Dodging that lethal beak on its long serpentine neck was something like slipping an arrow or a spear. I checked in my rush, so that the beak struck where I would have been. I thumped my fist against the side of his head, feeling the solid thunking sledge of the blow. I grabbed the girl. She was incoherent with fear now, a gibbering shrieking bundle. My sailor’s knife whipped from the sheath over my right hip and slashed through the tangling lines of the clerketer. I kicked the zhyan in the belly, and kicked again. If he took off now we were done for.
He hissed. I crooked the girl in my left arm. If I had to kill this beautiful white bird, I would have to do so; I would prefer to let him live to recover from his fit of bad temper. There was no way past his beak. He curved his head down on that long neck, beneath his body, and darted at me again. The girl hampered me, but I flashed the knife at his beak, and chipped the side, and he hissed, and withdrew. With a savage lunge — and savagery was needed here to spring us clear — I went out from under the bird, rolling head over heels, clasping the girl, feeling her heart beat in panic against mine, her fair hair clouded about my face.
Hands grabbed me and pulled the girl away.
“We’ve got her, dom!”
I let her go, heaving up on a knee, ready to flash the knife before me and so keep off that wickedly darting beak.
There was no need.
That gorgeous bird, that scarlet-billed, scarlet-clawed, pure white zhyan, lay jerking in the last throes of death.
Crossbow bolts showed uglily in his feathers, studding his white breast obscenely, with red blood befouling all that beauty. He hissed, and shuddered, and died.
I stood up.
The girl had fainted. Her women were caring for her.
The men with the crossbows were stowing their weapons away alongside their saddlebows. The fine-clothed gallants were shouting and gesticulating. The landlord was wringing his hands. The scene sickened me.
Here came Nulty with the mirvols.
“Mount up, Nulty. Let us drive into the clean air, away from this — this-”
“Yes, master,” said Nulty.
We took off astride our mirvols, and soared up into the clean air of Kregen.
Chapter Six
Ruathytu, the capital city of the Empire of Hamal, was a place where, if you were reasonably wealthy, you might enjoy a sumptuous time. Of course, if you happen to be wealthy in almost any place and at almost any time you may enjoy a sumptuous time, so you may think it unnecessary for me to call your attention to the matter. The truth was, in Ruathytu at that time, I came across an altogether too familiar and horrible phenomenon of our Earth that, until then, I had not encountered on Kregen. In Sanurkazz, in Magdag, in Vondium, in Zenicce, all wonderful cities of Kregen, there were lords with incredible wealth; their retainers and followers, who were sufficiently provided for; and fat shopkeepers, innkeepers, and the superior craftsmen; then there were slaves.
In Ruathytu there were guls running the gamut from master artisans to laborers only a step removed from slavery. Beneath the skilled guls a great mass of poverty-stricken free men existed in Hamal. They were free, and they took a pitiful pride in that, but they were poor and in an ill season they would die of starvation or disease, and few of them could afford a doctor, even of the faith-healing sort. Slaves performed most of the truly unpleasant tasks, of course, as was common on Kregen; but many and many a free man or woman desperate for food would labor alongside the slaves. So it was that as Nulty and I stabled our mirvols in a public perching tower where they would be under cover, and took our first sight of the city, I was struck by the marked divergence of fortunes here, many races intermingled in every walk of life holding their own converse rank by rank, and each section sundered from the next by iron barriers of wealth.
This may seem so common a fact of life on two worlds as not to merit comment; but my experiences of Kregen had shown me that a man might progress on that marvelous and yet terrifying world: progress materially and spiritually, gaining not only wealth but prestige and affection and a place in life that did not necessarily put down another fellow being. The slaves made this easier, of course, and I do not seek to deny that unpalatable fact. However, it does not deflect me from the perhaps impossible task of erasing slavery altogether within a foreseeable time. The clums of Hamal were not slaves; no man might enslave them without just cause or rivet an iron collar about their necks; the clums were free men and women. That they did not have the slaves’ advantages of a place to sleep and food from masters with their welfare at heart made no difference to them. Better a clum than a slave!
Human beings of any race were constantly needed to feed the insatiable demands of the Arena. The clums would volunteer for the Jikhorkdun only in extremis. Willing hands were constantly needed to keep running the many ever-flowing, artful fountains; clums would do this work for a pittance. They would do whatever they had to, to survive; but, all the time, they were clums, free and not slave. One of the ever-present dreams of a clum was to gain wealth and skills enough to become a gul. Nulty, once a gul and now a faithful servitor to a noble, turned up his nose at the city.
“The place stinks, master.”
I knew what he meant.
“It smells pleasant enough, Nulty, with all the fountains and the armies of cleaners. There are flowers and
fragrant bushes everywhere, and the white walls are scrubbed each day-”
“That, Notor, was not what I meant.”
We found a comfortable inn catering to the more permanent kind of lodger. The inn was called The Thraxter and Voller, a clean house with a clientele composed mainly of high-ranking Horters, Tyrs, and Kyrs, people of the same rank as myself in my guise as Amak Hamun, an Elten or two, and a Strom who made no secret of his higher rank and so was condescending or contemptuous to the rest. I steered clear of him. A Strom is more like an Earthly count than an earl. I have always felt earls far superior to counts. For the first few days I felt my way around the city, learning. The city proper is situated in the fork between the two rivers, but the environs spread around for some distance, traversed by wide avenues along which the young bloods would race their saddle animals. Aqueducts bring in plentiful supplies of a crystal water from surrounding hills. The climate is equable. There is a considerable waterborne traffic down to the sea, and also inland along both rivers. I had taken a trip on one of the three-decked flat-bottomed boats on the Black River from Dovad to Hemlad. I had not cared to retrace my steps when with Ilter and Avec I had wandered Central Hamal in areas southerly of the Black River.[3]
Once I had a firm impression of the city, once I felt I knew my way about, I would start inquiries concerning the vollers.
No sense of impending doom darkened those early days in Ruathytu, and I admit, not without a proper sense of shame, that the sight of beggars, and of poor ragged starving people, came to seem to me merely an unsavory part of the city’s life, quite distinct from me, completely unnatural on Kregen and yet something I was forced to accept here. The depth of my purse as Amak of Paline Valley would have clothed and fed a derisory percentage of those in need. I had given alms in such a fashion as to raise the supercilious eyebrows of the Strom lodging at The Thraxter and Voller. Then I reconsidered. I took a common course of action — or non-action. I did not give away my goods to the poor, I did not even tear my cloak in half. I had given a very great deal, and then I considered what I was doing. If I had nothing, how could I prosecute the designs that had brought me here? The greater plans I had were a part and parcel of a grand design that would free not only the slaves but also these clums. So I had to harden my heart.