Manhounds of Antares

Chapter Six

The morning broke fresh and glorious with the twin Suns of Scorpio bursting up over the jungle levels and casting down their streaming mingled jade and ruby light. The air smelled clean and invigorating, and however dank it might become in the jungle, as we ate a huge breakfast, I own we slaves felt happier than any of us had any right to be.

Lilah had told me that she had been on a visit of state with an uncle to a neighboring country of Havilfar when her airboat had been attacked and captured. She called the fliers vollers, and when I mentioned that they always seemed to be breaking down, she turned a puzzled frown my way, and said, “Not reliable, Dray? You do an injustice to the voller builders! Why, our vollers can outfly the fastest saddle-birds in all Havilfar!”

I let the matter go, but I did not forget it.

She was not completely sure how she had come to be brought to Faol. She knew the island, of course, off northern Havilfar; and she had heard casual tales of great hunts to be had there. She had no idea that this Jikai was the hunting of people, and she had met the jiklos with utter horror. Like all the continents and the nine islands of Kregen — with the exception of Vallia — Havilfar is divided up into different countries. I set myself to learn their geography and histories, as well as Lilah could inform me, and when it is necessary for you to know any part of these, then that is when I shall introduce it.

In the circle of vaol-paol all things may come to pass.

Nath the Guide winked at us as we shuffled outside and into the cleared area before the slave barracks. Waiting for us and backed by a strong guard contingent stood Nalgre and his customers. Today the great hunters were dressed in leathers, with tall boots, wide hats, and a massive armory hung about them. The chief weapon of the hunt would be the crossbow. As always, I studied the weapons of those who were my foemen and who sought to slay me.

The fashion in swords here was for the short straight blade, perhaps not quite as robust a brand as the shortswords of my clansmen, but a useful and all-purpose cut-and-thrust weapon that would do its work efficiently and without fuss. The crossbows were beautiful artifacts, the wood a close-grained hurm — a close relative of the ubiquitous sturm-wood — and the butts and stocks shone in the mingled rays of the suns. The bows themselves were of tempered steel. Most of these crossbows were spanned by cranequins, one or two by goat’s-foot lever. I did not see a single windlass. The bolts were notched in leather. In addition these infamous hunters had loaded themselves with various bloodthirsty weapons. It infuriated me to see, for instance, a plump and laughing woman, her hair looped up in a net of priceless pearls, leaning on her crossbow and talking to her companion, who kept digging the point of his vosk-spear into the ground. They all looked a little self-conscious in their hunting leathers and they handled their weapons rather as tourists handle implements with which they are not totally familiar. All this spending of money and time and effort — to hunt a raggle-tail bunch of half-naked slaves through the jungles!

Half-naked: we were issued with gray slave breechclouts which we put on, out there, on the ground, in sight of everyone. Lilah acted as though the hunters did not exist.

I waited for the clothes and the knives, but Nath the Guide whispered fiercely and at his words I forbore to inquire, sensing a part of the secret the guides kept against the man-hunters of Faol. In this little group of slaves — sixteen of us — only Lilah and I and two others, a man and woman, were humans. All the rest were halflings. I couldn’t equate Nath as a slave. Despite the air of docility and fear he assumed there was about him the unmistakable sense of the free man, the man who fought against odds, and expected to win.

This fine morning Nalgre had his little pet with him.

He clicked his fingers and a jiklo ran across the clearing toward him, tongue lolling, eyes bright, frisking about him. I watched, sickened. This jiklo was a woman. She panted about her master on all fours, pricking her ears, emitting little gobbles of pleasure at his notice of her, and at the dribble of ground vosk he let fall, which she lapped up greedily. She wore a red bolero jacket, and a gray breechclout, and she ran on all fours, and she was a manhound of Antares, and she was a woman. The studs and plaques on her leather collar were all of gold. Her brown hair frizzed up into that angry matted crest, and blonde streamers of hair fell back in a tail from the central mass. Her naked rump frisked about Nalgre, and had a tail sprouted there, I suppose, one might have accepted the picture more.

