The Tides of Kregen

slinger.

He was apim. The next stone missed also, but only because I dodged sideways. This fellow might be one of the people I had been sent here to assist; he might be one of those I must fight. I did not know. This problem confronted me as of old, the difference on this occasion being that I had no guidelines at all. A second man now followed the first, swirling a sling about his head. His stone barely missed the first slinger, who turned, reloaded and swung. By the time I had reached him he had sent his missile full into his pursuer’s face. The second man pitched to the ground, minus an eye and with blood flowing. I grabbed the slinger as he swung back. I had run noiselessly and his face contorted with terror, shattered at thus being taken without warning.

'Now, dom,' I said. 'You can tell me all about it.'

'The slavers!' he cried, wincing from my grip, trying to kick me, trying to bite, struggling to get his knife out. He wore a breechclout of decent fawn cloth, with a bag for his slingshots, a leather belt, the knife and dusty sandals.

'Slavers,' I said.

'They are taking away the girls! I must save them, and yet. .' Here he stopped struggling. He was very young. His voice fell. 'And yet I ran away.'

'Then we must run back and see what we can do.'

If the Star Lords looked down on this comedy and were displeased with what they saw, I might find myself back on Earth for another twenty-one years. Even as I took a grip on the lad’s arm and ran him back to the bushes, I considered that from what had happened to me on Earth it could well be that the Star Lords had had no hand in this return to Kregen. It could be the Savanti who had called on me. We ran into the bushes.

At my back the ground trended dustily away to mountains with no sign of human habitation. Beyond the bushes lay a well-trodden path. Further bushes and then a few scattered cultivated fields extended ahead. A house burned. Well, as I have said, sounds of strife and sights of burning houses are often my lot when I return to Kregen.

Along the path the girls in their fetters struggled, shrieking and wailing, terrified. The difficulty was in judging who was attempting to abduct the girls and who was trying to rescue them. At first glance there seemed very little difference between the two sides. Both wore the fawn-colored breechclouts, both used slings and knives. They were all apims, with a mixture of hair ranging from light to dark brown, so I must discard that as an identification. A stone almost took my eye out, and I moved away smartly, marking the man who had flung.

'Him,' I said to my captive. 'Is he friend or enemy?'

'That is Noki and he was always an onker! He couldn’t hit the mark at twenty paces!' A trifle local friction here, I decided. Noki saw what was going on and tried again, whereat my captive bellowed, 'Hold, you get-onker! This man will help us!'

'I thought you were slain, Mako!' yelped this Noki. 'Hurry! They are dragging the girls to their ship.' I perked up at this. So far this appeared to me to be a parody of the times I had fought for the Star Lords. The time was slipping away, for already most of the girls had vanished around a bend in the trail. They were all shackled to one another, stumbling on. While it was clear enough to see which of the men were trying to release them, it was not as easy to see who was slinging at the locals and bringing them down.

I made up my mind.

'Follow, Mako and you, Noki! You must fight!'

Then I was off, haring along the trail, dodging flung stones until, passing the struggling, shrieking girls, I reached the head of the column around the bend. The sea blazed before me, rippled with a breeze, glittering with the twin fires of the Suns of Scorpio. A large open pulling boat was drawn up on the sand. There was going to be no mistake now.

I went straight in at the three fellows hauling on the shackles at the head of the procession, dragging the girls along. They all dropped the ropes and slung at me. I dodged. Three blows took care of them. Against knives a fist is a useful weapon, lacking anything better. The unarmed combat disciplines hammered into me by the Krozairs of Zy also ensured I could take out a man armed only with a knife. As for the slung stones, they could break an arm or crack a skull. Two more slavers went down, their faces abruptly bloody, as they tried to jump me. And all the time I was leaping around like a frenzied fire-dancer, trying to present so shifting and erratic a target that the slingers would be bound to miss. It all struck me as remarkably fatuous, not real, as though I was being run through a slow-motion reprise of what had gone on long ago in much more gory detail. But the truth was there in the blood and the screams and the agony. This was real enough. The missing factor was twenty-one years away from scenes of Kregen, I was the one at fault.

