I handed the spyglass back.
“Nothing, save the trees. But—”
“Yes? What was it?”
I took a breath.
Seg believed I’d seen something.
“Like a flock of birds—”
“All right. Nothing unusual in that.”
“Agreed. But at this distance — they must have been large—”
“Saddle birds?”
Seg’s tone was sharp.
“Aye.”
He looked seriously at me, his fey blue eyes regarding me calmly. “Pandahem does not have flyers.”
“I know. So that means...”
“I’ll cast loose the guidance ropes. We’ll be ready to go down at once.”
“Good.”
I stared eagerly at the airboat ahead.
But — but the wretched thing just went sailing on, flying high and fast, going pelting along. She just flew over whatever mysteries lay beneath. Perforce, we followed.
Taking up the spyglass I leaned over the coaming and studied the ground underneath. Rather — the tops of the trees...
Anything could be concealed under that luxuriant foliage. We hurtled out over the rounded top of a hill, and on the far side a fair-sized lake opened out. The water was as brown as the waters of the River of Bloody Jaws. A few islands studded the surface. There were no boats. A few birds quarreled on a brown mud spit. The suns light glinted up off the water. Sounds rose, the birds, the roars of hunting beasts, the distant splash of water I took to be a waterfall.
Swiveling, as our voller flashed on, I looked aft.
The edge of the hill fell sheer into the lake. It was buttressed by tall columns of rock, grey and weather-beaten and festooned with lianas. Birds cavorted here, too. A spume of white mist was just visible over a rising shaft of rock.
Even in the rush of the breeze, the strong and pungent smell of flowers stung my nostrils.
“Spiny Ribcrushers,” said Seg. “Like syatras.”
“They smell — juicy.”
“That’s right. They’ll melt you down to your boot soles.”
The lake whisked away below, the tall buttresses of rock vanished aft. Ahead the voller bore on steadily. The rain forest started on the very edge of the lake, and continued, unbroken. Probably there was a small tributary down there.
Seg put the control levers back on the guidance ropes and presently he called: “The hills are flattening out ahead. And we have the river back.”
It was clear that the River of Bloody Jaws, coursing down to the southeast, made a vast loop to go around this outcropping of hills.
I stared ahead, far into the distance.
There was no sign of the Central Mountains.
Still the voller sailed on.
At the apex of the curve of the river where it turned to skirt the jumbled upheaval of forest-clad hills stood a town. As we flashed past above we could see the town was stockaded, small but neat, with jetties extending into the river. There was no sign of a single vessel. Smoke rose and the smells of cooking lifted. Seg made a face and rubbed his stomach.
“Old Frandor told me they were a devilishly mixed bunch here, with screaming cannibals in one valley and a high level of civilization in the next. Something to do with the difficulties of communication after the old empire went.”
“We saw something of that in the Hostile Territories — Seg? You remember?”
And then I wished I hadn’t mentioned the Hostile Territories of Turismond and thus brought up memories of our adventures there. Delia and me — and Seg and Thelda. I said at once, “Look! The fellow’s turning!”
Whatever made the voller carrying Pancresta choose that moment to turn, I blessed. Whatever it was saved me from a nasty moment.
Seg said, “He’s turning gently — now what is he up to?”
We began to edge out to starboard to cross the angle of the other flier’s turn and so meet him. But he was a clever flier and kept away, using all his speed, turned so that soon we were heading directly back the way we had come.
And, still, we followed.
But we had narrowed the gap considerably. If only we’d had a couple of db’s more speed — but that was foolish. If we’d had those, we’d have caught Pancresta hours ago.
The reciprocal course was taking us away to one side of the town over which we had passed. Speeds in the air are phenomenal if compared with speeds on land.
Seg abruptly stiffened. The spyglass twitched and was held, rigid. He stared ahead.
Then he said, “You were right about the saddle flyers.”
Of course! Pancresta’s flier had shot on ahead, over that lake and the rearing columns of rock where I’d imagined I’d seen flyers. The voller had drawn us on, and then gently turned, taking all the time needed, and reversed course. The saddle flyers had risen in a cloud to follow.
And now we were heading smack back into them.
