Madman's Army

Chapter I

Even while she emitted an almost-constant contrabasso rumble of contentment, Sunshine was conversing silently with her “brother,” Gil Djohnz, who was engaged in washing her in the shallows of the small river that flowed through the verdant croplands of the Duchy of Mehsees. Whenever Gil looked up and to the east, he could see the dirty smoke of the countless cooking-fires rising up from the city of Mehseepolis and the sprawl of the army camp that surrounded it.

A few yards away, three other elephants were being scrubbed by their own “brothers.” The nearest of these called herself Tulip. She was a bit taller and a few years older than Sunshine; her “brother” was a half brother of Gil—though Gil, being the son of his father’s premier wife, received Bili Djohnz’s deference, for Bill’s mother had been but a concubine when he was born. Just beyond Tulip lay a much smaller elephant, a young bull, only a little over four years old; this one called himself Dragonfly for some reason no man or beast had ever yet fathomed, and his “brother” was a nineteen-year-old cousin of Gil. On the bank, drying off from her own bath in the fitful wind and the hot sun, stood the largest of all four elephants, a tusked cow who had named herself Newgrass.

Although in traditional Ehleen armies only bulls were used as war-elephants, the smaller and mostly tuskless cows being relegated to heavy draught purposes, all three of these cows had served in numerous campaigns of the army of the Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee in armor and in the very thick of battle in the time before real, war-trained bulls had finally been sent from the Land of Elephants, the far-western duchies near the shores of the Upper Gulf.

Consequently, the tender grey skins of all three of the cows now bore honorable war scars—marks left them by the bite of sharp steel blades, the stabbing of spear-, dart- and arrow-points, the friction and pinching of harness and armor. Gil’s sensitive soul mourned once again whenever he saw and felt these scars, recalling as he then did the suffering of his huge but basically gentle “sister.”

For the umpteenth time, Sunshine beamed the question to Gil, “Brother-mine, is it really true, then? We really will leave for the land wherein Sunshine was calved, soon? We will really set out next week?”

“Yes, my sister,” he beamed back patiently, smiling to himself at the cow’s enthusiasm. “We will set out for the far-western duchies on next Monday … hopefully, but by Tuesday, at the latest, Sun and Wind willing. A way was found for us to circumvent the machinations of the Grand Strahteegos, who would have—had he been allowed his way—kept us here in virtual military slavery until I had a long beard as white as snow; kept us for no reason of which I can think, for now there are a full dozen huge, long-tusked bulls in the elephant-lines, along with men I have taught to mindspeak them, so the only uses that you and our sisters have been recently put to on campaign have been those of oversized draught-oxen—pulling siege-engines and wagons and the like—and I am of the mind that your war service earned you better than that.

“But now they tell me that that old man is finally dead, slain by one of his own officers when he went mad and attacked the leader of Council—him with a sword and a dirk and his chief unarmed. So now we are completely free to leave this dishonorable service to which he saw fit to relegate us and make our way to the land of your birth, with no longer any worry that armed horsemen might be sent galloping after to bring us back into odious and shameful bondage.”

He ceased to beam then as he concentrated on removing an embedded tick from deep within a fold of her right ear. He still was at it when an unexpected gush of cold river water struck his head and shoulders with enough force to rock him where he squatted, his consequent imbalance causing Sunshine a jab of pain. When he looked around, he quickly spied out the culprit, who already was refilling his trunk. “Dragonfly!” he beamed sternly. “Did you know that you just caused me to hurt your Auntie Sunshine?”

The dripping young bull shook his head and, while looking about for another, unaware target for his trunkful of water, beamed in a petulant manner, “Well, two-leg, if you don’t want to get wet, then hurry up, My mother and the rest won’t leave here until you’re done, and I want to go back to the elephant-lines, now!”

Knowing of old the futility of trying to either argue or reason with the stubborn, selfish young bull, Gil beamed to his cousin, “For the sake of Sacred Sun, Bert, come take this little beast in hand before I’m tempted to render him into army beef.”

