Warlord

'Ah, Raj,' Menyez coughed; it sounded embarrassed, a social gesture rather than the product of his affliction. 'Your lady was kind enough to invite Aylice and myself to the entertainment tonight. Shall we arrange a carriage together?'

Semul Falhasker was staging a revival of Minalor's Foreshadows of the Fall, classical mime-drama. No expense had been spared: a full orchestra and troupe from the East Residence, with fireworks and illumination on the Drangosh to follow. Little enough, for the richest merchant in Sandoral.

'No, thank you,' Raj said, looking aside. 'I'll be, ah, that is, too busy. I'll be dropping by for the banquet and review afterwards.' On torchlit barges out on the river; that was being staged by Wenner Reed. Captain Wenner Reed, if you please; Falhasker's bitter rival, second-richest merchant in Sandoral, and commander of the city militia. That made it a matter of military courtesy to attend. . 'Enjoy yourselves by all means.'

He straightened. 'No rest for the weary; I've got to go drop by on the Skinners, before they forget why they're here and decide to burn down the city on a whim.'

Menyez nodded, compassion flickering in his eyes for a moment.

'And I don't envy you the Skinners,' he continued, changing the subject with a slight shudder. Nobody liked the barbarian mercenaries from the far northeast; compared to them, the western tribes of the Military Governments, the Brigade and Squadron and even the Stalwarts, were models of civilized sophistication.

'Well,' Raj said, 'they do have one great qualification.'

'Their marksmanship?'

'No,' he said, reining around. 'The fact that they're the only people around here, Tewfik possibly excepted, who are really looking forward to the fighting.'

* * *

'Ser,' M'lewis and da Cruz said, almost simultaneously. They eyed each other, and the Master Sergeant continued first. It was his responsibility to inform the commander of possible threats, after all.

'Skinner, left about one thousand, in t'ditch, ser,' he said. 'Lookin' real unobtrusive like, but he's aimin' at us.'

Raj rolled his head as if stretching his neck muscles. Was that a glimmer of sun on iron? Impossible to tell, and the wind was in their faces, no warning from the dogs.

'Right an' behinds us, in t'tree, ser,' M'lewis said. Da Cruz was startled enough to whip his head around, swearing.

'Eyes front,' Raj said. Better to ride right in and let the barbarians think all their scouts had been spotted and ignored.

There were probably more of the Skinners watching behind their heavy two-meter sauroid-killer rifles. Not because anyone had assigned them to it, simply because that was what those particular warriors had chosen to do. The camp up ahead contained half his Skinners, it would be an offense against the patron Avatars of the Army to call them a battalion of soldiers. . and this was better organized than his other war band of them; he kept them well north and south of the city respectively, they came of different clans and had a habit of casual sniping whenever he brought them in range of each other. The chiefs assured him that would stop when a real enemy came in sight.

The Skinners had been assigned an evacuated village on the fringe of the cultivated lands as their camp; it was almost all destroyed now, the huts burned down, the orchard trees hacked for firewood or used for target practice or simply destroyed in idle vandalism. Some of them had rigged sun shelters of sauroid hides-they were hunters, mostly, at home on the northern plains-and more simply dropped and slept wherever impulse took them. The stink was enough to make the troopers behind him gasp and breathe through their mouths; enough to make him, too, if dignity had not prevented.

There were flyblown half-eaten sheep carcasses lying in the muddy patches between shelters, some writhing with maggots; flies clustered blackly on the mouths and eyes of men lying sleeping against their saddles. Dogshit and human dung littered the ground; as they watched, a Skinner undid his breechclout and squatted. Another staggered out of a roofless hut with a jug clutched in one hand, swayed, pirouetted, vomited, and fell facedown in the result, twitching and mumbling. Hounds of every color raised their massive flop-eared heads as the party from the 5th trotted by, scratched at fleas or simply slept.

Raj suspected that his own relative popularity with the Skinners was based on Horace; few other peoples rode hounds, with their incorrigible tendency to do exactly as they pleased with very little regard for consequences. . which, come to think of it, was very much like the Skinners themselves.

'Spirit on crutches, this place looks like an invitation to an attack,' one of the troopers in the color party muttered to another.

'That's what they thought,' da Cruz replied with grim amusement; he had been here with Raj before.

They were coming up on a relatively intact hut, one that had not been burned down, at least, and whose tile roof was mostly still there. Also there were at least fifty heads, identifiable as Colonists by the spired helms, lined up in the eaves trough of the house or dangling from the branches of a dead orange tree beside the door; some had fallen, and been casually kicked into corners. The trooper took a look and went eyes-front, making an audible swallowing sound.

There was a hound lying on its back beside the door, rumbling a deep snore and occasionally twitching one of its splayed-out paws as it hunted in its sleep. The Skinner chief was kneeling on the threshold, behind a woman with her dress thrown up over her head; he took one hand off her hips and waved as Raj and his men reined in, without interrupting the rhythm of his thrusts. They jingled the long cartridges in the belts slung across his chest; for the rest, he wore the fringed leggings and beaded moccasins of his people's dress; the breechclout was thrown aside for the moment. Two-inch sauroid fangs were sewn onto his vest and tangled in the scalplock of hair that fell from the crown of his head to his waist; for the rest the head was as bald as an egg and brown as the rest of his body.

'Eh, my fren', amitu!' he called, in an atrocious mixture of Sponglish and Kanjuk. The woman squeaked as he finished in a flurry of grunts and withdrew. 'You sojer-man who mal cumme nus, bad like us! You wan' cushez cet fil, eh? She pretty good.' Massive, at least, which was how comeliness was measured among the northeastern nomads.

'Not right now, thank you,' Raj replied politely.

'Eh, good, you drink wit' me.' He gave the woman a ringing slap on her presented buttocks and stood, scratching his crotch energetically. 'Fetch drink, woman.'

She rose and scurried into the hut, returning with a clay jug. The Skinner drank noisily, liquid running down his chest, and handed the jug to Raj. Gritting his teeth and conscious of the beady eyes watching him, he took a healthy swig, spat a mouthful out.

'Dog piss,' he said politely, and drank again; thank the Spirit he'd had the foresight to stuff himself with bread soaked in olive oil before coming out here. The liquor was basically arak, a sort of gin distilled from dates; the additions were those traders dealing with the steppe had found popular, chili peppers, sprigs of wormwood and a little turpentine.

'Want eat?' the chief said, pulling a stick of dried meat from a bag hanging from the eaves.

'No,' Raj said: that was no breach of etiquette among Skinners, they could gorge and then go for days without a bite, as indifferent to hunger as they were to any other physical discomfort.

'So,' the barbarian said, the formalities having been satisfied. 'What you want, sojer-man? Mez gars, my men, they no kill any more farmers?'

Not since we took to shipping the liquor up here by the wagonload, Raj thought. That was a solution of limited use, though: he wanted them alive when Tewfik got here. On the whole, he wished that the Minister of Barbarians had been a little less efficient in moving the Skinners across the Civil Government and down to the frontier; it would have been more convenient had they arrived later. Most troops benefited from extra training, but if you kept Skinners in one place too long all they did was rot. On the other hand, there was no knowing exactly when the Colonists would make their move, now that the campaigning season was open.

'There are to be fireworks tonight,' he said. The chief frowned, scratching himself again and tying on the