But then, he was a man. And Queen Lush was a woman — that was blatantly obvious. If she occupied his attention perhaps I could get on with my own affairs. At least, he had not made too particular inquiries about his grandchildren. I had to hoick Dayra out of the mess she was in and straighten her out before the emperor decided to take a hand.
And, again, that implied that I knew best for my daughter. That I was totally unsure must be obvious. But I thought, at the least, that smashing up taverns and raiding with a bunch of hairy reivers against innocent citizens of Vallia were not occupations she could in all honesty claim as morally defensible. Mind you, by Krun! She could easily have some explanation that would make me change my mind. The Suns of Scorpio flooded down their mingled streaming lights of jade and ruby as I circled once over Thengelsax and slanted in for a landing outside the designated inn. The city presented the expected appearance of a well-ordered city of Vallia. Clean, neat, prosperous, situated where the River Emerade flows into the Great River, the city looked justly proud of itself.
As an interesting light upon the importance of those old fortifications, the Trylon took the name of Thengelsax, from the city, and not that of Thengel, from the trylonate. Barty met me as the airboat touched down and the hostlers ran out to see to her. He looked excited and I felt a welling of hope that he had discovered some vital clue to the whereabouts of Dayra. My hopes were dashed. As we went into the inn and posting house, The Hanged Leemshead, Barty started on cussing about the Strom of Vilandeul. He windmilled his arms and when we had pots of ale before us he sloshed suds about, scarlet-faced, almost incoherent, and yet, in the end, making lucid sense and betraying the very real depths of his affection for Dayra.
“That Nath Typhohan!” he raved. “I know him! I’ve wrestled him, and thrown him, and fenced with him and pinked him. Now he’s the Strom of Vilandeul he has the effrontery to lay claim to the most beautiful land of my island! He wants the Shadow Forests of Calimbrev! I ask you!”
I nodded. “I had trouble with his father. Well-” I said, uncomfortably, “not me. My son Drak and Tom Tomor. I was away at the time. The Strom of Vilandeul laid claim to parts of Veliadrin, west of the Varamin Mountains.”
“The trouble is Nath’s Stromnate of Vilandeul is small and is penned in by powerful kovnates. He is land hungry.”
“You can understand that.”
“We must stick together, pri — Jak. If it comes to it, we’ll have to hire mercenaries and go up against him. No damned Typhohan is going to steal my land from me, by Vox!”
Mildly, I said: “In Valka we have our own army. And I would heartily dislike having to fight Vallians. We threw the aragorn and the slavers out. Don’t they trouble you?”
“A little. They take a few slaves from me. Nothing I can’t live with.”
My mildness vanished. “If you entertain any notions of marrying Dayra, I fancy you will have to manumit your slaves. The whole lot. And I will help you deal with the slavers.”
He blinked.
Even so good-hearted a fellow as Barty could not really understand my attitude about slaves. Had not Opaz made slaves for other men to use? Of course he had. Therefore a good citizen of Vallia must employ what Opaz had put into his hands.
This must be pursued later. I said in my harsh old voice: “What have you discovered about Dayra?”
“I have spoken to the landlord. She was seen with a rascally gang of Hawkwas hiring zorcas and riding northeast.”
Hawkwa was the contemptuous name given in hatred and fear by the civilized people of Vallia in the old days to the reivers from the Northeast, and in turn used by the barbarians in boastful pride and reciprocal contempt.
“Also, I have hired a guide.”
Well, I could not complain. Barty had done well. In the time I had been making inquiries in Vondium and hobnobbing with the emperor he had been hard at work here. I warmed to him. He must cherish genuine feelings for my daughter, for he had not gone rushing back to his island to fend off the predatory demands of Nath Typhohan, the Strom of Vilandeul. Well, I would help him there, for his island lay close to Veliadrin. And the Elten of Avanar, Tom Tomor, had given the old Strom of Vilandeul a salutary lesson over land-grabbing.
“We will not ride,” I said with a snap. “We will take your flier, seeing she has space for a dozen or more and the zorcas. My two-seat craft will be useless. The guide you have found-”
“Uthnior Chavonthjid. A hunter with a fine reputation. And expensive, by Vox.”
“Well, this Uthnior will have to get used to airboats if he is not already familiar with them. We have no time to lose.”
Transferring the gear I had brought to Barty’s flier did not take long, despite the mountains of stuff Delia always insisted I take along with me on these expeditions. More often than not I lost most of it, and returned draggle-tailed and almost empty-handed. Weapons, food and — well, little else, really, on Kregen, apart from necessary clothing against the weather — are all that are required. Of food we had wicker hampers piled up. Of weapons we took the usual Kregen arsenal. Uthnior Chavonthjid turned out to be the picture of a leem hunter, lean, rangy, broad-shouldered, with that weather-beaten face that conveys an ample sense of experience and wide horizons. His history contained nothing out of the usual, save for the incident that claimed for him the coveted jid appended to the animal he had slain bare-handed, or the danger he had overcome. The chavonth is a feral big cat, savage and tirelessly vindictive. Uthnior had met and bested one, breaking its back. The word jid is seldom used alone, which is why I always use bane — as, for instance, in the Bane of Grodno. I felt confident that Uthnior Chavonthjid would prove a fine, tough guide for us. As to his reliability, that remained to be weighed in the balance.
As we flew at the sedate speed of Barty’s capacious flier toward the Kwan Hills, in which rises the River Emerade, some forty dwaburs or so from Thengelsax, I was once more forcibly struck by the incongruity of having to hire a guide to any part of Vallia. But the truth remained — and, alas, still remains
— that some parts of Vallia are barbaric and untamed still.
You may recall the Ochre Limits. There nature set the obstacles in the path. Here, the Kwan Hills, densely forested, alive with game, untracked and mysterious, were the haunts of the drikingers, the reivers, the Hawkwas, who set the limits to strangers.
Uthnior, to my surprise, had refused to take zorcas.
“Koter Jakhan,” he said in his grave manner. “Where we are going the totrix is the mount for us.”