But another reached the culprit before the young man; she bore him to the ground and belabored him with her trunk until he squealed shrilly, beaming pleas for mercy. But no sooner had his mother, Tulip, allowed him to rearise than he sidled swiftly out of her reach and taunted, “You don’t really hurt me. You don’t ever really hurt me, I just fool you into thinking you’re hurting me. But when I’m all grown up and as big as Brohntos, then I’ll hurt you, I’ll crush your bones and stab my tusks into you until you’re very sorry you ever tried to hurt me when I was smaller than you are. You’ll see, Mother! You …”

At that point, the beastlet was again hurled flat on one side and Newgrass, who had had a few calves of her own, over the years, belabored him until there could be no question but that his shrieks and squeals were those of true and intense pain. When Bert Djohnz came over, the little bull was more than willing to get up and leave the vicinity of his grim Auntie Newgrass with his two-leg brother.

Worriedly, Gil beamed to Sunshine, “Dragonfly disturbs me, sister-mine; he is stubborn, willful, selfish and vindictive. Now, while he’s only four feet or so at the withers and has not more weight than four or five men, he’s not really very dangerous, but as he grows, I fear he’ll become so deadly he’ll have to be either run off or killed, and I love my sister’s kind, Sunshine, I don’t want to see any of them hurt.”

The recumbent elephant raised her trunk to tenderly caress the man kneeling on her side with its sensitive, fingerlike tip. “Yes, man-Gil, Sunshine knows how much you love her and her sisters. She loves you deeply and so, too, do Tulip and Newgrass … and even that little bull, Dragonfly, he loves Gil Djohnz, brother-of-elephants.

“The way that Dragonfly behaves and misbehaves and threatens, none of it is really his fault, brother-mine; rather it is because he is growing up with only mature elephants, not naturally, in a herd environment, with others of his own age with whom he can prank and play and fight and slowly establish just what will be his place when at last he is himself mature. When we reach my place of birth, he will have a herd and you will see a great change in him, brother.”

As he mounted Sunshine after she had dried and was ready to return to the Elephant-Lines in camp, Gil saw on the distant road a galloper raising a plume of dust as he spurred hard toward the city, a string of remounts racing after him. From this distance, Gil could not be certain, but he thought that that many remounts would only be brought along by a Horseclans galloper.

Even while Gil and his elephants were wending their slow, unhurried way back to camp, Sub-chief Djaimz Baikuh, drooping in his saddle with weariness, approached the city gate, identified himself, and was granted entry and given a guide to conduct him to the one-time ducal palace, now become a labyrinthine complex of old and new buildings and housing the Council of Thoheeksee and their staffs, plus all of the bureaucrats and functionaries necessary to the newly established government.

Thoheeks Mahvros convened the meeting of those other thoheeksee who had happened to be in or near to the palace-citadel complex. All who hurried to answer the urgent summons for the emergency meeting were obliged to rack swords and leave other cutlery in the new receptacles located just outside the doors of the chamber, then submit to searches for hidden weapons by the guards, but vividly recalling the terrible events of the third-from-last meeting of the Council, the objections were few and weak.

Thoheeks Grahvos commented, “Mahvros, we can’t cast valid votes on any matter of real importance— there’re only eleven of us here.”

Mahvros shook his head. “There’s no need I can see to vote on anything, important or unimportant. This meeting was convened only to officially notify you all that the replacements for Captain Chief Pawl Vawn’s squadron of Horseclanner archers is a few days east of

Thrahkohnpolis and will be here within a fortnight or less.”

He paused and took a deep, deep breath. “With them rides Milos Morai, High Lord of the Confederation of Eastern Peoples, our overlord … in case anyone had forgotten. You’d best all start putting your personal affairs and those of your vassals and desmenes in proper order for his perusal or that of whomever he decides to make our prince and ahrkeethoheeksee.”

