The eggs! The eggs!
The exclamations of Queen Ayfa were picked up by the other Firvulag. For the sake of the weaker farsighted, Culluket amplified his own vision until they all saw the great pearly spheroids, twice the size of a human head, being deposited one by one into the warm muck. The female rested for a few moments after the last egg was laid, then began gentle swimming motions that served to tumble the sides of the bowl and bury the clutch securely.
Out on the water, the male plesiosaur was slowly sinking from view. It uttered one last prolonged hoot and vanished. The female now lay motionless, only her muddy sides heaving.
Culluket said: Look on the right!
Aiken said: Two bigbastards’ Yoicks!
He thumped his glass-spurred heels on the shoulders of his chaliko. Golden knight and mount slid down the air and landed with a resounding squelch. The chaliko sank up to its shaggy fetlocks in mud but remained composed. Aiken leaped from its back and burst into halide-bright effulgence. The area beneath the mossy cypresses was lit like midsummer noontide. Creeping through the thin underbrush toward the exhausted female plesiosaur were two enormous crocodilians. Their eyes blazed red and their mouths were slightly open, showing tusks like peeled and sharpened bananas. The head of the larger reptile was more than two meters long.
Aiken came capering over the surface of the mire like a demented will-o’-the-wisp, emitting vulgar noises. The lead phobosuchus veered toward him while the other halted, nonplussed.
“What are you spooks waiting for?” Aiken taunted the Firvulag. “Charge, dammit!”
“May I, High King?” begged Fafnor, couching his lance.
Sharn nodded. “And you, Medor. Stand by . . . and be alert.”
With valiant yells the two spurred their chalikos toward the dancing bright manikin. It seemed they would ride him down, but he leaped and whirled like a burning leaf, dodging easily out of harm’s way. Fafnor spitted the nearest crocodile through the middle of its body. It roared and contorted and its powerful tail whipped toward the chaliko, which was saved only when it abruptly rose four meters into the air. Fafnor’s lance was left behind in the madly twisting body. The young hero drew his longsword and darted back after the prey, now having to avoid not only the beast’s jaws and tail, but also his own lance, which seemed to have an enmity all its own. Several times it came perilously close to smashing him from the saddle. Medor stood back, helpless. Metapsychic intervention would be an unsporting gaucherie, and Hunt conventions allowed a companion to participate only when the principal was unmounted or disarmed.
“Don’t hack at its tail, dummy!” Aiken cried. “You think you’re carving a joint at a banquet? Get its brain’ Behind the eye!”
Fafnor rallied and finally located the critical spot, stabbing his sword down with a mighty two-handed blow. He backed off to safety while the reptile thrashed in mortal agony. Dark blood gushed at last from its jaws and it lay still.
The entire Hunt sprang brilliantly to life. A rainbow radiance lit the lagoon and both Tanu and Firvulag cheered. Aiken strolled to the dead monster, zapped off one of the projecting tusks by means of his psychoenergy, and handed the trophy to Fafnor. “Nice going, kid.”
By now, the second crocodile had disappeared. But the sporting blood of the Little People had been stimulated at last, and they demanded that Aiken produce fresh quarry.
“Why not? The night’s young!” A smile of studied casualness played about the jester’s lips. “Of course, anyone can fight a beast on land. But the real thrill comes when you manage to take one from the air, out over the sea. If you Firvulag were game for a real challenge, we could fly on back to the Strait of Redon and find us a bull-plesiosaur. Nonmating ones are always in season. But the usual restriction prevails: no fair using metapsychic force—just your regular weapons. And one further catch! No sloppiness, leaving a wounded beast to swim off and die. If you don’t make a clean kill at first cut, you have to go into the water to finish him off.”
There was abrupt stillness. Aiken’s satirical eye roved over the faces of his ogrish guests. “What? No volunteers? You Firvutag are supposed to be a lot braver in the water than Tanu. It should be easy for you to polish off a sea monster in its own element. They aren’t all that hard to nail. All it takes is a good eye—and nerve.”
“I’m game, if no Foeman dares risk.” Old Celadeyr of Afaliah had an unaccustomed gaiety about him.
“Let me do it. High King!” Betularn begged his sovereign. The other ogres hastily chimed in.
“No,” said Sharn ‘The honor will be mine alone, lest our saucy host think us deficient in that quality so prized by Low-lives—nerve.”
“I need to be taught a good lesson,” Aiken said “Let’s go!”
The Flying Hunt soared aloft and westward, toward the strait. The moon was halfway to the zenith Aiken earned the riders to a considerable altitude, so that they could see the black stretch of the coast and the gleaming water, the lights of Goriah on the horizon, and even the twinkling fires marking the Firvulag encampment far up the curving Laar, adjacent to the Grove of May.
“Plesiosaurs that stay out to sea on nights like this are apt to be very young or very old,” the shining youth explained. “Now, these big old bulls may be past it, but they still know how to fight—believe me! We’ll cruise around until Cull spots a really choice specimen for you, Sharnie, and then you can show us a sample of the real Firvulag jisum!”
Idiot, Ayfa told her husband on the intimate mode.
He tricked me.
Of course he did.
Was I supposed to let myself be upstaged by a pair of creaking dotards? I’m the King and Battlemaster!
A very paragon of nerve and jisum . . . men!
Plesiosaurs don’t look to be as dangerous as the crocodiles. I could have taken that one back there in the swamp with a dull tableknife.
Well, you’re for it now. And I have uncomfortable premonitions that Aiken Drum planned it this way!