Very carefully, I said, “I think Pancresta will escape. I count thirty birds. By the time we’ve finished with them, she’ll be gone.”
“I think you are right.” Seg picked up his two longbows, letting the spyglass fall. He looked at each one. “We’ll feather them, all of them, I have no doubt. But that scheming woman will be vanished.”
“We know where to, though. We’ll find her.”
“Aye, my old dom. We’ll catch up with her, in due time. But, now—” And here Seg selected a bow and drew it gently, and so took an arrow and set nock to string, “—now we have a fight on our hands.”
Seg Quenches a Fire
Shooting through the windrush of a voller’s flight is a truly difficult business. Seg had little difficulty aiming with the uncanny marksmanship of a Master Bowman of Loh. Seg had finished off my training as a bowman, after my ferocious Clansmen of Segesthes had taken me in hand, and I tried to match Seg, shaft for shaft.
“One gold piece, Dray, or — perchance — three?”
The wind caught at his dark hair, tumbled the locks over his forehead. His fey blue eyes challenged me right heartily. The wind blew, the hostile saddle birds dropped upon us — and, as ever, Seg was out for a wager or two, a side bet on the outcome in addition to our own lives.
“Three, I think,” I said with a judiciousness that brought a delighted curl to Seg’s lips.
Up aloft the birds winged in.
They sparkled with light. Radiance reflected from burnished accoutrements. The leading saddle flyer bore brilliant golden ornamentation over his breast feathers. That gold would be wafer-thin, beaten out into hollow shapes, strapped on with narrow leather bands. His wings held stiff in the attacking dive.
Seg sniffed, looking up. “Brunnelleys,” he said. He held the new bow down, relaxed, the shaft crossing the stave and beginning that smooth draw of the master bowman.
The wind buffeted into our faces. The birds up there, gaudy of color in mauves and blues and browns, with yellow beaks and scarlet clawed feet — all four legs bore claws — swooped with that eager pounce of the brunnelley. Powerful saddle birds, brunnelleys, and like just about any other kind of saddle flyer, unknown in the island of Pandahem.
“Aye. And the riders are not flutsmen, either.”
“No. I fancy Spikatur has a hand in this.” And then Seg lifted the bow, drew and loosed.
The shaft missed.
I looked not so much amused as dumbfounded.
In his turn, Seg looked at the bow. His brows drew down. He pursed up his lips. I shot and put a shaft through the wing of a brunnelley which wasn’t going to do the bird a great deal of harm.
Seg threw the bow down into the bottom of the voller.
He picked up the other bowstave, and shook it.
“Thus do the prideful take a tumble, and the mighty are cast down. The stave does not cast true.”
I knew he had no stupid boastfulness in equating himself with pride and mightiness; just that the aphorism fit and appealed to our sense of humor. With his second cast he sent the shaft clean through the breast of the rider.
The fellow screeched and fell off, to dangle all upside down in the straps of his clerketer under his bird’s tail feathers.
“H’m,” quoth Seg. “That is marginally better,” and so shot again, thwack thump and sent a shaft clean through the eye of the next.
I tried to match my companion; but when Seg got himself into a paddy and shot with real intent, there was no man alive on two worlds, I devoutly believe, who came within a million dwaburs of him.
We began to take the diving formation apart, and such was the ferocity of our shooting the plunging birds parted and screamed down with whistling feathers on either side of our voller.
That was merely round one.
In the brief respite before the next attack we glimpsed Pancresta’s flier diving steeply ahead, going down with tremendous speed to soar out over the river.
“They’re gone,” said Seg, arranging his next series of shafts in the quick-release sockets along the gunwale.
“Aye. For now.”
“Here they come again.”
Once more we shot sufficiently well to drive off the attack. Four shafts plunked into the woodwork of the voller, and a handful more cut through the canvas.
We were aware of height and wind and of rushing progress through the air. The Suns cast light and shadow, and the birds wheeled about us now, their riders shooting down. One or two cast javelins, but I made no attempt to snatch a javelin from the air and hurl it back. At this moment the bow was the superior weapon.
Our voller ploughed on, slowing down, surrounded by the furious cloud of birds.