What I had left, only moments before, still seemed more real to me. The Parisian hospital, the Prussian guns, the balloon, the blood there. Already, because one of the slavers twisted his knife as I struck him down and spitted himself, I had blood on my hands. Blood. Is blood, then, so inseparable from life?

'They climb into the boat!' screeched Mako.

'Don’t just stand there shouting about it!' I bellowed at him, running down the beach. 'Stop them!' I did not have the heart to use the great word Jikai, and I think I was right. An older man ran across as I started. A knife slash had brought blood in a line across his side. He was panting. 'Let them go,' he said, his chest heaving. 'They may kill more of us.' I ignored him. His was the word of wisdom, of course, for the girls had been saved and the last of the slavers were evidently only too anxious to push off and row away. But I had other ideas. It was through no bloodthirsty madness that I acted as I did; I simply needed that boat. I did not know where I was but, by Vox, it was a long way off the beaten track.

The younger element was anxious to follow my lead. In a last affray in the surf, where, I admit, I stood back at the end and let them get on with it, the last of the slavers were seen to. Up on the beach the people on whose side I had fought were going around carefully slitting every living slaver’s throat. The girls, their shackles torn off, played a lustful part in that butchery too. Presently I was able to go back to the older man who was being seen to, his wound stanched by a pad of leaves. No one produced a kit of acupuncture needles. Truly, I was out in the boondocks. Something about the light at last demanded my full attention, and I looked up. Yes. Yes, up there the huge red sun preceded the smaller green sun across the sky. In the forty-year cycle, which is never really an exact forty years by virtue of Kregen’s Keplerian orbit about Antares, the suns had met and eclipsed and parted again. I thought of Magdag. What did they get up to on that occasion in that infamous city, when the green sun passed in front of the red? Could the smaller sun even be seen against that massive somber red glow?

'We owe you our thanks,' said the older man, who said his name was Mogo the Wise. I still remained on Kregen so I must have done the right thing.

Looking at the people here, the girls hysterical in their relief, the men comforting them, and now a stream of other people, old men and women, youngsters, coming running along the path from the village, I wondered which of them the Star Lords had wanted preserved. They did not seem a likely lot of prospects for a great destiny on Kregen. That was not my concern. Exchanging polite greetings with the headman was not my concern. I wrapped a fawn breechclout around my nakedness and possessed myself of a knife, a poor thing with a bone handle and a bronze blade, indifferently made. These people were poor. I cut through all the chatter.

'Tell me where this place is,' I said, then, quelling their inquiries, I added, 'for I have been shipwrecked and am lost out of the sea.'

The head-shaking at this, the lip-pursing, made me wonder what they ordinarily did to shipwrecked mariners.

'Why,' said Mogo the Wise, screwing up his eyes. 'This is Inama. Everyone knows that.' In my screaming desire to know, to return to Delia, I wondered what fool had ever called this fool wise.

'And where is Inama? What is the next island called? The nearest mainland?'

'The next island is where those devils of Yanimas come from. As to any other large island, there cannot be any as large as Inama or Yanima, although there are smaller. And, as for what you call mainland. .' Here he turned to his people and lifted his hands to his temples. Whereat everyone laughed. I kept my temper — just.

'Do any ships call here?'

'Of course. But they come to kill us or take us prisoner. They sail from the Ice Floes of Sicce. We run and hide. Sometimes they leave things behind.' He held out his knife. It was of iron, with an ivory handle.

'This is a great knife, left by a ship.'

Of one fact I felt relief in my dangerous impatience: these poor people talked of the Ice Floes of Sicce. That particular version of a Kregan hell, perhaps the most famous, was not the only one. I took heart from this talk of