Free Warlord of Antares by Alan Burt Akers Page B

this.”
    “I’ll show you — then you finish the rest.”
    This was quite unlike the Seg Segutorio I knew who was always punctiliously polite and gallant to women. He did not much care for the bunch we’d saved from the malkos, that was clear. Apart from the Rumay fanatics, whose beliefs and actions were self-explanatory, others of these women held secrets that made me wonder just how much trouble we were storing up for ourselves. It could be the women had been imprisoned after a process of justice, even in the Coup Blag. I doubted it; but it was possible.
    Nath the Impenitent’s whole attitude was quite different. He had already sorted out the women in his own mind. He had the leems and the ponshos marked.
    The two girls he had been caring for were, I had to admit, in a different class from the others. Nath had chosen well, and yet these two, pretty though they were, shared all the toughness and spirit of the Rumay fanatics.
    No one questioned Nath’s right to share a raft with these two girls: Seg and I sorted out who would sail with whom, and suggested to Nath he take more of the ladies with him.
    “The three of us will have to take different rafts, that is obvious. I don’t like it; it is a duty laid on us.”
    “It is, my old dom, a duty only if we choose to accept it.”
    “By Chozputz, Seg! You are right, and yet I’d far rather we did not have to accept the mission, take on this heavy burden.”
    Nath rumbled out: “The Rumay women can handle themselves, doms. It is the others we must care for.”
    In the end we had it sorted out and the little armada of rafts lay on the bank of the river, waiting.
    We ate of the cooked fish and of handfuls of palines. Among the trailing vines and plentiful leaves of the trees against the cliff, small agile figures clambered to gibber at us. The women left here would not need to exist on an exclusively fish diet.
    I didn’t fully trust to the lianas to lash the rafts and so had insisted on using other materials as well: split bark twisted and plaited, proved excellent. The rafts were serviceable. I hadn’t served as a Powder Monkey and as a First Lieutenant in Nelson’s Navy for nothing. Well, by Krun, I
had
got nothing for it, that was true, and I suspected my lack of success on Earth had a great deal to do with what others considered my considerable success on Kregen.
    We ripped up blankets of moss and heaping mounds of leaves to form pliable cushions and we lashed everyone down with many strands of our plaited ropes. When all was ready Seg, Nath and I launched the other rafts, then Seg and I lashed Nath down and launched him, and I lashed Seg down and launched him amid an icy silence of reprobation that he was not the last.
    As the current swirled him off he yelled back: “One of these days you’ll take a risk too many, you stiff-necked hulu! I can be spared from Kregen; you—”
    “Close the black-fanged winespout, my old dom!” I hollered back. “Save your breath for breathing!”
    In the next instant Seg aboard his raft whirled into the black demon-guarded opening.
    Lashing myself down as securely as I could, I felt my priorities of safety had been correct. Going first was not the peril that going unsecured would be.
    Using forearms only, I thrust the long branch at the bank and eased the raft the last few inches off the mud. The current caught us at once, and we spun about, caught and sucked along with instant force. The smell of the mud, of the algae, of the water, struck up with physical force as we hurtled along.
    The girls aboard my raft squealed; but they were very good and tried to keep silent. I think three of them fainted as we burst from the soft green radiance into the unholy darkness of the tunnel.
    Phocis, a dark-haired girl with a full fresh face who clutched a spear at her side, stared up at me in the stern. At the moment, the raft had swirled around and I was going first. The branch with which I had equipped myself as a pole and rudder was