Manhounds of Antares

Chapter Sixteen

Almost immediately half a dozen fluttrells bearing armed warriors passed in a skein over the clearing. I remained still. I hungered for a voller.

As the morning wore on and Far and Havil crawled across the sky and the temperature rose and we sweated and steamed, more fluttrells pirouetted above us until I began to think we would have to decoy them down, enough for all fourteen of us, for we had lost three and gained one. In the end I saw what must be the truth of the matter and cursed; but having deliberately walked all this way through jungle in order to decoy a suitably proud hunting party, the loss of a few more burs hardly counted. When the next skein of fluttrells was sighted I stepped out into the clearing and waved.

“Have a care, Dray Prescot,” called Turko. “Remember, they will have real steel weapons, also.”

His light voice sounded stronger, which cheered me, and I did not miss that underlying mockery. Truly, he counted me a nul, never a true khamster, and this was inevitable and right. The fluttrells slanted down. There were five of them, and they looked bright and brave against the glow of the suns.

This was just another of those occasions on Kregen when I faced odds. I hoped the fluttrells would wing away after an inspection to report to the manhunters that they had discovered our whereabouts. The mighty hunters on the great Jikai were almost certainly sitting with their feet up, sipping the best wines of Havilfar — or possibly, if they could afford it, a fine Jholaix — and waiting until a sighting report had been brought back by their aerial scouts.

My hope was vain.

The first four fluttrells continued their descent; the fifth winged up in a flash of velvety green over the beige-white, his streamlined head-vane turning. He disappeared over the jungle roof before his comrades alighted. The men astride the fluttrells, although new to me then, were of a type, if not a nation, with which I was perfectly familiar. I had seen their like strutting the boulevards and enclaves of Zenicce, lording it over the slaves in the warrens of Magdag, supervising the Emperor’s haulers along the canals of Vallia. Hard, tough, professional, man-managers and slave-masters they were, like the aragorn I had bested in Valka. They jumped down with cheerful cries, one to another. They unstrapped their clerketers, and their weapons clicked up into position, the crossbows spanned, the moment their feet hit the tangled ground of the clearing.

They wore flying leathers, and braided cloaks cunningly fashioned from the velvet-green feathers of the fluttrells themselves. Their feathered flying caps fitted closely to their mahogany-brown faces, and streamed a clotted and flaring mass of multicolored ribbons, very brave to see in the slipstream of their passage across the sky. They advanced without any caution whatsoever. My bow felt the ill-made thing it was in my fist. I could have no hesitation here. The Star Lords’

commands impelled me.

The first arrow took the first flyer in the throat. The second arrow, a fraction too late, struck the second flyer in the face as he ducked to the side. I had read his ducking and his direction but the clumsy arrow loosed not as accurately as a clothyard shaft fletched with the brilliant blue feathers of the king korf of Erthyrdrin would have done. By the time the third arrow was on its way crossbow bolts were thunking about me.

They had difficulty seeing me against the gloom of the jungle and the third arrow pitched into the third flyer’s throat above the leather flying tunic. The fourth flyer looked dazedly at his companions, at what must have seemed to him to be a deadly wall of jungle sprouting arrows — and he turned and ran for his fluttrell.

Much as I dislike shooting men in the back this was a thing very necessary to be done. When it was all over Mog crackled out: “A great Jikai, Dray Prescot! You shoot well from ambush. Hai, Jikai!”

Which displeased me most savagely, so that I cursed the old witch in the name of the putrescent right eyeball of Makki-Grodno.

“They are flutsmen, Dray Prescot,” Rapechak called. He walked across, carefully cut out the arrow from the nearest body, turned it over with his foot, and bending lithely, took up the man’s thraxter. “I have served with them, in the long ago. They are good soldiers, although avaricious and without mercy. Because they ride their fluttrells through the windy wastes of the sky they consider themselves far better than the ordinary footman. They are disliked. But they earn their pay.” He waved the thraxter about a little, and I saw the feelings strong upon him as he once more grasped a weapon in his Rapa fist. The flutsmen, so I gathered, were not in any sense a race or a nation. Rather, they recruited from strong, fierce, vicious young men of similar natures to themselves, forming a kind of freemasonry of the skies, owing allegiance to no one unless paid and paid well. True mercenaries, they were, giving their first thought to their own band, then to the flutsmen, and, after that, to their current paymaster. Men from all over Havilfar, aye, and from over the seas, served in their winged ranks. Gynor the Brokelsh approached. He looked determined. “There are four fluttrells, Dray Prescot. Will you four apims take them and fly away and leave us halflings?”