Lilah’s supple figure quivered at sight of the jiklo, then she controlled herself. The halflings were whispering to one another, and a couple of Fristles unashamedly clasped each other in their furry arms. I had no doubt why Nalgre played with his pet before us. “Look,” he was saying. “This is a manhound. These are the creatures who will chase you and hunt you and pull you down.”

The jiklo trotted over to us. The halflings went rigid with fear. I looked down as the red bolero swung past. The thing emitted little gasps and wheezes, and the pug nose wrinkled up. The thing was smelling us! She was taking our scent!

“Get away, you filthy kleesh!” snarled the human man, a husky youngster called Naghan, who came, so he said, from Hamal itself. He told us this with pride. The girl with him screamed as the jiklo’s tongue, all lolling and wet and red, rasped down her naked calf. Naghan kicked out and then he, too, screamed and writhed as a guard lashed his back with a cunning whipblow called the rattler.

“Stay in line there, you rasts!” shouted Nalgre.

He turned and spoke quietly to his customers the hunters, and then they glanced swiftly and at an angle beneath their hands at the suns, to tell the time, and then all turned and walked off out of the clearing, back to their comfortable Jikai villas to await the time to be off.

The time for the slaves to leave was now.

With the whips cracking about our heads, and words of advice from Nalgre, we set off. His advice amounted to: “Run and run, cramphs. If you do not afford good sport and are taken without a good chase, you will be more sorry than you may imagine!” He snickered as he said this, and fondled the female jiklo, who crooned in pleasure at the touch of her master’s hand. We set off due east.

The jungle closed above our heads and strange noises rose from the depths of the greenery. The brilliant light of the twin suns muted to a long lazy green-gold radiance, and here and there mingled shafts of ruby and jade struck down through interstices in the leafy cover. The trail was hard-packed for the first dwabur. Five miles was a fair distance to travel, and when we came out to a little clearing the slaves were happy to flop down, panting, to rest.

Nath the Guide crossed to a heap of lichened stones and lifted one to the side. I looked over his shoulder.

In the hollow between the stones lay clothing, food — and knives! Also there were clumsy-looking shoes. The halflings pounced on the shoes first. Well, that made sense. I have been accustomed all my life to going barefoot, and I had walked across the Hostile Territories, and the Owlarh Waste without footwear. The journey across the Klackadrin, too, was not without a lively memory or two, and then I had been barefoot.

I said I did not want a pair of shoes.

At this Nath the Guide protested, saying I would slow the others up. They were putting on the clothes, simple gray tunics and floppy hats, and Lilah, too, implored me to don a pair of shoes. In the end I did so, to quiet her noise.

We ate and rested and then set off again.

“When will they catch up with us, Nath?”

“Not until the suns have passed the zenith.” He chuckled. “And if we press on boldly they may never catch up with us at all. There are secret ways.”

He kept us going east. The jungle looked like many another jungle through which I have traveled, with trees and growths familiar to Earth as well as Kregen. Lilah was holding up well. If we could keep going and get well ahead, we might clear right out for good.

Toward early evening we left the edge of the jungle, which had thinned considerably, and came to an immense ravine cut through the earth athwart our path. A light rope bridge hung above the abyss. We crossed, not without a deal of swaying about and a few screams, and after we had reached the other side Naghan from Hamal said: “Let us destroy the bridge.”

That seemed a sensible idea.

“No,” said Nath the Guide. “If the bridge is gone the Jikai will surely know which way we have gone.”

Well, that seemed sensible, too.

In the end, bowing to Nath’s superior knowledge of the problems of the manhunters, we left the bridge intact.

For a space I walked along with Nath, while Lilah walked with Naghan and his girl, Sosie. The guide intrigued me. I questioned him, casually, about his life.