“Now just wait a minute!” yelped Thoheeks Vikos, agitatedly. “I thought one of the prime agreements when this Council of Thoheeksee was first established was that it was being established to prevent the further proliferation of despotic kings to sit on thrones and grind us all down until we could take no more and rose up against them in bloody, costly rebellions. To my mind, a prince is no better than just another name for a tyrannical …”

Thoheeks Grahvos slapped one horny palm on the table and roared, “Enough, now, dammit, Vikos! Do I have to shake sense into your hot head again today? In this instance, ‘prince’ is simply what the High Lord chooses to title his satrapeeosee, his highest-ranking deputies, who rule but only in his name and that of the Confederation.”

“What of these ahrkeethoheeksee, Grahvos?” asked another of the men. “Will they be of us or northerners put over us?”

Grahvos shrugged. “I couldn’t say, my lord, though I would imagine that the ahrkeethoheeksee, at least, will be chosen from among the present thoheeksee and possibly the prince will, too … but I would rather that we weren’t and I mean to tell the High Lord precisely that, and in just those words.”

Young Thoheeks Pennendos looked stunned, appalled. “My lord, my lord, you mean you’d see our overlord put some alien over us before one of our own blood and breeding?”

“And damned right, too!” rumbled Thoheeks Bahos’ deep voice. “And if he didn’t advise just that, then I would, too. Maybe you’re too young to remember, but I’m not—thoheeksee fighting like gutter curs over some stinking piece of offal, hiring on warbands, taking plowmen out of the croplands to push pikes and die in trying to forward a claim to the crown and office no better than some score of others. And one Bahos right along with them, too, infected by the same cursed plague of ambition as they. That pest is apparently endemic to our blood, my boy, and that’s why we dare not see one of us made prince of this land.”

Mahvros looked down the table to Thoheeks Sitheeros, saying, “My lord, for some reason, the High Lord has indicated a desire to meet your elephant-master, the man Rikos Laskos, so you must immediately summon him to Mehseepolis. As for me, I can be glad that at least we finally got the new guest wing of the complex completed last year; otherwise, we’d all have to be moving out of suites and in with each other or down into the army camp for the duration of the High Lord’s stay amongst us, here. Now, at last, you all know just why Thoheeks Grahvos pushed that project so hard during his last year of tenure as Council Chairman and I during the earlier months of mine own.”

Thoheeks Fraiklinos of Fraiklinospolis declared, “Well, I for one would be more than happy to see this nebulous overlord of ours even if it meant sleeping and biding in a pigsty for the next year. Something has got to be done about the raids against mine and the other western duchies, and our own reorganized fleet just does not seem capable of doing more than helping to pick up the pieces long after the damned foreign raiders are gone back to wherever they lair up.”

Grahvos sighed. “Yes, our current fleet—if I can call it that!—indeed sorely lacks experienced senior officers, thanks to Zastros’ prize nautikos and his idiotic idea of taking on the whole fleet of the Ehleen pirates off the Lumbuh River delta. It would seem that not even one veteran naval officer survived that debacle. And of course any who swam ashore there would’ve been taken and tormented to death by the bestial fen-men.

“Such as we have are young men learning as they go along, and I fear it will take time to season them in command positions, none of which is of much help or solace to you and your folk of the western thoheekseeahnee, my lord; just remember as you curse and revile them, that for all their present ineptitude, they are trying.”

“You’re damned right they’re trying!” grated Fraiklinos. “Very trying indeed, are they!”

“Well,” Grahvos said, “I do know that our overlord has a large and fine fleet in his Confederation; it is, in fact, none other than the fleet that destroyed the best part of the fleet of Zastros, the fleet of Prince Alexandros Pahpahs, Lord of the Ehleen Pirate Isles. Perhaps a reformed pirate will be what it takes to put paid to this worrisome host of active pirates, eh?”

Fraiklinos grumped. “At this point, my lord, I’d be more than willing to try a fleet of demons and apes; certain sure, they would be of more real help than our so-called fleet; they could in no way be more useless.”

