The Tritonian Ring and Other Pasudian Tales (32 page)

             
"Oh, come along! I will help you," said Vakar, though in his heart he knew that men seldom recovered from a deep abdominal stab.

             
"No, go. It will do you no good to drag me, for I shall be dead soon, and you will merely get yourself killed if you try."

             
Muttering, Vakar tore the head-cloak and veil off the dead Gwedulian and put them on. Under them the nomad was a lean dark man,
physically much like the Gampha
sants, with his head shaved except for a scalp-lock. Vakar also took the man's sandals, but left the corpse its breech-clout, feeling squeamish about putting so foul a garment against his own skin. He appropriated the buckler, the ax with the head of polished stone, and the spear. Then he took Abeggu by the arm and tried to drag him down the corridor, but the man shrieked, crying:

             
"Go on, fool! You can do nothing for me!"

             
Vakar gave up and hurried out the door, feeling a mixture of guilt at leaving Abeggu and relief at not having to haul the wounded man to safety.

             
In front of the entrance knelt the Gwedu
li
an's
dromedary.
Vakar glanced
up and down the street. Gampha
santian corpses lay here and
th
ere, and other Gwedulians rode hither and thither in pursuit of live victims, riding them down with their lances or hurling javelins into their backs. A swirl of pursuers and pursued raced past Vakar while the camel sat placidly chewing its cud. A hundred paces upstreet a knot of dismounted Gwedulians was raping a woman
seriatim.

             
Vakar
approached the camel in gingerly fashion. The beast looked at Vakar from under long eyelashes, its jaw moving with a rotary motion. A wooden frame fitted over the hump on its back, with a foot-long piece of wood sticking up in front. A kind of blanket was fastened over and under this frame, and from the sides of this saddle hung a quirt, a quiver of flint-tipped javelins, a large goatskin booty-bag, and smaller bags containing food and water.

             
Vakar gathered up his meager booty and climbed on to the camel's back, trying to assume the Gwedulians' posture. The Tahakh and the ax he dropped into the large bag.
But how to make the creature go?
Several commands produced no result; he knew no Gwedulian. Finally he unhooked the quirt and struck the camel on the rump. Nothing happened, so he punched the beast with his fist.

             
The camel's hindquarters rose with such suddenness that Vakar was pitched off its back on to his head in the roadway. He saw stars and wondered for an instant if his neck were broken. When he rolled over and got to his feet the camel was standing beside him, still chewing. Its legs were hobbled with a tackle of braided rawhide to keep it from running away.

             
Now how should he mount the creature without a ladder? He tried speaking to it and tapping it here and there with the whip, hoping to persuade it to kneel again, but the camel stood masticating while the wrack of conquest and massacre swirled past it.

             
At last Vakar untied the hobble, planted the Gwedulian spear in the ground, and hauled himself up hand over hand, kicking and straining. He took hold of the spear and whacked
th
e camel with
the
whip, whereupon it grunted and started up with a jerk that nearly unseated him for the second time. He found that a camel did not trot: it paced, jerking its rider from side to side until Vakar thought he would fly to pieces. In his present bruised and battered state the motion was torture. He clung to the post in front of the saddle, and by sawing on the reins got his mount headed out of Tokalet.

             
The sounds of massacre died away behind Vakar as the camel racked along the road that followed the shore of Lake Kokutos southward.

-

             
Vakar Zhu rode along the margin of Lake Kokutos seldom seeing a living person. Sometimes he passed through a village, but it was either deserted or Gamphasant corpses lay about, showing that the Gwedulians had arrived before the inhabitants had time to flee. In the stifling heat the bodies became noisome in a few hours, so that Vakar learned to detour such settlements.

             
The few live Gamphasants he saw fled screaming at the sight of his head-cloak. Bands of camel-riding Gwedulians paid him no heed save to call an occasional hail. When he came upon a group of them in a sacked village he stopped to watch them manage their camels. When he rode on he at least knew the tongue clicks used to make the animals kneel and rise.

             
When the food in the Gwedulian's provision-bag ran low, Vakar killed an abandoned cow and, using the copper head of his lance and his stone ax, cut the more accessible portions of the meat into narrow strips across the grain. After hours of sweaty work he hung a hundred pounds of these strips on the camel's saddle to dry. Thereafter until the beef was jerked at the end of the following day he rode amidst an opaque cloud of buzzing flies and blessed the voluminous head-cloak for keeping most of them off his person. He would have preferred a nice compact pig, but the Gamphasants did not seem to keep them. In fact he had not seen a pig, barring the big wild tuskers of the inland savannas, since leaving Phaiaxia. When the beef was dried he scraped the flies' eggs off it with his nails and stowed it in his bags.

             
Vakar had always been accustomed to travelling with a lavish equipage of spare clothes, toilet-articles, weapons, and trade-metal, and one or more menials to carry the stuff. Now that the Gamphasants had stripped him down to
fundamentals he learned that one can live on a much simpler level, with practically no worldly goods save a supply of food or means for getting it. He never learned to like it, though. He missed Fual keenly.

