back to him well multiplied — or the young bloods rued the day and ran the gauntlet of their fathers’ displeasure. Casmas the Deldy had ears and eyes everywhere. His corpulence fitted him. He wore a great black cummerbund swathed around his belly — and, I had more than half an idea, some kind of ribbed corset beneath to hold him in — and rich gem-encrusted robes, and he kept his smooth satiny skin oiled and sleek. Oh, yes, Casmas fitted his part in the hectic life of the sacred quarter of Ruathytu.
I had pumped him and gained information, but he had stonewalled on my request to be taken on a visit around the buildings of Zhyan’s Pinions. I was not to get in as easily as that.
“No, no, my dear Amak.” He was punctilious, was Casmas the Deldy, in his lubricious way. As I say, he fitted his part. “I am merely a poor money-lender scraping a living from young bloods. What those guls do down in Zhyan’s Pinions is a mystery to me. All I know or want to know is that I am paid my due for my lovely golden deldys.”
He shut up then. But I guessed the government of Queen Thyllis, desperate after the devastation and the expenses of the successful revolt, was borrowing money everywhere, as hard as it could. Damned war!
Always upsets the economy and makes it hard for a poor man to make a living. Just a simple straightforward fight between equals, one to one, as Trylon Rees had said, that should be the way of it. That would sort out the warmongers. But then, Hamal had the duel, developed to an art form and an entertainment.
So I spent my days, wandering, scraping up information, at the salle, circumspectly at the baths of nine, seeking to worm my way into establishments where it was clear Queen Thyllis and her Pallans wanted no one’s nose poking around. And, still, for all my working, for all my nighttime flittings over the rooftops, my cloak flaring under the moons, for all my smashing of amphorae, I came not a jot nearer. And, too, I guessed much more of this would arouse suspicions to the point where the Pallans must guess someone was after the voller secrets. They were sensitive about their vollers. They had already set heavier guard details. I had one or two merry fights to break clear, and left three more terchicks as evidence that the mischief was done by a man and not a demon with eight arms.
I had to cover my tracks somehow.
All the time these nocturnal expeditions were going on I ruffled my life away as one of the young bloods of the sacred quarter of Ruathytu. I had now practically perfected that blank look of docile imbecility -
and damned difficult it was, too, with a figurehead like mine.
The precautions I took in the baths of nine so as to disguise my muscular development and the breadth of those shoulders of mine that, as a boy, had wrought such havoc with my clothes, to the despair of my mother, the sheer animal strength of the body God and adversity have blessed me with — all these precautions make me look back now with amusement. At the time it was deadly serious. The baths of nine — and they are worth a book in themselves — had to be most carefully indulged in, and I pleaded all manner of ingenious excuses. Only with Trylon Rees could I feel reasonably comfortable, and that because the lion-man thought he knew me best of all of them, and understood the burning desire in me to be a Bladesman, a desire frustrated by nature.
Once, I recall, Rees received a challenge from a man — an apim — from some outlandish tribe of Hamal renowned for its wrestlers. With his great booming laugh the lion-man accepted the wager, and we all gathered around the mat, with the rules and the laws all carefully detailed, to watch and hoot and roar encouragement, and to lay wagers that made old Casmas the Deldy rub his sly hands together. The lion-man was a truly remarkable specimen of humanity. His massive golden mane, the golden flecks in his eyes, that tawny skin with the muscles sliding and roping, that bunched bursting power of him -
only when I took a more careful look at his challenger did I give this man, one Radak, any chance at all. Then I looked more closely.
Radak the Syatra came from a tribe living far away over by the Mountains of the West, remote and half cut off, under constant threat of raids, although not, I fancied, as forgotten as Paline Valley. His physique had clearly been developed from barbarian ancestors only a generation or so removed. Like a solid block of metal with the muscles deeply etched, as though by acid, with a round head jutting from between massive shoulders, he stood with his fists on his hips, a primitive killing-machine, entirely savage, appearing invulnerable.
“Come on, Radak the Syatra! Let us see if you are made of steel or of flesh and blood!”
“With the blessing of Havil the Green. On your own head be it, Notor!”