Apim, as you know, is the slang and somewhat contemptuous term used by halflings for ordinary human beings — for, of course, to any halfling he is ordinary and the apims are strange.

“You have put an idea into my head, Gynor, for, by Vox, I hadn’t thought of it.”

He eyed me again. “You may speak truth. You are a strange man, Dray Prescot. If not that, then, what?”

“We must capture a voller-” I began, but with a rush of long naked legs and a hysterical series of screams, the two girls were upon me, panting, breathing in gulps, their hair all over their faces — very distracting and pretty, no doubt, but quite out of place in the serious work to hand.

“You must take us, Dray!” they both wailed. “Fly with us to safety in Havilfar!”

I pushed them aside, and they clung to me, sobbing, pleading to be taken away instantly from this horrible jungle.

“I want to get out of this Opaz-forsaken jungle more than you do!” I blared at them, outraged. “Now for the sweet sake of Blessed Mother Zinzu — shut up!”

They had no idea who Mother Zinzu the Blessed was — of course, the patron saint of the drinking classes of Sanurkazz — but everyone swore by their own gods, and so everyone was used to outlandish names in the way of oaths. They recoiled from my face.

“Look!” I said, pointing to a couple of Lamnias and the Fristle couple, all of whom were far gone. I marched over. “You, Doriclish,” I said to the Lamnia, who was making an effort to smooth his laypom-yellow fur down. “Can you ride a fluttrell?”

“I have not done so since my youth, when the sport was a passion-”

“Then you can. And you? And you?” to the others.

It turned out that when it came to it, most everyone in Havilfar was quite at home in the air, whether aboard a voller or astride a fluttrell or other flying saddle bird or animal, and so I could shovel out another load of responsibility. “Very well. You may take the four fluttrells and make a flight for it.”

If I had expected argument from the other halflings, I did not receive it. Only Saenda and Quaesa reacted, and they had to be told, pretty sharply, to behave themselves.

“Your feet are well enough,” I said. “And there will be a voller before long.”

“I shan’t forget this, Dray Prescot!” shouted Saenda.

“You’ll be sorry, Dray Prescot!” screeched Quaesa.

I saw the four halflings safely strapped into their clerketers, the straps buckled up tightly, and then with a final word of caution, sent the four great birds into the air. They flew over the jungle, going strongly, until they were out of sight. I thought they had a very good chance, for no other fluttrell patrols came by until, sometime later, the voller arrived. No doubt the mighty hunters had stopped for a final drink before setting off.

Between us we now disposed of four crossbows and five thraxters. I was disappointed there were no aerial spears, like the toonons used by the Ullars, but Rapechak snorted and said the flutsmen were kitted out for light patrol, not for battle. Then, he said, they were flying armories. Some people have talked and even written of aerial combat with shortswords from the backs of flying birds; it is doubtful if they have ever tried it. But, as is the way of Kregen no less than that of Earth, there are to be found people who believe nonsense of this sort. I looked at the crossbows. They were beautifully made instruments of death. Not as shiny or as flamboyant as the hunters’ bows, they were weapons of professionals. I felt very satisfied with them. I changed the guard’s thraxter for one of the flutsmen’s swords; the one I chose was nicely balanced, firm in the grip, with a blade very reminiscent of the cutlass blade of my youth, although not quite as broad and strengthened with a single groove. The grip, of red-dyed fish-skin, and the guard, reasonably elaborate, of a kind of open half-basket pattern, pleased me well enough. Oh, the sword was no great Krozair longsword or that superb Savanti weapon, but I would use it to good purpose in the service of the Star Lords, for my sins. The flutsmen employed a novel form of goat’s-foot lever to span their crossbows, and although I knew it was perfectly possible to span an arbalest with cranequin or windlass when flying by use of adapted equipment and if one was skilled, I appreciated this goat’s-foot lever of the flutsmen. Gynor said he could handle a crossbow. Rapechak, of course, was an old mercenary. Two other halflings came forward saying they wished for nothing better than to sink a bolt into the guts of the manhunters. So we waited, rather like leems, I confess, as the voller came in. Instead of an eager hunting party of untrained and amateurish nobles jumping down from the voller to slaughter, there leaped with vicious howls four couples of manhounds. The change in our fortunes rattled in so subtly, so quickly, so disastrously.