Where once, as late as three hundreds of years— scarcely an eyeblink of geological time—before, had been green, verdant lands, tall forests and winding freshwater streams, the waves of a long, wide bay now lapped at beaches and muddy deltas, their oceanic salinity always tempered by the quantities of water borne down to that new bay by the rivers and streams from north and west and east. Some of those rivers were indeed mighty and they already had begun to build from the silt and sand and rock that the water brought from drier places islets and deltine peninsulas on which grew grasses and shrubs and small trees, their roots catching and holding more soil and rocks to enlarge and solidify their precarious perches.

There were, by then, few living creatures who could recall the vast cataclysms that had spawned this bay. It had been a time of terror, a time of horror, a time for many of death. In the dark, early-morning hours, a great, unsuspected tsunami had come ashore all along the sleeping coastline and advanced destructively far, far inland, a wall of cold, salty, relentless water; even beyond the main force of the tsunami, the courses of rivers were reversed to flood over their banks, killing and destroying even more.

Though bad enough, the tsunamis were far from the worst ills to afflict the lands and all that dwelt thereupon. There came a seemingly endless succession of earthquakes and tremors that changed the ages-old courses of streams and rivers overnight, dumped ponds and even lakes from out their beds, tumbled cities, buried towns and forests under slides or drowned them, swallowed up farms and homes. Volcanoes dormant for uncountable millennia suddenly rumbled into full, frightful, fiery life all along the chains of eastern and southern mountains, darkening days with their wind-borne dust and ash, belching molten lava and superheated stones to fire hundreds of square miles of montane forests.

Then, suddenly, as much as a hundred miles inland, all along the eastern coast, the land subsided and the sea came pouring, boiling in. On the southern coast, it was even worse, for the entire peninsula long ago called Florida sank until most of it was, at best, a salt fen, only its rare highlands really above the highest tides.

A second great earthquake sank most of that area once called Louisiana, along with vast stretches of land to the west and the east of it, becoming only an estaurine bay of the vastly enlarged Gulf of Mexico. The Caribbean Sea had shown its own rapaciousness, too, avidly gobbling up coastlines, islands, cays and keys. Most of those lands, islands and islets left above water were smaller, lower and still racked by earthquake aftershocks and some volcanism.

But elsewhere, new lands were formed—the Bermuda Islands having been transformed by risings into a virtual archipelago, almost circular, and almost completely surrounding a shallow salt lagoon, in which lay a broad, hilly island of seabed rock, bare as a picked skull.

After the earth had ceased its agonized spasms, the survivors—plant, animal and human—began to adjust to the new order of lands and seas, to breed and repopulate, to build anew. Some years later, subsequent to a civil war in Kehnooryos Ehlahs, the losers enshipped, sailed down one of the rivers and out to sea, finally making landfall at the collection of new and older islands some hundreds of miles off the east coast.

In the beginning, they made their homes on some of the less rocky, more southerly islands, refurbishing ancient ruins, farming where decent soil remained, breeding small numbers of stock beasts on the strictly limited graze, fishing, and in times of desperation, raiding the coasts and riverways of their previous homelands to the west. But after, themselves, suffering the effects of raids, they first built a citadel on the rocky isle in the inner lagoon, then began to ship load after load of fertile soil over to fill in the terraces they were constructing of material mined from the rocks themselves.

Slowly, painfully, abodes were chipped out, multi-chamber homes mined into the very rock that had underlain seabed ooze from time out of mind until the upheavals had forced it from endless darkness into the glare of the sun and the silvery rays of the moon. By the time that few of the third generation of islanders were left alive, much had been accomplished and the isle was mostly become green and productive.

Even so, however, there simply was no way to feed the ever growing population from its yield, no matter how bountiful, nor did the drudgery of farming and fishing come easily to these men, who were mostly the descendants of noble warriors, not of farmers and laborers. And so, sometime in the fourth generation, they slid into piracy on shipping—both coastal shipping and maritime—and began to mount regular raids on the coasts to the west, not just against their own ancestors’ place of origin but against all of the lands and cities their ships and men could easily reach.

