Читать книгу The Treasured One - David Eddings - Страница 14

Ara came through the door of the round room about an hour later. ‘Supper’s ready,’ she announced. ‘Come along and eat it before it gets cold.’

‘I think you’re in for a treat, gentlemen,’ Veltan said with a note of pride. ‘Ara’s probably the best cook in the whole wide world.’

‘I’d say that she’s wasting her real talent, then,’ Jalkan declared with an obscene leer. ‘A woman with a body like hers could make a fortune in Kaldacin.’

A chill came over Omago. ‘I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at, Jalkan,’ he said in a flat, unemotional tone.

‘Are you blind, man? This servant sets my blood to boiling. I’d pay good gold for the chance to get her in bed.’

Without even thinking, Omago drove his fist into the scrawny Trogite’s mouth, knocking him flat on his back.

Jalkan stumbled back up, spitting blood, teeth and curses as he clawed at his knife-hilt.

Keselo’s sword, however, came out of its sheath more smoothly and rapidly. The young man put the point of his sword against the bone-thin Trogite’s throat. ‘Drop it Jalkan,’ he said quite firmly. ‘Drop the knife, or I’ll kill you right here on the spot.’

‘But this peasant just hit me!’ Jalkan screamed. ‘That’s a hanging offence! I’m an officer!’

‘Not any more, you aren’t,’ Narasan declared in a flat tone of voice. ‘I’ve put up with you for much too long already, and you’ve just given me something that I’ve been waiting for. Your army career is finished, Jalkan, and good riddance.’

‘You can’t do that!’ Jalkan screamed at Narasan. ‘I paid gold for my commission! GoldV

‘You just forfeited the gold, Jalkan. You’re done.’ Narasan turned. ‘Padan, chain this scoundrel and take him back to the beach. I’ll decide what to do with him later – after I get my temper under control.’ He turned to Omago. ‘Did you want to deal with this yourself, or would you rather that I did it? I’m not too clear about the customs here in the Land of Dhrall. It was your wife he insulted, though, so I think it’s only proper that you should decide his fate.’

‘Just get him out of my sight, Commander,’ Omago said, clenching and unclenching his fists.

‘I’ll take care of it, then.’ Narasan looked at Padan. ‘Get this scummy lecher out of here,’ he ordered.

‘My pleasure, Commander,’ Padan said with a broad grin. ‘Did you want to go peacefully, scummy lecher? Or would you rather have me kick your behind every step of the way back to the beach?’

‘Nicely put, Padan,’ Red-Beard said admiringly.

‘I’ve always had this way with words,’ Padan replied modestly.

There were several strangers in the round map-room with Veltan the next morning when Omago arrived.

‘Ah, there you are, Omago,’ Veltan greeted him. ‘There are some people here I’d like you to meet.’ He gestured at an imposing, grey-bearded man wearing clothes made of furry animal skins. ‘This is my older brother, Dahlaine of the North.’

‘Omago,’ the bearded one said, briefly nodding.

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Omago replied a bit uncertainly. There was something about Veltan’s brother that made Omago just a bit nervous.

‘You’ve already met my sister Zelana,’ Veltan continued, ‘but this is my other sister Aracia.’

Aracia wore splendid clothes and a superior expression.

‘Ma’am,’ Omago said politely.

‘Dahlaine and Aracia thought it might be wise to bring the leaders of the armies they’ve hired here so that they can observe,’ Veltan said. ‘They’ll almost certainly be coming up against the creatures of the Wasteland before much longer, and it won’t hurt if they know what they’ll be facing.’

‘Let me take care of this, Veltan,’ the bearded Dahlaine said. He turned back to Omago. ‘Veltan tells us that you’re the leader of his army,’ he said.

‘I don’t know if I’d go quite so far as to call my people an army,’ Omago said. ‘We aren’t really all that familiar with weapons, but Commander Narasan’s promised to see to it that we’ll get the training we’re going to need.’

‘Have you ever heard of horses?’ Dahlaine asked.

Omago frowned. ‘I don’t believe I have,’ he admitted.

‘A horse is something like a cow – except that it doesn’t have horns, and it can run much faster than a cow,’ Dahlaine explained. He reached out and put his hand on the shoulder of a lean man with a scarred face. ‘This is Prince Ekial, the leader of the horse-people. Quite some time ago, Ekial’s people tamed the horses and taught them how to carry things. After a while, it occurred to some clever fellow that if a horse could carry heavy bags of grain or loads of firewood from one place to another, it could probably carry people just as well – and a horse can run much faster than a man can. The horse people did that for quite some time, and then a war came along. The horse people found that fighting from the back of a horse could be very effective. Since there aren’t any horses here in the Land of Dhrall, the servants of the Vlagh won’t have any idea of what they’re encountering. I’m fairly sure that they aren’t going to like horses and the men who’ll be riding them very much at all – that’s the ones who’ll survive, and I don’t think there’ll be very many survivors.’