“Do not miss, my friends!” I called in a voice I made firm, driving, intolerant. I do not think that was necessary, now, looking back, but then I felt the precipice edge of disaster at my feet. The jiklos picked up our scent at once and with fearsome howls bounded toward us. They looked their hideous selves. If any nobility exists in beasts, as I believe it does, then these men-beasts had lost all. Jagged teeth glinting in the suns-light streaming into the clearing, leaping fallen trees and tangled undergrowth, blood-crazy, they bounded for us.

Four crossbow bolts sped true, driven by brains and eyes trained in hatred and loathing. My bow loosed, and loosed again. That was six down and the seventh took a shaft along his flank and was on me. My thraxter rasped as it drew from the scabbard and I went over backward with the manhound all bloody and messy upon me, screeching, his teeth clicking together in rage and pain, seeking my throat. The sword was deeply buried in him somewhere low, and my left hand gripped his neck and forced those clashing jaws away. Blood and spittle fouled me. His mad blood-crazed eyes glared on me, and his thin lips worked, his tongue lolled out, and then to my infinite relief the light of intelligence faded in those crazed eyes and he slumped. I stood up carefully, throwing the carcass away so that my right hand could drag the thraxter free.

Men were yelling over by the voller.

Gynor and Rapechak and the other two halflings with swords left off plunging their blades into the mangled body of the eighth manhound. This one had been a female, and, sickened, I turned away to stare with hatred at the hunters.

They had heard the shrieks and the muffled howlings, and, too, they had seen some of their manhounds fall, stricken in mid-leap.

“Span your bows!” I spoke as I used to speak in the smoke and thunder of the broadsides, when the old wooden walls drifted down to bloody battle, and I must see my battery of thirty-two-pounders kept on firing until only myself, perhaps, was left to sponge, load, ram, and pull the lock string. The people from the voller were uncertain. One called in a loud, hectoring voice: “Gumchee! Tulishi!”

That would be the female manhound, I guessed. “Colicoli! Hapang!” They could call until the Ice Floes of Sicce went up in steam but they’d get no answer from those four couples of manhounds. Rapechak said, “We are ready, Dray Prescot. May your Opaz go with you.”

Turko shouted. He spoke loudly, angry, raging, shoving up from his bed of leaves. His face lost its look of pain and took on the semblance of superior anger more habitual to it.

“And is no one of you stinking half-men going with Dray?”

Of the nine halflings who had started with the party, only five were left now, and four were ready to do damage with the crossbows. The last, a little Xaffer, would be of no help in a fight. Mog started to cackle something and the two girls were sobbing, clutching each other. I shouted back:

“I will have to go alone. Now, cover me!”

Even then Turko tried to get up, to stand and to rush out with me, but his legs buckled and gave way and he fell. Then I waited for no more but started a mad dash for the voller. I say mad dash, for I was mad, clean through, and I dashed, for the mighty hunters of the great Jikai had their crossbows ready.

I lived only because they were such lousy shots.

The only one from whom I expected real danger would be their guide, a man similar to the one I had snatched from his zorca on the plain with the Pallan Golan. Rapechak knew this, also. By the time I reached the voller three of the hunters lay with bolts skewering them. I had dodged and weaved in the last few yards. Up there and peering over the voller’s side the guide looked down. His face showed contempt and rage and only a tinge of fear — and I fancied that was for his dead clients. He lifted himself to get a good shot at me — and the last crossbow quarrel, loosed by Rapechak the Rapa, penetrated his face and knocked him back.

The hunters drew their thraxters to face me. There were five of them and I must draw a veil, as they say, over what followed. I did not kill them all. Three of them were unarmed and then my halflings had reached me, and before there was anything further I could do, there were no hunters left alive. Truth to tell, apart from not really being able to blame the fugitives for their ready justice, I could only have left the hunters there in the jungle. That would have been a more prolonged end, if they were not picked up in time.

This time I said to Rapechak: “Keep an eye on the voller, good Rapechak. We are all comrades, now, in adversity, and this flier is our means of escape.”

He took my meaning clearly enough.

Before I went back for Turko and Mog I respanned the bow, the most handsome of them all, I took from the dead hunter who lay so messily among the rotting detritus of the clearing. With Mog, Turko, the two girls, and the Xaffer I returned to the airboat. We went some time stripping the dead and cleaning their clothes and putting them on. I could not find a tunic to fit and so had to content myself with fashioning a breechclout out of the only scarlet length of material there, and of slinging a short scarlet cape over my left shoulder. Then we all climbed in and, with a feeling of some relief, I sent the voller up into the clean blue sky of Kregen, where the twin Suns of Scorpio blazed down with a light so much more genial than before.