Seg the Bowman (3 page)

The aerial onslaught of the drikingers pressed on. Seg found more and more difficulty in selecting a target who was not involved in handstrokes.

“I can’t just stand here, Milsi. You constrain me.”

“Look, Seg,” her voice remained firm, the quaver bravely concealed. “Here come three of them to kill us.”

“Three,” grumped Seg, and shot, flick, flick, flick. “Now, Milsi, please. Either go into the jungle or—”

“I think,” and there was a comfortableness in her tone. “I think the jungle is much more dangerous. You will not be there.”

“Women,” said Seg, and sought a target.

He reached up to his quiver, and groped, and brought out a rose-fletched arrow. After nocking it, he reached up and felt, carefully. There was but the one shaft left, and he knew that was a blue-fletched one of the supply with which he’d begun.

He saw Exandu, swishing and swashing, and complaining away. With a quick snap-shot, Seg disposed of the bandit about to jump on Shanli, dropping him a mere foot short of his target. The blood in Seg demanded a more direct participation... He did not nock the blue-fletched arrow. He slid the bow up his left shoulder. He half-turned.

“Milsi! I must go to Exandu’s aid. The time for shooting is past. Now, you must—”

“I must go with you, Seg!”

There was no time for anything further. The sounds of combat boiled menacingly in the jungle clearing.

The raw harsh stink of spilled blood broke through the jungle scents and the aromas of cooking. Shrieks and yells, the tinker-hammer of steel upon steel, the puddling of blood in the trampled mud beneath... Seg ripped out his sword and flung himself forward. Milsi followed hard in his footsteps.

He was barely in time.

Exandu, for all his moaning and groaning, could handle his heavy single-edged blade. But he was not in the same class as the guards, or the bandits.

Seg reached him in time to chop a man down, jump over him and skewer another as he was in the act of bringing an axe down on Exandu’s undefended head.

For a brief instant, the fight ebbed away as the two dropped. Seg looked about, glaring, worked up.

Exandu emitted a groaning laugh, a weak splutter.

“I think they run.”

And it was so.

Milsi did not seem to see the corpses strewn everywhere about the clearing. She possessed a serenity in moments of crisis that warmed Seg. He knew practically nothing of her, of her life, her history, and it was most positively certain that she knew nothing of his. Yet, as Kregans say, they had been shafted by the same bolt of lightning at the moment of their meeting. If fate was to be held responsible, then fate would rejoice in their meeting. In the great circle of vaol-paol, the infinite circle of existence, they had met and the circle was complete.

The remaining bandits scrambled into their saddles. The brunnelleys fluttered and scooped wingfuls of air, soared flapping aloft. The birds whose riders had been slain joined in the departure.

“By Vox!” said Seg. He leaped for the nearest bird.

His clutching fingers almost reached the dangling clerketer, the harness which held the rider securely upon the saddle. The bird twitched a beady eye on him, reared away, flapped his wings madly. With a gouting of broken stems and leaves and detritus, the bird was airborne. He lifted away and as he went he let rip a squawk that, to Seg at least, came as a mocking screech of triumph.

“Bad cess to it!” shouted Seg. He stood, hands on hips, head upflung, staring as the birds bore away through the radiance of the twin suns.

Walking across to him, Milsi also looked up.

“You know about these wonderful birds, Seg?”

“Something.”

“They are very strange to us here in Pandahem. Yet I have heard of them, of birds and animals that carry people through the sky. And now I have seen them. I wonder where they could have come from?”

“From Cottmer’s Caverns, that’s where, the damned unnatural things.” Hop the Intemperate looked up, and in his face the look was one of bafflement. “What could you have done with one, Pantor Seg, had you caught it?”

“Why,” said Seg, surprised. “Flown the thing, of course. What else?”

“You can fly a bird?”

Seg sobered. He made himself hum and haw.

“We-ell — I could have tried!”

“You’d have fallen off. A copper ob to a golden crox, you’d have toppled head over heels.”

“Aye,” agreed Seg, routine caution at last returning to him. “Aye, Hop. Probably.”

The fact that the jungle clearing lay encumbered with corpses had different effects upon each of the people there. Most were inured by terrors to a dour acceptance of what might befall. They gave thanks to their various gods that they were not numbered among the slain.

