A Victory for Kregen Read Free Page B

watched his face, wondering if he would suffer a character change now that we were out in the fresh air.
    The thorn-ivy, vicious stuff that flays the unwary, clustered thickly on the two ridgeways bordering the runnel. This was the real spiny ivy of Kregen. The Kregish for ivy is hagli. If we kept low we would be out of sight of a rider approaching at right angles. We chose a kink in the runnel so we could arrange one avenue only to watch. The clumped bushes shone a lustrous green and the thorns prickled like an army of miniature spearmen.
    “You think so, Jak?” Tyfar looked uncertain.
    The three principals stood together. The other six would not offer their opinions until asked, although the two Pachaks had every right to speak up.
    Presently, Tyfar called, “Barkindrar, Nath. We camp here.”
    I nodded to myself.
     
    That was the way it ought to be done. Confidence. The two Pachaks said nothing; silently they got on with cutting thorn-ivy and fashioning a form of boma around the open angle of the kink in the runnel. Old campaigners, these two Pachak hyr-paktuns, capital fellows to have along with you in a chancy business.
    “I am quite fond of bright-leaved hagli around the door,” said Quienyin. “But this stuff is murderous.”
    We hauled the thorn-ivy around, using sticks and weapons and not touching the stuff, and so fashioned the boma. I spied the land in the first flush of light. Jumping out, I walked a way off, turned to check the look of our hide.
    It looked innocent enough.
    Going back along the runnel I felt a burst of confidence.
    We could hole up there all day and never be spotted unless some damned rider fell on top of us.
    If that was what was in Tyfar’s mind, it most certainly was not in mine.
    Hunch was in no doubt.
    “We can hole up here all day,” he said to Nodgen. “We’ve water to last us and we can march on to the next stream tonight.” He yawned. “I think I shall sleep all day.”
    “The dawn wind will blow our tracks away,” said Nodgen. “But you’ll stand your watch like the rest of us, you skulking Tryfant.”
    “At least I don’t always need a shave—”
    “Quiet, you two,” I said.
    They froze.
    “All of you — still!”
    As the light brightened with the rising of the red sun, Zim, and the green sun, Genodras, and the shadows fleeted across the sere land, specks drifted high against the radiance. We squinted our eyes. Yes —
    Flutsmen. They were flutsmen up there, sky flyers sweeping across the land on the lookout for prey. True mercenaries of the skies, the flutsmen serve for pay in various armies; but they mostly enjoy reiving on their own account. And no man is safe from them.
    We remained perfectly still.
    High and menacing, the wings of their flyers lifting and falling in rhythm, the flutsmen circled twice, rising and falling, and then lined out and headed north.
    “May the leather of their clerketers rot so they fall off and break their evil necks,” said Hunch. He shut his eyes tightly. “Have they gone?”
    “They’ve gone, you fambly — you can stop shaking.”
    “The trouble is,” said Hunch the Tryfant, opening his eyes and looking serious. “I couldn’t run away then, and you know how it upsets me not to have a clear run.”
    There spoke your true Tryfant. But Hunch had proved a good comrade, despite his avowed intention of running off if the going got too tough.
    We composed ourselves for the day. I positioned myself so that my head was just under the lowest prickly branch of a thorn-ivy bush, where I had to be careful. The view afforded lowered down — the dusty surface, ocher and dun, blowing a little with the dawn wind, and the prospects of the Moders, massive artificial mounds that gave the Humped Land its name of Moderdrin, spotting the landscape for as far as I could see. Slowly, the Suns of Scorpio crawled across the heavens. And we waited and sweated.
    The first sign came, as so often, in a patch of lifting dust.
    I narrowed my eyes