‘Do you actually sit on an animal’s back when you want to go somewhere?’ Omago asked the scar-faced Prince Ekial.

Ekial shrugged. ‘It’s easier than doing the walking ourselves,’ he replied, ‘and horses love to run. If you’ve got a good horse, you can go from here to there about five times faster than you could if you did the walking yourself.’

‘Can we get on with this?’ Aracia said abruptly. ‘I have other things I need to attend to.’ She turned to look at Omago. ‘Please don’t get all excited, Omago,’ she said. She pointed at a tall woman who had a very long knife hanging from the leather belt encircling her waist. ‘This is Trenicia, the queen of the warrior women of the Isle of Akalla. Different places have different traditions and different customs. On the Isle of Akalla, the women rule, and the women do the fighting.’

‘What do the men do?’ the horseman Ekial asked curiously.

‘As little as they possibly can,’ the warrior woman said in a sardonic tone. ‘Over the years, they’ve foisted just about everything off on us. We have to grow the food, hunt the meat, and fight the wars. The men sit around getting fat and arguing with each other about something they call “philosophy” – most of which is pure nonsense.’

‘Isn’t your sword just a little slender?’ the horseman asked curiously. ‘I wouldn’t think it’s quite strong enough to cut through any kind of armor.’

‘Why would I want to waste my time banging on somebody’s armor?’ Trenicia asked scornfully. ‘The important part of my sword is the point. It’s very sharp, and it slides through an enemy quite smoothly. There are all sorts of important things in an enemy’s belly or head. My enemy always seems to lose interest in a war after I’ve slid my sword through her a few times.’

‘Are you saying that you fight wars with other women?’ Zelana asked with a certain surprise.

‘We almost have to,’ Trenicia replied. ‘The men of Akalla don’t really know which end of a sword is which. There was an argument on the Isle a few years back about who was really the queen. We don’t have to argue any more, though. Everybody who’s still alive wholeheartedly agrees that I am queen, and I give the orders.’ She smiled a sunny sort of smile. ‘Isn’t that just lovely?’ she asked them.

For some reason the warrior queen made Omago turn cold all over. There was a savagery just below her surface that was very frightening.

Dahlaine motioned Veltan off to one side, but Omago was close enough to hear their quiet talk.

‘Have you told any of these mercenaries about that second invasion that turned up in Ashad’s dream?’ Dahlaine asked quietly.

‘Not as yet,’ Veltan replied. ‘I can’t for the life of me think of a way to mention it to Narasan without offending him. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to deal with it on my own – or possibly get some help from Zelana. She’s very good at dealing with winds and tides, and she could probably freeze any approaching fleet in place for the next few centuries.’

‘I wouldn’t set that in stone, Veltan,’ Dahlaine cautioned. ‘Ashad’s dream definitely put that second invasion ashore in the southern part of your Domain.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily lock it in place, Dahlaine,’ Veltan disagreed. ‘Eleria’s dream over in the Land of the Maags supposedly killed Sorgan and all his men, but Longbow stepped in and prevented that dream from taking place right there on the spot. As I understand it, these dreams are sometimes warnings rather than absolute certainties.’

‘Well, maybe,’ Dahlaine conceded, ‘but keep your eyes and ears open.’

‘This rounded shank fits right over the tip of the spear-shaft, Omago,’ the small Maag called Rabbit explained the following day when the two of them were working in Omago’s door-yard. ‘Then I whack it a few times with my hammer to sort of lock the spear-point in place.’

‘That probably would work better than just lashing a knife to the tip of the pole,’ Omago conceded. ‘I was mulling things over last night,’ he said, ‘and something sort of came to me.’

‘Another one of those pops of yours?’ Rabbit asked with a sly grin.

‘Well, sort of. It seemed to me that if a spear had more than one point it might be more effective.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a spear with more than one point.’

Omago went into his tool shed and picked up his wooden hay-rake. ‘We use this tool to clear away the straw after we’ve harvested our wheat,’ he said, holding the rake out to Rabbit. ‘If the points were sticking straight out instead of angling down, wouldn’t that be more effective than just a single point?’

Rabbit squinted, absently tapping his hammer on his anvil. ‘You might have just come up with something, Omago,’ he agreed. ‘An ordinary spear only has one point, because you’re only trying to kill one enemy at a time, but if you’ve got that venom we used back in the ravine, you could kill three or four snake-men with one poke. Let’s try it and see what the Cap’n and Commander Narasan think about it. If your people are all lined up the way you told us they’d be, that’d put a whole lot of poisoned points out to the front.’