Radak’s body moved with that blur of speed that betokens an athlete in perfect training or a barbarian in his natural state. I knew savages. Simple-minded a barbarian may be, but he is quick-witted and cunning because he wishes to keep his skin on his back and his head on his shoulders — and not decorating the trophy posts of his enemies. I looked at the superb chiseled body of Radak with all that dynamic, unstoppable killing power and I knew that I, Dray Prescot, walked about in a body like that, for all that I took great pains with paints and disguises to conceal the facts.
The fight took some time. Accompanied by the whistles and catcalls of the onlookers the two men wrestled. I knew with a little uncomfortable shiver that I’d best call into play those marvelous disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy, if I was ever pitted against either of them, summon up the almost mystical tricks and systems that had given me the advantage in unarmed combat even over the fearsome Khamorros. These two wrestled country style. They grunted and grappled and heaved and fell with enormous splatting squashes and displays of colossal brute power. They streamed sweat. They roared and sledged each other, and twisted, and locked, and still each man remained on his feet. A few khamster grips and locks and they’d fall flat and down and out. I looked on, wanting Trylon Rees to win, of course, but feeling for Radak, named for the voracious man-eating plant of Loh.
Such a display of sheer primal energy! Crashings and bashings, simple barbarian strength pitted against only a fractionally more skilled civilized strength. In the end Rees managed to land so many elbow blows that Radak staggered back, his face a mask of blood, and Rees was on him, bearing him down, smothering him. For a few murs they twitched like a single dying beast, convulsively, each spasm following at greater and greater length, and then Rees patted Radak on the head and stood up, smiling and stretching, and it was all over.
Casmas the Deldy came off reasonably well, although he forked out my golden winnings when I held out my hand.
“You would bet on the Trylon Rees if he was sent against a chavonth,” Casmas grumbled. Rees was listening.
“Aye,” I said in my best toadying manner. “Aye! For the Trylon Rees is a man among men!”
Rees came over, hot and sweaty, and clapped me on the shoulder, roaring his good humor. I take no pride in all this: it was necessary, it was a distasteful task laid on me. The betting had not been entirely in Rees’s favor. Radak, this massive chunk of barbarism, had been imported into the raffish and decadent world of Ruathytu’s sacred quarter by a Vad who fancied he had a grudge against the Trylon of the Golden Wind. When the doctors had patched up Radak the Syatra he was led out. His Vad, an aristocratic shark called Garnath, had swung off with so black a look I knew the business had been nowhere near finished on the wrestling mat. Radak’s eyes held all the ferocity of the true savage, smoldering with the inner fires of pure rage, well exemplified in many of the cycles of ballads surrounding the mythical figure of King Kranak whose story has been sung these many thousand years around the hearth-fires of Kregen. The lilt in the songs of Kregen is ideally suited to bring out the true barbarian savage, limning him in fine detail, with his heavy-jawed, low-browed face and mighty-thewed body. That treacherous lilt can abruptly break its rhythm to pitch the imagination over into dark abysses of the mind. .
Radak the Syatra took the proffered hand and shook with Trylon Rees ham Harshur. His maniacal eyes glared into the tawny eyes of the lion-man.
“You bested me fair, Notor. Vad Garnath is like a leem with a thorn in its paw. Best be wary, Notor.”
“Aye, Radak. Your thews are like black iron — would you join me if it could be arranged?”
I saw the flare in Radak’s eyes, and understood much from that burst of passion.
“Aye, Notor! Aye!”
Then Vad Garnath yelled from the door, in his baffled fury so far forgetting himself as to call upon the name of Lem as he bade his servant follow him like a dog.
Rees eyed me. “Lem, Hamun,” he said, and his lips ricked up. “The foul beast grows stronger every day. There are riots. Soon there will be more than riots within the city.”
Chido said with anger: “The Queen will-”
“The Queen will what, good Chido?” Rees shook his head. “I know her guards control the flutsmen’s raids to a degree these days. The laws of Hamal are not to be flouted.”
“The laws have fallen away lately, Trylon,” observed Casmas.
