owed my people, this petty slaving affray below was no business of mine.
So I took up the first shaft, notched it, drew back the string, and loosed. The shaft took the nearest flutsman under the ear.
He pitched from his saddle, hanging from the clerketer, the straps beating in the wind as his mount reared aloft.
The next shaft dispatched a flutsman whose swung line had barbed a man, who simply sprawled forward, his hands clasped together, his body limp.
Then it was a matter of shooting as fast as I might haul the shafts from their sleeves around the rim of the voller, of drawing the string and of loosing. Shaft after shaft sped; I think only two missed their mark. Now the slavers could not fail to take notice of me.
Standing braced as I was in the tiny forward compartment, I must have presented a target to them they considered easy, a mere man to be swept away with a swift attack and a shower of stuxes. They hurled their javelins, true enough. But I snatched up a shield and hung it on my left shoulder. This was a trick I had been practicing, to the enormous amusement of Seg and my other friends in Valka, and, I admit, to the worried annoyance of Turko the Shield. Stuxes banged and slithered against the shield. I could still shoot. If a javelin was launched at my right side — and be very sure I kept a sharp lookout to starboard
— I could duck or sway away from its flight. Only three times had I to release the string of the longbow and so reach out and pluck the flying javelin from the air. These three went back whence they came, to bury their broad heads deeply into the bodies of their late owners.
Fluttrell wings blattered the air about me. Stuxes flew. Now the enraged flutsmen swooped in, closer and closer, and they tried to stick me with their long lance-swords. The blades sliced and slashed, and chunks of the voller’s wooden frame splintered and strips of the canvas cover ripped away. I let the great Lohvian longbow slide to the deck.
The feel of the longsword in my hands, as always, gave me that uplifting and yet fallible feeling I have so often described. With the naked brand in my fists I prepared to deal blow for blow. This longsword was a true longsword. It was not a Krozair longsword. But it was as close as I could make it in the smithy at home in the high fortress of Esser Rarioch overlooking Valkanium. Naghan the Gnat, the cunning armorer, and I, with the best swordsmiths I could find, had labored long to produce this weapon. I had debated whether or not to bring that true Krozair longsword with me but — for the same reasons I had brought this inferior flier, the same reason I wore a sober gray shirt and blue trousers over the old scarlet breechclout — I had decided not to bring that marvelous brand with the letters
incised on the blade.
Naghan the Gnat had proved a first-class armorer and swordsmith. Together we had folded and refolded the glowing metal, producing that cunning interlay of many thicknesses demanded of a true blade. With varying thicknesses of clay during the annealing process we had developed a diamond-hard cutting edge from the point up both edges, and that more tough and flexible central spine. We had labored amid heat and smoke and sweat to fashion this blade. It was as true a longsword as might be found outside the Eye of the World; but, even so, it still was not a Krozair longsword. But, here, in an affray with miserable aragorn-hired flutsmen, it would serve to lop a few heads, to dismember, to rip the smoking guts out of these evil slavers.
The feel of the silver-wire-wound hilt was all I needed to go to work. And then, in that moment when, with the blood singing through my veins and the beginnings of a juicy little encounter shaping up, I fancied I might discommode these cramphs, the flier jerked, yawed, flummoxed in the air, and then plunged straight for the ground.
In a matter of moments my flier would smash headlong into the earth and smash me along with it.
Chapter Two
That abrupt plunge earthward scattered the flying slavers away from the voller. Wings skittered sharply as the flutsmen veered away. One flutsman, however — no doubt seething with anger that with all their vaunted prowess the mercenaries of the air had failed to dispose of a single flier — swooped upon me with a screech. He clearly intended to sink his long-bladed weapon into me before I struck ground. That suited me perfectly.
The intention suited me; not the execution of that design.
The ground leaped up toward me. The fluttrell barreled over, tasseled flying cloths fluttering, the straps of the clerketer holding the flutsman swinging wildly. The long lance, razor sharp, speared for my body. Where normally I would have buffeted it away with a swing of my blade, I let my body swing away. I shifted grips on the two-handed hilt of the longsword. With the sword in my left hand I braced, flexed my legs, and leaped.
For a single heartbeat I thought I had missed.