At first, the raiders brought captives in only as slaves, for the work of making their home a near-impregnable fortress went on. Ways were found to block all save a single, treacherous channel to the open sea from the lagoon—native seamen could negotiate it easily and with relative speed, while non-natives perforce had to feel a way along with a leadsman always astride the bowsprit, the snail-crawl progress making of a stranger’s ship an easy target to the guards on the cliffs on either hand.

Stones were quarried from the newer, bare-rock isles and barged across the lagoon to the older, lower isles, there to be used in the construction of fortifications and underwater obstacles to hinder the landings of boats on the beaches. Other fortifications and lookout towers were built atop the highest pinnacles of rock. In addition, shipload after shipload of rich soil was brought in from the less populated portions of coastlines and was used to fill terraces built into the lagoon-sides of the surrounding isles.

But as the years followed one after the other and the raidings and piracies and sea-fights and storm-losses of ships and whole crews went on, the slaves began to outnumber the free men and women in the isles, and, at length, one farsighted Lord of the Isles persuaded the Council of Shipmasters to proclaim an end to slavery, giving every living, hale, male slave the right to either ship aboard one of the raiders as a free crewman and warrior or remain ashore to perform one of the numerous necessary trades or crafts in support of the fleet. The pirates and raiders also began to let it be known that slaves of mainland masters with enough guts to attach themselves to raiders’ shore parties or otherwise get to the Sea Isles would find a welcome there, just so long as they paid their way and lived according to the Laws of the Isles.

Over the years, a true society developed, an ordered society, with customs and laws and usages of its own. The Lord of the Isles, chosen upon the death of his predecessor by the Council of Shipmasters, was usually—but not always!—a descendant of one of the original Ehleen settlers, and while no one of these families was even near to being of the purity of lineage that the mainland Ehleenohee called kath’ahrohs, most of them did try to kidnap and marry Ehleen women of good family, now and then in their raidings; moreover, they made sure that a priest of the Ehleen sect was always in residence in the Isles, honored after a fashion and supported handsomely.

At a time about a hundred and fifty years after the settlement of the Isles, a non-Ehleen Lord of the Isles, Lord Djahn Krooguh, who had been a mainland slave before becoming a pirate, made a momentous and a very valuable discovery. This lord happened to be a telepath, and, having mentally communicated with various beasts in his youth, before being enslaved, he sent out a beam to a pod of eheethosee—great black-and-white dolphins, called by other peoples grampuses or orcas or killer whales. Shortly, to the real terror of his crew, his small ship was surrounded by the eheethosee— their dorsal fins towering up higher than any of the men, some of them almost as long and as broad abeam as the cockleshell ship. Nor did any one of the crewmen believe for one minute that their very new lord could or was conversing in silence with the pod of sea-monsters, not at first.

But in time such communication came to be accepted among the folk of the Sea Isles and a tenuous bond between man and ork—as they came to be called, adopting a barbarian word for them—was established. Lord Djahn sought out telepaths or those with the ability to develop into such amongst his people and tried to place at least one aboard each of the active ships; so too did all his successors, and, eventually, the telepathic ability became one of the criteria for not only becoming Lord of the Isles, but even succeeding to a command of a ship.

Not only did the orks provide security for the Isles, they became most adept at exploring coasts and harbors for raiders, or seeking out prey on the open seas for pirates. On occasion, two or three or more of them had butted the side of a ship in unison, disordering the crew just before a pirate ship closed with the vessel.

Although the orks were far from averse to consuming dead bodies cast into the water—thus easing the problem of disposing of deceased Isle-folk without attracting sharks and other dangerous scavengers to the environs of the Isles—the sleek creatures often remarked that they preferred seals or fish or whales, so not a few of the pirates wondered now and again over the years just what kept the valuable marine allies so drawn to them. None of them ever learned, dying still ignorantly accepting the fact of the orks’ inexplicable allegiances.

Two hundred-odd years after the initial settlement, the folk of the Isles were become wealthy, their huge fleet was the largest and most powerful and modern, and enough of the mainland principalities had, over the years, suffered enough losses, broken enough teeth on the massive natural and man-made defenses of the ocean citadel to now leave well enough alone and accept their occasional losses or pay tribute in specie or goods to the Lord of the Sea Isles in order to keep his ravening, ferocious raiders from their coasts and coastal shipping.