‘Who came up with the idea of dipping the points of your wartools in venom?’

‘Longbow – or maybe it was One-Who-Heals – I’m not really sure which one. Longbow’s been killing snake-men since he was just a boy. You wouldn’t believe how good he is with that bow of his.’

‘Did he ever tell you just why he hated the snake-men so much?’ Omago asked.

‘He didn’t, but I was talking with one of the men from his tribe back in Lattash, and he told me that a snake-man killed the girl Longbow was going to marry, and after that, killing snake-men was about the only thing Longbow thought about. Let’s hammer out one of those rake-point spears and see what the Cap’n and Narasan think about it. If it works even half as good as it seems to me that it will, I think they’ll really like the idea. Every time you turn around, you seem to come up with a new idea.’

Omago smiled faintly. ‘It’s probably because I’m just a bit lazy, Rabbit. Maybe someday I’ll come up with a tool that’ll do all my work for me. Then I’ll be able to stay in bed until noon.’

‘Now that’s the tool I’ve been looking for since the first day when I had to go to work,’ Rabbit said with a broad grin.

Keselo turned the large metal shield over and showed Omago the back of it. ‘You have to slide your left arm under this leather strap and take a firm grip on the bar. That makes the shield a sort of extension of your arm, and you can block the strokes of your enemy’s sword or the jabs he makes at you if he’s using a spear. The creatures we came up against in the ravine didn’t have any weapons except their fangs and stingers, but the shields held them back far enough so that they couldn’t reach us. I talked this over with Rabbit earlier this morning, and he agreed with me that wooden shields would work as well as metal ones, since the snake-men don’t have swords or axes. We wouldn’t be able to gather up enough metal to make shields for all of your men anyway, and wood’s lighter and easier to carry than iron or bronze.’

‘And if the shield was made of wood, Rabbit could probably attach a spear-point to the middle of it, couldn’t he?’ Omago suggested.

Keselo blinked. ‘I never thought of that!’ he exclaimed. ‘How in the world did you come up with that notion, Omago?’

‘The two things just sort of connected,’ Omago replied. ‘I wasn’t trying to make a joke of it or anything like that, but if there’s a spear-point that’s been dipped in that venom, you’d have something to protect yourself with if one of the snake-men happens to duck under the spear-points lined up out in front.’

‘You’re an absolute genius, Omago!’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, Keselo,’ Omago replied, feeling slightly embarrassed by the young Trogite’s enthusiasm. ‘As I see it, this phalanx thing your commander mentioned is going to take quite a bit of practice to get used to.’

Keselo nodded. ‘Several weeks at least,’ he agreed. ‘Now, when we take up the phalanx formation we overlap our shields to put a solid wall to the front. Then we tuck the butt of the spear under our right armpit and take hold of the shaft with our right hand. You have to hold the shield bar tightly with your left hand and the shaft of your spear just as tight with your right. The muscles in both your arms will be a little sore by the end of the day at first, but that’ll go away after a while. The secret of the whole thing is that your soldiers aren’t working as individuals. They’re a unit, and they’re very closely coordinated. When you use the phalanx formation, your men have to lock their spears in place and then walk forward in unison. They walk the spear-point into the enemy instead of jabbing or poking.’

‘That might take a bit of getting used to,’ Omago said a bit dubiously.

‘Yes, it does. We’ll start by teaching your men to march. That involves walking in unison. We want everybody’s left foot to come down on the ground at the same time. After a while, it gets to be second nature, and they’ll be able to do it in their sleep – well, almost.’

‘Being a soldier’s a little more complicated than I thought it might be,’ Omago observed.

‘It beats doing honest work,’ Keselo replied with a slight grin.

‘My ships are a lot faster than yours, Narasan,’ Sorgan Hook-Beak said that evening at the supper table. ‘I’ll be able to bring Lady Zelana’s archers here in about half the time it’d take those scows of yours.’

‘And only bring back half as many,’ Narasan added dryly. ‘We could probably argue all night about which would be better – fast or many.’

‘You’ve got a very warped sense of humor, Narasan.’

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ Narasan replied blandly.

‘Just exactly where’s the border-line between your Domain and Zelana’s, Veltan?’ Longbow asked.

‘I don’t know if I’d call it a line, exactly,’ Veltan replied. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Most archers are hunters, and hunters can run quite a bit faster than people who spend their time sitting in one place. Any ship – either Sorgan’s or Narasan’s – will have to take the long way around to get back to Lattash. The archers could come across country, though, and if I remember your lumpy picture correctly, a straight line from Lattash to your house here would be less than half as far as a ship would have to travel.’ He looked at Sorgan with a faint smile. ‘We could race, if you’d like, and maybe even make some kind of wager on it.’

