The lead rider reined up, those enormously long legs of his mount spindling with muscled power. Sand cascaded, his mount slid backward, then, with a snickering shrill, it had regained its balance. But in those few vital moments I had reached a stirrup. I grasped the booted foot and jerked and pulled as though I could tear the thing’s leg clean off.
He screamed and something thwacked down on my
shoulders. I glared up. Delia moaned. The rider threw away his crop in fury and drew a long curved sword and lifted it high. I reached up, took his elbow between my fingers, twisted, and heard the bones grind and snap. The thing shrieked again.
Delia’s eyes opened; horror clouded them. “Behind you-”
I whirled and ducked and the curved sword sliced air. Now they were all about me. Swords lifted in a net of steel. I reached again for him whose arm I had mangled. He let out a keening shriek and hauled desperately at his mount’s reins. The beast reared, throwing me off. Ducking a swiping sword, silently, I leaped again. I was on the thing’s haunches, and so short were they that I half hung over nothingness with my left arm clamped around the rider’s waist and my right dragging his head back in that arrogant golden helmet. I heard his neck snap and cast him from me. I slid forward into the saddle, seized the reins and kicked my heels into the flanks of the beast. It shivered and snorted and bounded forward.
Then the world spun around in a blaze of sparks and I saw the sand rising up toward me and, for only a fractional moment of time, felt the hardness of the sandy ground smash all along my face.
They must have left me for dead.
When I recovered, sick and groggy, and looked about, the beach was silent and deserted and only the pitiful humped shape of the dead beast, and the sprawled rider beyond, told of the tragedy that had unfolded here.
At the instant of my success, on the point of escape, I had had my mount shot from under me. The weapon still protruded from the poor thing’s flank. It was an eight-foot long spear, the head fashioned from bronze and heavy although not particularly sharp. It was an unhandy weapon.
Beneath the rider-I subsequently learned that these feline-like semi-humans were called Fristles-I found his curved scimitar-like sword. Despite his broken elbow he had retained grasp of his sword hilt. When I had flung him from the high saddle he had fallen so that the point of the blade had entered his stomach with the hilt jammed against the ground. That blade had gone clean through his body and the stained point protruded eight inches past his backbone. The blood was blackened and caked and a few flies-for they exist everywhere-rose as I approached. I turned him over with my foot, freed his hand from the hilt, put a foot on his body and dragged the sword clear. I cleaned it thoroughly with the sand all about me. I was not thinking at all clearly. I did not care to use this creature’s clothes, so I cut up the purple leather and fashioned myself a breechclout after the fashion of Savanti hunting leathers; and I cut from his tunic enough to wind about my left arm. His boots fit me well enough. I slung the sword over my shoulder, its scabbard suspended from a leather baldric, and I felt that when I ran across these cat-people again I would kill very many of them before they could once again wrest Delia of Delphond from me.
The sound of hooves would be muffled to a succession of steady thumps in the sand. At the sound I drew the sword and turned to face the rider who approached. The wind blew grains of sand across the hoofprints; there had been no chance of tracking those who had taken Delia.
“Lahal,” the rider called when he was fairly up with me.
“Lahal, Jikai.”
“Lahal,” I likewise replied. I had learned what Jikai could mean in the various inflexions put upon the word. It could mean simply “Kill!” It, could mean “Warrior” or “A noble feat of arms”
or a number of other related concepts, to do with honor and pride and warrior-status and, inevitably, slaying. It had been used in admiration by Delia of the Blue Mountains, as it had been used by her as a command. I studied the stranger, as I said: “Lahal, Jikai.”
For, clearly, he was a warrior.
I had made a mistake in custom and usage; for he made a face and pointed to the dead rider and his mount. “Indeed, it is for me to call you Jikai; what have I done that you know of?”
“As to that,” I said, “I doubt not that you are a mighty warrior. But I seek a girl these-things-took.”
He had an open, frank face, burned brown by the suns of Antares, with light-colored hair bleached by those suns. He carried a steel helmet at his saddle bow, and his mount was of the same strange high-stepping breed as the dead one at my feet. He wore Leathers, russet-brown, tasseled and fringed after the fashion in New England, and he sat his saddle with the alert carriage yet relaxed air I knew bespoke a master rider. I could not say horseman, although no doubt from sheer familiar usage the word crosses my lips from time to time.
“I am Hap Loder, Jiktar of the First Division of the Clan of Felschraung.” The last word, as you can hear, was pronounced deeply with a great sound as of clearing the throat. The way Hap Loder said it, made it sound menacing, prideful, arrogant.
“I am Dray Prescot.”
“Now that we have made pappattu, I will fight you at once.”
Very little would startle me now. Any other time I’d have been pleased to fight him, if he so desired; but at this imperative time I must find Delia. He dismounted.
“You have not told me if you have seen a girl-” I began. His lance flashed before my eyes.
“Uncouth barbarian! Know you not we cannot speak of anything save obi until we have fought and given or taken obi?”
Furious anger flooded me. Pappattu, I understood, meant introduction. The formalities had been observed; but now this idiot would not tell me of Delia until he had fought me! Well-my captured blade flashed. I would not take long over this. He went back to that tall-legged animal, stuck the slender willowy lance in its boot, came back with two swords. One was long, heavy, straight, a swashbuckling broadsword. The other was short, straight, simple of construction, a stabbing short sword like a gladius. “I have challenged. Which sword, since that is what you have, will you choose?”
I looked him in the eye. Impatient or not to have the thing done, I recognized honor when I met it. This young man, Hap Loder, was offering me a chance of life, and of death for himself. The powerful broadsword, of course, would not stand against my scimitar, except perhaps on sand. I nodded toward the shortsword. He smiled. “It matters not to me,” I said. “But make haste.” Then, for he was a fine-looking young man and, as I was to discover, Hap Loder was steel-true honest and fearless, I added: “But I think you would do well to choose the shortsword.”
“Yes,” he said, and took it up by its grip, replacing the long broadsword in its scabbard strapped to his mount’s saddle. “Should you win I do not mind giving obi; but I have no wish to die unnecessarily.”
On which fine point of logic we fell to.
He was a fine swordsman, yet the very advantages of the quick and deadly shortsword were lost to him now. The shortsword is at its best when used with a shield, packed with room to play in the long ranks of a disciplined army, each man relying on his neighbor. Or in the close and sweaty melee of the press, when the elbow has room only to move within the compass of the body, does the shortsword rule. The great broadsword, too, can be outfought by a wily and nimble opponent, and I think he had made the better choice. But he could not match the demon-driven needs that obsessed me.
“Jikai!” he shouted, and lunged.
I made a few quick passes, left his blade short and faltering, and then, with the old over-underhand loop, sent his blade flying. My point hovered at his throat. He stared up, his eyes suddenly wide.