“They thin out.” Seg shot and took up shaft and drew and shot again.
“True.”
I put my head over the coaming and looked down.
“The rasts.”
Half a dozen riders closed in on their birds, the wings beating perilously close together, aiming to strike up at our exposed underside.
Three quick shafts took three of them out; but the balance bored on. Golden ornaments glittered. The men riding the birds hunched in tightly buckled cloaks, not streaming flamboyantly, and their small round helmets gleamed with purpose. This group carried crossbows. A bolt punched up through the canvas past my nose, and I jumped back.
“I count that as three gold pieces to me,” said Seg, and he laughed.
“Indubitably.” I looked over again, in time to put a shaft into the nearest fellow. He looked up with the utmost surprise on his face, one-eyed, for the shaft through the other one impeded his vision somewhat.
He fell off his bird, and the brunnelley curved away, carrying the dangling rider like a pendulum clock.
Seg sniffed.
At once disabused of the notion that he was passing a comment on my shooting, I sniffed also.
We looked quickly about.
Shafts hissed in, to feather into the voller and start to turn her into a flying pincushion.
Smoke blew flatly back.
“They’ve set us afire, my old dom. But where is the flame?”
Smoke suddenly choked back in a great evil-smelling cloud.
“Wherever it is, the wind drives it flat, and the smoke obscures the source.”
Then I cursed myself for a ninny, a nincompoop, for the kind of man no captain of a seventy-four would ever employ as his first lieutenant. When I served in the Royal Navy of Nelson’s time we habitually doused fires before going into action, and sanded the decks, and took the utmost precautions against being set alight.
And, now, I’d just forgotten to douse the fire in the combustible box, and it had been struck by a shaft, and overturned, and set our voller aflame.
Even as this stupid, time-wasting self-recrimination echoed in my silly old vosk-skull of a head, the fire burst up and enveloped the voller. Flames blew flatly aft. Seg yelled.
He leaped for the controls and threw off the guidance ropes. He shoved the levers down and the flier’s nose dropped and we fell out of the sky like a brick.
A flashing glimpse of a bird, upside down and with a broken wing where we’d struck him — a man slashing with his long flexible aerial spear — another fellow loosing and his bolt splintering into the coaming under my nose — and then we were hurtling down and down toward the ground.
We had no flying safety belts. We’d have to ride the voller down.
“Hold on!” bellowed Seg.
A gusting mass of smoke and flame billowed up, a choking confused mass, orange and scarlet and black, coiling and hot — damned hot!
The spectacle we must have made from higher up as the men astride their brunnelleys looked down surely convinced them we were doomed.
I wasn’t too sure myself...
“Seg!” I bellowed.
My comrade towered amid the filthy smoke, enveloped in flame, a titanic figure of myth, of the time when men walked among volcanoes and leaped the fire-filled chasms in the earth.
He yelled back, and the words blustered past, lost amid wind and smoke and flame roar.
The trees reared up.
What Seg did with the controls was what any competent aerial pilot would do. He set them for a slanting impact, slowing the speed as much as he could, and then fastened the guidance ropes back on. But, being Seg Segutorio and a wild and fey fellow, he set the voller to a steeper angle than any more circumspect flier would risk.
We went skipping through the tops of the trees.
Tree branches thwacked at us, ripping canvas and gonging against wood.
Leaves fluttered up into our faces, birds squawked and flew for safety, a horde of little red spiders wafted off on balloons of silk. A leafy bough slashed at my head and I ducked and my helmet reverberated as though the Bells of Beng Kishi were all cracked and dissonant.
We toppled out of the last hoary heads of the trees and pitched for the brown river below.
The voller was now a roaring combustible mass and Seg and I crouched in the stern, shielding our faces, waiting for the moment of impact.
Seg gasped out: “I thought — the river — douse the flames—”
Before I could cough out an answer we hit.
We felt as though we’d leaped off a roof onto a brick factory. The thump rattled through the flier, through our backbones and shook the teeth in our jaws.
Water fountained up around us, like a flower’s petals, brown and silver, and we were hurled headlong into the water. Even then the hem of Seg’s tunic caught alight and hissed madly as he went under.