‘I think I’ll put my money on Longbow, Sorgan,’ Narasan declared.

‘Not against me, you won’t,’ Sorgan said sourly. ‘The main thing I’ve learned about Longbow is never to try to beat him – at anything.’

The following morning a balding Trogite named Gunda came up from the beach to confer with Commander Narasan. ‘I had a clerk draw a copy of my map for Andar,’ he reported, ‘and he’ll bring the rest of the army on up through that channel through the ice. Then I bought a sloop so that I could come up here and find out exactly where we want the army to come ashore. Then I’ll go on back down to the upper end of the channel and lead Andar on up here.’

‘How long is it likely to take, Gunda?’ Narasan asked.

‘Probably about another two weeks. Have things started to heat up here yet?’

‘Not as far as we know,’ Narasan replied. ‘Of course, when you’re dealing with those snake-men, you can never be sure. Why didn’t you bring Padan up here with you?’

‘Well, he’s just a little bit nervous, Commander,’ Gunda replied. ‘When he gets here, he’s going to have to report a couple of things that aren’t going to make you any too happy.’

‘Such as?’

‘Could I take that as an order, sir?’ Gunda asked. ‘I wouldn’t want Padan to start calling me a snitch.’

‘Consider it to be an order then, Gunda. What’s been going on down there at the beach?’

‘Well, sir, when Padan woke up yesterday morning, he noticed right off that Veltan’s sloop wasn’t there any more.’

‘You said what?’ Veltan demanded.

‘It’s gone,’ Gunda replied, ‘but this gets even better. Padan told me that Commander Narasan had stripped Jalkan of his commission and had him put in chains. After a while, Padan put a couple of things together and he ran down to the little room in the hold of the ship where Jalkan had been chained to the wall – and guess what? Jalkan wasn’t there any more either. I suppose it might just be a coincidence that the sloop and Jalkan both vanished on the same night, but I don’t think I’d want to wager a month’s pay on it.’

‘Are you just about through joking around, Gunda?’ Narasan demanded.

‘I was just reporting what had happened, sir. If I remember correctly, you did order me to tell you about this, and a good soldier always obeys orders.’ He feigned a look of wide-eyed innocence.

And then he burst out laughing.

Upon reflection, Omago realized that the outlanders were quite a bit more advanced than the people of the Land of Dhrall, but their social structure left much to be desired. They were very much like children – except that they all carried deadly weapons, and they’d go to war on almost any pretext.

That childish aggressiveness did work to the advantage of the people of the Land of Dhrall, though. The current situation required many hired killers, and it appeared that Veltan and his sister had found exactly the ones best qualified to meet the servants of the Vlagh.

Omago smiled faintly. The outlanders had all appeared to be astonished by several of the innovations he’d suggested. Evidently they all had the notion of ‘primitive savages’ locked in stone in their minds. The possibility that anybody in the Land of Dhrall could come up with improvements in weaponry was beyond their comprehension.

To some degree, perhaps, that blank spot in the minds of the outlanders could have grown out of their lack of awareness – or interest – in the extensive education Omago had received from Veltan since his early childhood. He was fairly sure that no outlander from the Trogite Empire or the Land of Maag had ever had a god for his teacher. The ‘connections’ which had come to Omago had been second nature, actually. Omago habitually moved from ‘effect’ to ‘cause’, and that seemed to be unnatural for the outlanders. They always seemed to think in the opposite direction. Evidently it had never occurred to them that the source of most inventions was ‘I need something that will do that,’ not ‘I wonder what I’ll be able to do with this thing if I make it.’

Omago was forced to concede that he had made a serious blunder, however. Jalkan’s insult had been a perfect opportunity to eliminate what might well turn out to be a serious danger down the line. ‘I should have killed him right there on the spot,’ Omago muttered regretfully. ‘Narasan even went so far as to offer me the opportunity, and I passed it up – probably because I didn’t want to offend the Trogites. I’m almost certain that we haven’t seen the last of that foul-mouthed lecher.’

Then a peculiar notion came to him. Could it be that Ara had deliberately instilled that lust in Jalkan? Omago was almost positive that she could have done that. She’d certainly done it to him when they’d first met in his orchard. Just the sight of her had made him her captive. If she had, in fact, set Jalkan’s mind to moving in that direction, it was quite obvious what she’d been after. Omago cursed himself. He’d failed her. She’d almost certainly have wanted him to respond in the most primitive way – bashing Jalkan’s brains out or ripping him up the middle with that iron knife.

‘If that’s what she really wanted, I wish she’d told me what she had in mind.’ He shrugged. ‘Ah, well,’ he sighed. ‘Maybe next time.’