The only mainland state that did not suffer either sea-robbers or tribute was Kehnooryos Ehlahs; some third of a century before, all raidings against them had ceased, and few of their ships had been lost since then to the ships of the Isles. Then, just as High King Zastros had been readying his huge host to march northward on his chosen course of conquest, the young Lord of the Sea Isles, Alexandras Pahpahs, had set sail for Kehnooryos Atheenahs, capital of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, and after conferring with the rulers, allied his folk and ships with the mainland confederation that had grown out of the united stand against the High King of the Southern Ehleenohee.

Moreover, possibly in earnest of the alliance, he had brought back to the Sea Isles upon his own return one of the rulers, who was the recent widow of him who had been the fourth of the original two men and two women who had ruled over Kehnooryos Ehlahs for nearly fifty years.

Sea Isle folk who heard the news thought that his ship would bear some withered, wrinkled crone. They were wrong. The young woman who leaped lightly from rail to wharf looked, despite her actual sixty-odd years, to be no more than twenty-two or twenty-three and a true kath’ahrohs—with a dense mass of blue-black hair, eyes so dark as to appear black and an olive complexion beneath her tan.

The High Lady Aldora Linsee Treeah-Potohmahs had quickly proven herself a singular lady in a host of ways. Very well coordinated, she had on the voyage to the Isles learned to scamper up and down the rigging of the sailing ship as rapidly and surefootedly as any of the able-bodied seamen. She was a master of many weapons, making up for the bulk and bulging muscles she lacked with a flexibility and speed that had to be seen to be believed; the wearing of heavy armor did not seem to ever tire her and slowed her but minimally. She could swim as fast and with as little apparent effort as any Sea Islesman, and her telepathic ability was stronger and farther-ranging than that of any man or woman of the Sea Isles folk.

She also proved herself stubborn and willful, stalking unsummoned into a meeting of the Council of Captains to demand that she be aboard one of the ships being sent to coastal waters to interdict High King Zastros’ fleet, prevent it from entering the Lumbuh River and giving aid and supplies to the land forces. She shouted them all down in the course of that stormy meeting, even Lord Alexandras and the Senior Captain, Yahnekos, his stepfather. When a Captain Mohmahros had had enough female impertinence and made to put her out of the chamber by force, she dislocated his shoulder and his elbow and cracked three of his ribs so speedily and with so little apparent effort that many of the others did not immediately realize just why the man had come to lie, white-faced and groaning, on the carpet before the wisp of a grim-faced girl.

Eventually, having worn down most of the opposition, she got her way, of course, shipping out aboard Lord Alexandras’ personal bireme, pulling her part of an oar on the benches with the rest of the ship’s complement and, in the course of the protracted, destructive, very bloody battle against the Southern Ehleen battle fleet, distinguishing herself as a paladin-par-excellence.

So respected was she become for her warlike traits and skills that she faced no argument when she elected to be one of the volunteers who went upriver in the smallest, most shallow-draft vessels to mount night attacks against the camps of the High King sprawled along the southern banks across from the sections defended by the High Lord Milo and his allies.

After the deaths of Zastros and his queen, after the abrupt cessation of hostilities on the mainland, the Lady Aldora took part in some practical voyages, even tried coastal raiding for a while. Then, however, having driven home her point, gotten her way, she put off her armor and weapons and sea-boots, taking up the attire and ways of a Sea Isles woman, living in the palace with Lord Alexandros—first as his mistress, then, after a while, as his legal wife. She was not his only wife, of course, for he wanted and needed heirs, sons, while she was barren and knew it for fact, fifty years’ worth of lusty lovers having all failed to ever quicken her. When first she began to enjoy regular sex with Alexandros, she hoped against hope … but she was of too practical and realistic a basic nature to pin the succession of his house and title on such vain hopes, so she insisted that he seek out and wed other women, even presenting some of them to him; one of the girls she had personally kidnapped from Kehnooryos Mahkehdonya and another from a seaside city in Ehspahneeah, far and far to the east across the great Ocean.