             
Because of the terror incited by his costume he had less trouble on this leg of his journey with men than with his mount. Though a tame and tireless beast, able to eat anything in the plant line, it was also stupid and unresponsive, quite apt unless watched to stop short in the middle of a morning's run, fold its long legs (pitching Vakar over its head) and set
tl
e down to a placid session of cud-chewing.

             
By painful experiment Vakar mastered the art of camelitation. To make the camel go one waved the whip where the animal could see it; to stop it one pulled the reins and hit the beast over the head with the butt of the whip. Its racking pace was hard enough; its walk was worse, bouncing less but jerking the rider back and forth and from side to side in a labyrinthine pattern; while its gallop was impossible to endure for any time.

             
Vakar missed Fual and somberly pondered on the bloodshed that had dogged his track. Surely the gods had it in for him. Nearly everybody who had been friendly to him—Queen Aramn
ê
, Fual, and Abeggu of Tokalet—had come to a violent end. What curse lay upon him? He was not a bloodthirsty man, but one who only asked to be allowed to go about his business in
peace
...

             
As Vakar neared the southwest end of Lake Kokutos the farms thinned out and the signs of Gwedulian violence ended. Vakar took off the stifling face-veil and stopped the camel within earshot of a goatherd who did not seem to have heard of the invasion, for he did not run away. With their few words in common and much sign-language Vakar learned that beyond the end of the lake a track continued across the sandy wastes to the Oasis of Kiliessa, and beyond that one came to the Akheron River which flowed to the sea. The goatherd had never heard of Tartaros and its black craftsmen, but Vakar was sure that he could find that region once he reached the Western Ocean.

-

             
Two days later Vakar rode over a rise into sight of the Oasis of Kiliessa. A glance showed human beings moving among the palms. Tired of hearing no voices but the yap of jackals, the laugh of hyenas, and the gargling groans and grunts of his camel, he rode rapidly down the slope with a hail on his lips.

             
As he neared the oasis there was a stir of activity and mounted figures came out towards him: three men on asses, beating their beasts along. As they came nearer the leading rider nocked an arrow and let fly just as he passed the camel. The shaft grazed Vakar's face, tearing a two-inch gash in his cheek at the edge of his beard.

             
Vakar was so caught by surprise that he did not even try to dodge the arrow, but then he moved quickly. The second and third men each held a bundle of javelins in one hand and poised a single such dart in the other as they came closer. The second man's javelin struck the saddle-frame. Vakar, holding the saddle-post with one hand, leaned over and drove his lance into the third man just as the latter threw. The javelin went wild and the man's ass continued its rocking gallop, the man clawing at the spear so that the shaft was wrenched out of Vakar's hand.

             
Vakar turned the camel around, slipped the ostrich-hide buckler over his forearm, and started back towards his assailants, pulling Gwedulian javelins out of their quiver. The first two attackers had turned also. As they came close again each loosed a missile as Vakar threw two in quick succession. Vakar caught the arrow with his shield; the other foe's javelin struck the camel. One of Vakar's javelins missed while the other struck the archer's donkey, which bucked with such violence that it pitched its rider off into the sand.

             
The man whom Vakar had speared had now fallen off his ass. The remaining rider took to flight, galloping off into the desert. The archer got up and started to run. The Lorskan followed him, throwing flint-headed javelins until the man collapsed with five of the things sticking in his
back. Then Vakar
knelt
his camel, walked over to the man, and brained him with the stone ax.

             
Vakar took stock. The man he had speared lay dying with bloody froth running from his mouth. The wounded ass was disappearing over the sky-line, while the un-wounded one had fallen to nibbling on a desert shrub. Vakar examined the camel and found the stone-pointed javelin stuck into the shoulder-muscle. He pulled the dart out; the camel bled a
little
but chewed its cud without appearing to notice the wound.

             
Vakar picked up his spear and cautiously approached the palm-trees. The other human occupants of the oasis comprised twelve naked Negroes: nine men and three women, fastened together by means of a set of wooden yokes strung together like a chain. One named Yoju spoke some Hesperian, the universal trading-language of the coasts of the Western Sea. Yoju explained:

             
"We are from between the Rivers Akheron and Stoux, but inland from that land you call Tartaros. The chief of the Abiku (
may
his wives bear scorpions) enslaved us and sold us to these traders, who were taking us to
Kernê
. We hope your lordship will not slay us."

             
Vakar asked: "Why did the traders attack me?"

             
"Because they greatly fear Gwedulians, who slay all who come across their path.
Thinking you a scout for a party of raiders, they thought their only chance was to kill you before you could fetch your fellows."

             
More useless bloodshed! Vakar leaned upon his spear in thought. He could use a couple of stout slaves and would have had no great compunction about so employing these people. But as a practical matter he could not use all of them, for being afoot they would slow him to a walk. They would be of lit
tl
e use chained, and if he unshackled them they would likely murder him in his sleep and flee. Even if Vakar had been willing to butcher all but one of the Negroes in cold blood (which he was not) that one might still stave in his skull with a stone some night.

             
"What," he asked, "would you do if you had your choice?"

             
"Return to our homes!"