“We are of Faol, too,” he said. “I live in a village on the southern shore, and the young men are dedicated to helping the slaves. The manhunters are very terrible masters.”

I congratulated him, thinking of the dangers he and his comrades faced. “I think,” he said to me, glancing sideways as we walked, “you have been on many great Jikais yourself.”

“Aye,” I said, thinking of the great days when my clansmen had hunted across the Great Plains of Segesthes. “But I have never hunted humans for sport.”

“Humans?” He looked at me oddly. “But only Naghan and Sosie, Lilah, and yourself are humans.”

The Fristle man was at that moment helping the Fristle woman along, putting his furry arm about her waist and half carrying her. I was about to make what I considered a fitting reply when Nath broke away from me, looking up, shouting a warning.

“Vollers! Quick! Into the bushes — and remain still, for the sake of Hito the Hunter!”

From the shelter of the bushes we looked up as a flier passed overhead, traveling slowly due east. Well, that answered one question I had intended to put to Nath — how the manhunters would know in which direction we had gone. He had been right about the bridge.

When the voller had gone we stood up, breathing our relief, and set off again. The country was opening out now. From the edge of the jungle beyond the ravine at our back the sky filled with the quick darting shapes of flying foxes, hereabouts called inklevols, black against the dying suns-glow. Nath the Guide pointed ahead across the open land, dotted here and there with clumps of trees, gently rolling and gradually undulating away to a distant horizon.

“Tomorrow we cross the plain and then-”

“Then we are free!” exclaimed a Brokelsh, rubbing his black bristle body-hair in his excitement. We made our little camp in a hollow, surrounded by trees, in the bend of a small river. Nath showed the usual skills of the hunter in preparing a smokeless fire and of shielding the flame-glare by a palisade of twisted rushes. The knives he had provided were poor things, it was true, but they did enable us to cut wood and leaves and so fabricate a softer bed than the ground. We ate and drank water from the stream, and Nath had been able to provide a little wine for us. Truth to tell, freedom was the wine we all craved.

We sat for a short space, talking, Nath and I. I had said to Naghan earlier: “Sosie and Lilah will sleep side by side, and you and I will sleep outside them.” And he had replied: “It is a good plan.”

Now I said to Nath: “And is manhunting the chief occupation of the high ones of Faol?”

“Yes. It is their ruling passion. Nobles come from all over Havilfar, and the lands beyond, to go on a Faol Jikai.”

He sounded proud of that, which was strange, but he added: “They bring in money, which helps my people, and we arrange for the escape of the slaves.”

“The hunters did not reach us, as you suggested they might.”

“No. Tomorrow will be a day of careful marching.”

I was itching to ask about Lilah who, as a princess, would in the societies I had previously known on Kregen be far more valuable as a subject for ransom than as a subject for a hunt. I put the point to Nath the Guide, who yawned, and said carelessly: “Oh, there are many girls who claim to be princesses and queens, and, mayhap, some of them are. But then — if a customer knew he was hunting a princess, and with all that would follow at the end of the hunt, think how much more the pleasure!”

“I see,” I said.

It did make sense, of a kind that sickened me anew. I rolled over and pushed up against Lilah where she lay asleep, one arm outflung across Sosie, and so let my eyelids close. Tomorrow we would cross the plain and reach safety and then I could deliver the Princess Lilah of Hyrklana to her friends and take off for Vallia. As sleep overcame me, I wondered vaguely if I might not prosecute two of my obsessions on Kregen as I was so near Havilfar. For on Havilfar lived the scarlet-robed Todalpheme who had taken Delia to Aphrasoe and who might therefore tell me where that marvelous Swinging City was situated on the face of Kregen. And the other obsession was to discover more of the fliers, the vollers, and their manufacture.

So I slept and with the first rays of Far and Havil striking low over the plain I awoke, sat up and rubbed my eyes, and reached for the cheap knife and stood up — and Nath the Guide was gone.