As for clearing up—

“Leave them all,” ordered Strom Ornol, striding about, still wrought up, brilliant and commanding. “Pack everything we need at once. We are leaving now.”

“Strom Ornol!” Exandu waddled up. Shanli was busily cleaning his single-edged sword. “We cannot leave our poor fellows unburied, unhallowed.”

“We can. The jungle will bury them for us. You know that.”

“I know that. But it is not right—”

“Then you may remain here and perform your religious observances, while we march through the Snarly Hills and out of here.”

“As to that—”

Seg took no part in this altercation. Like any professional warrior, any Bowman of Loh, he went about the clearing seeking his targets. He drew his knife. Cutting the arrows out had to be done carefully. He might hack a chunk of flesh away, all bloody and dripping; he had to harden himself against that. The most important item was not to damage the arrow.

Milsi did not join him during this proceeding.

During this recovery process, Seg took automatic reckoning of his shots, their effect, the accuracy of his aim.

He realized as he worked that he missed the wagers he and his old dom would have as they shot in the midst of combat. That was not a cruel or insensitive habit. They understood perhaps a little more of what possessed a man in a battle than most. There was absolutely no doubt in Seg’s mind, no doubt whatsoever, that he sorely missed his blade comrade, the man these people called the Bogandur.

Kalu and his Pachaks did what any sensible mercenary would do, and helped themselves to the best of their fallen enemy’s weaponry.

“Although, Seg, these drikingers use parlous poor weapons. All Krasny work. Look at this spear! The point wouldn’t puncture a maiden—”

“Aye, Kalu. And their bows, which to our untold advantage they did not use, are crossbows.”

Kalu laughed his Pachak laugh.

“You are not a crossbowman, Seg.”

“Oh,” sniffed Seg. “I have been known to use a crossbow.”

The expedition had lost a number of guards in this fight. The slaves had run screaming, and now some of them returned. Some appeared to have run too far into the jungle, for they did not return. Ornol expressed his great distaste. “If they are a monster’s breakfast, that is what serves them right. But it leaves us short of porters.”

Seg could not stop himself.

“We’re only carrying treasure, after all.”

Ornol’s pallid face turned on him like the head of a dinosaur above the swampy vegetation, seeking prey.

“You are above taking treasure, are you? You can joke about so important a matter? Perhaps you can afford to be disdainful of gold and gems, Seg the Horkandur!”

Milsi put a hand neatly on Seg’s arm.

“Oh, no, pantor. It is not that. Seg but thinks of the provisions we must carry to take us safely through the perils of the Snarly Hills.”

“As for me,” quoth Exandu, scarlet, puffing, “I can barely drag my poor old bones along. Oh, how my joints ache! They are on fire — Shanli—”

“I am here, master, with a potion of Mistress Cliomin’s Marrow Virtue — you will be eased in no time.”

“Oh, Shanli — you are my treasure!”

“And that,” said Seg, sotto voce to Milsi, “is Erthyr’s sweet truth!”

The slaves set to to pack up the camp.

“Erthyr?” said Milsi. “That is—”

“He is the Supreme Being,” Seg told her. “Well, of Erthyrdrin, that is. You believe in Pandrite, of course, being of Pandahem?”

“Of course. I do not call myself an overly religious woman. But I know of the power religion can afford.

Pandrite is the most powerful god in Pandahem, as Armipand is the most powerful devil. But there are many other gods and many other pantheons. I have heard you speak of Vox, and of Opaz—”

“Aye.”

She half-lifted one eyebrow at him; he did not elaborate.

They walked a little apart from the others, for Seg carried everything he possessed with him. Like him, Milsi had no retainers. What they could not carry they could not have.

In the end the adventurers sorted out their bundles.

Slaves carried more than slaves cared to carry. The guards, with a deal of haggling over increased rates of pay, agreed to carry bundles. The threat of the pack of toilcas remained with everyone. If that eerie witch woman in her throne could detect them and direct the bandits to them, surely she might do the same for the toilcas?