Aldora found herself to be naturally attuned to and very comfortable with the free and easy sexual mores of the Sea Isle womenfolk, mores so like to those of the Horseclans with whom she had matured. She never took another legal husband, as did most of the polyandrous women of the Isle, but she felt free and was, indeed, completely free to enjoy many lovers from among the captains, pirates and raiders while her husband busied himself with the necessary functions of procreation on his other wives. But when they were at sea together, Lord Alexandros was hers alone for the length of the voyage and she took full advantage of him and his rare ability to fully fulfill her, as lover, as matelot, as caring friend, as knowledgeable teacher in the ways of the sea.

She found that she did not miss the mainland or its people at all, after a while; what she did miss was horses and the great prairiecats. The only felines on any of the Isles were domestic or feral housecats, kept to check the depredations of rats and mice, and there was not one horse to be found. There was a small herd of runty, wild ponies on the largest of the low isles, but all of her attempts to mindspeak them had proven them possessed of little ability to none at all, with but dim intelligence. The folk of the Isles used them mostly for meat and hides, like the feral swine that shared the isle, these latter being far and away the intellectual superiors of the ponies, capable of mindspeaking with humans, but not much inclined to so do, rather assiduously avoiding close proximity to their two-legged predators.

But with the great orks, Aldora found herself at home. The mindspeak of the massive marine mammals was almost as powerful as her own rare talents, and the creatures seemed to take to her as they did and had to no other human, living or dead. A pod of varying strengths always was resident in the clear waters of the sandy-bottomed central lagoon, for sharks seldom entered from the sea beyond the circling isles and, consequently, the lagoon was a safe place for calving.

In company with her newfound friends, Aldora explored the most distant reaches of the lagoon, fearful of no other living thing while she swam among the sleek black-and-white beasts. Not even the long, scaly krohkohthehlishsee that crawled and swam in the salt swamp on the southernmost side of the Isles dared to venture into the lagoon when orks were nearby, for their armor-plated hides were no match for the crushing strength of an ork’s jaws, and fast as their flattened sculling tails could propel them, the orks could effortlessly swim rings around them; also, orks could seldom bring themselves to pass up a tasty snack of reptile meat.

When once she suggested to Lord Alexandros the extirpation of the crocodilians—which numbered among them some true giants of fifteen and twenty feet in length and took ponies and pigs on occasion, as well as a human swimmer, now and then, or a sentinel careless or foolhardy enough to leave one of the three fen-watchtowers alone and afoot—he had demurred.

“No, love, like the orks, those dragons are allies in our defense, fearsome and treacherous allies, sometimes, but still allies.”

“Allies?” she demanded. “What the hell are you talking about, Lekos? The orks are intelligent, can reason; those damned things are mindless, just toothy eating-machines, and about as picky about their fare as a damned shark.”

“Well, for one thing,” he replied patiently, “they provide efficient burial service for corpses and quick disposal of such garbage as the swine find unappetizing. But the most important thing is that they make of that fen a deathtrap to any would-be invaders.

“Fourscore or so years back, a party of mainlanders made to dig out and deepen the water courses through those fens in order to get some of their ships through it and into the lagoon. They began at dusk, one night, while others of them kept the attention of our men near the entry-channel, away to the north. A few justly terrified warriors and seamen were found in the tops of a few trees or squatting within one of the two whaleboats left behind, and they swore that over a full thousand men had entered that benighted fen, perhaps a tenth of their numbers had won back to the sea, a few dozens had found safe places and the rest had all died horribly, done to death by the dragons.

“Until that occurrence, our folk had actively hunted the beasts for their fine leather and the flesh of their tails, but the then Lord of the Isles forbade any further incursions against them, and it has been so ever since. They are only killed when they are caught in or near to the harbor, too close to this isle or otherwise threatening one of us. As I say, they are considered to be allies in defense of the Sea Isles, my dear.”