“She looked at each one of us,” said Fregeff. Rik Razortooth upon his shoulder stirred a membranous wing and crept forth from the sorcerer’s voluminous hood. “She searched for someone, that is clear.”

“Well, we’re all here,” pointed out Kalu. He and his men were loaded with loot. That was their profession, venturing into tombs for treasure. They were good at their chosen task in life.

“Perhaps she looked for someone she knew, a friend, or something,” said Exandu, a trifle querulously.

“And when she saw us she didn’t like us hanging about here.”

“And we are not hanging about for long!” Ornol had unearthed a whip from his baggage, and now he cracked this with a fearsome bang.

“March! We put a long distance between us and this devilish Coup Blag before nightfall. March!”

Idly, Seg wondered what might happen if the strom accidentally flicked one of the principals with that whip. Or, come to that, if in his arrogant way he mistook a guard under a bundle for a porter and tickled him up...

That should prove amusing, at the least, by Orestorio with the Broken String!

During the fight the Lady Ilsa, Strom Ornol’s traveling companion, had hidden beneath a heaped-up pile of baggage. Her corn-colored hair had never recovered from her experiences, along with the others of the expedition, in the Coup Blag, and was now a fluffy yellow mass badly in need of the attentions of a first-class hairdresser. The neatness of Milsi’s hair, the severe smartness of Shanli’s, were in marked contrast.

Shanli carried her accustomed burdens. Milsi had taken a part of Exandu’s baggage, after a sidelong look at Seg, who humped along with a massive chest on his shoulder, out of the way of his bowstave.

That chest was Exandu’s. They owed the merchant nothing, of course; they carried these things out of comradeship.

The Lady Ilsa walked along freely, the new clothes she had discovered in the bandits’ hideout flowing about her, her head up, unencumbered.

Well, Seg reflected not a little sourly, the silly girl fancied she was a great lady, and the very first time he’d met her she’d treated him like a slave, like dirt.

The memory cheered him up and he smiled. Milsi observed this. She did not sigh. She did realize that this craggy man with the smooth suppleness of a superb athlete had a past, just as she had. She felt for him sensations new and strange to her. She might not be frightened — too much — by a ferocious onslaught of drikingers out to slay the men and capture the women; she was deeply disturbed by her own fascination with Seg and by the turmoil of her feelings. She consciously used the word turmoil, for that word was often quoted by the poets, and used in the many plays she loved, to denote a woman’s perplexities.

A turmoil of emotions had never meant much to her before, rather, she had experienced anger and resentment, for her life had not been easy. Now she was beginning to grasp a little at what the poets meant.

For a woman in her position to fall in love — actually to commit that gross folly! — would be disastrous.

And to fall in love with a wild, reckless, headstrong warrior of fortune would be the stupidest act of all.

So the expedition set off and left the horrors of the Coup Blag and struck boldly down into the Snarly Hills.

The bold expedition had set off, full of high hopes, from the tavern called The Dragon’s Roost in Selsmot.

That was a small place, a stockaded area of thatched huts and houses, open and free to the air, rather grand, all things considered, to aspire to the title of town. The smot in the name might cause offense or ridicule in other folk more used to the smots of civilized places out of the jungle.

“I do not particularly wish to go to Selsmot,” said Milsi quietly to Seg as they traipsed along a vague trail through the jungle.

“Oh? Well, everyone else started from The Dragon’s Roost, and naturally they wish to return there.

From Selsmot I suppose they’ll all go off home.”

“Or to more adventuring. The Pachaks, for whom I have a high regard, are indeed a most interesting party. Fancy! They make their living going around and robbing tombs—”

Seg cleared his throat.

“I’m not sure they’d appreciate your dubbing their profession a robbery. They don’t just dig up graves and take away the grave-goods. Far from it. They venture into dungeons and caverns and perils where the owners set traps, both physical and sorcerous, to slay them. I’d say they earn their living. And, anyway, the whole business is a kind of game.”

The trail wended past immense trees, each one isolated by its own capacity to discourage rival growths, and the way was relatively easy. Milsi looked up at Seg, and shook her head, and tut-tutted.

“When someone is out to kill me, I hardly call that a game!”

“It’s not an unreasonable way of looking at it, though. At least, it helps to take the edge off the horror.”