Any treachery would be certain to take place while I was distracted by the beast. You and Medor must monitor the little gold bastard’s PK output every second. At the least diminution—the least hint that he might drop me in the water—all of you combine to blast him out of the sky. Even if we all lose our lives in the fracas to follow, we’ll die with our racial honor intact.
Té save you, dear fool! You know what I think of this honor!
Yes. But you’ll do as I say nevertheless. Now be silent.
“I have discovered a suitable sea monster, Battlemaster,” said Culluket to Aiken.
“We’re off!” cried the Shining One. The cavalcade, like a pyrotechnic arrow, plunged toward the moonlit sea. “Is he on the surface, Cull?”
“Basking,” the Interrogator confirmed, “but alert. We’d better go invisible—save for the royal antagonist.”
Thirteen members of the Hunt vanished, leaving only Sharn and his mount plummeting like a dark meteor, sustained in flight by the psychokinesis of Aiken Drum.
The farspoken thought of the trickster came to the mind of the Firvulag King:
We standby above! Gogethim! Neckchop besthope Slonshal BigBoy!
Sharn drew his sword. He reined in his mount to come nearly to a halt just above the water, and drifted toward an indistinct gleaming mass that lounged amid waves that were thinly crested with white. The neck of the plesiosaur was down, extended in graceful S-curves, and its slender tail was undulating. It was a gigantic thing, nearly the length of the sperm whales of the Anversian Sea, at least half again as large as the mating pair they had seen back in the swamp.
Sharn approached the creature almost at wavetop, from directly behind the head. He prayed that its peripheral vision was poor, that its rubbery skin was insensitive to aerial vibrations, and that the wind would not shift, carrying his scent.
The plesiosaur began to scull with its paddles as well as its slow-moving tail. Sharn followed, a bejeweled ogre with an upraised crystal sword, biding his lime until the beast
should be directly upwind of him and the neck in a favorable posture.
The wind shifted. The monster caught his scent. Sharn’s heels drove into the barrel of the chaliko and it hurtled forward. An incredible neck curled up, flinging sheets of water. It snapped back like a whip and the jaws opened. Sharn gave the chaliko a violent crossrein and it heeled over at a full gallop, not a meter above the tossing waves, with the monstrous head snaking after it.
In a sudden convulsion of terror, Sharn felt something grip his armored left calf. The chaliko was wrenched to a halt and both rider and mount cried out. But even in his extremity, the King felt constrained by the rules of the Hunt. Instead of blasting the creature, he stabbed at it awkwardly with his sword. The jaws let go, the chaliko gave an explosive grunt as the hold on its rider eased, and Hunter and prey were flung wide apart. Sharn urged the chaliko aloft and it responded as it had been trained to do, racing through air as easily as it might have pounded across the steppes. Sharn turned it and sent it speeding back down. Fury had raised a high-pitched singing sound in his brain. The Lowlife usurper had planned this! He and the Torturer knew this plesiosaur’s wiliness and savage courage of old, and they had led the Hunt directly to its territory. And now wailed for it to kill him.
The monster darted up from the water in lightning lunges, champing and foaming, writhing like a nightmare python. The head was not large but the teeth were recurved and razor sharp— and at least one had already penetrated a chink in his hinder jambeau, for there was a trickling at the back of his leg, although he felt no pain.
Oh, you would, would you?
As he dived at it he shouted the ancient battle-curse of the Little People, the one passed down from his grandsire’s grandsire, who had contended with Bright Lugonn at the Ship’s Grave and wielded the immortal Sword.
“Ylahayll!” roared King Sham-Mes. “Ylahayll Tanu! Ylahayll Aiken Drum!”
The coiling neck shot at him, jaws wide, on a perfect trajectory to catch him if he missed. He cried again, “Ylahayll!” And struck.
The head of the monster tumbled into the sea.
Up above, the members of the Hunt flared in multicolored light, circling like angels on a merry-go-round. Sharn retrieved the floating head and flung it aloft with all of his titanic strength straight at Aiken Drum. The head blazed green and the teeth in the open jaws were wickedly aglitter.
“This time,” Sharn called out to his host, “the trophy is for you.”
12
AT DAWN ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL THE GRAND LOVING OF Firvulag commenced its preliminary events.
From their encampment on the Field of Gold streamed thousands upon thousands of Little People, all dressed in their finest clothes. The boys and girls of marriageable age carried beribboned wreaths of vervain and St. John’s-wort, species deemed to resemble most closely certain fertility herbs native to lost Duat. The matrons were burdened with armloads of precious gifts wrapped in embroidered linen, and their menfolk toted trumpets, shawms, fifes, cymbals, tam-tams, and sixteen varieties of drum. Trailing after came a great herd of little children wearing surcoats and caps of green leaves, carrying baskets of colored eggs and waving noisemaker rattles.
Making a musical din, the throng marched to the ramp of the Nionel suspension bridge, where it was met by a mounted delegation from the city, headed by Sugoll. The Lord of the Howlers, all in white and adorned with a magnificent illusory body, bade his kinfolk follow him a-Maying, and led them over the bridge. The suspension cables fluttered with rainbow-colored banners, and garlands of greenery decorated the rails.
On the opposite shore of the river. reborn Nionel waited with its gates wide open. The industrious goblin citizenry had burnished forty years of verdigris from its toadstool-domes and bulbous cupolas, and now they shone like gold in the sunrise. Golden, too, were the freshly plastered walls of the houses, the sanded streets, and the sweeping expanse of the grand plaza where the celebration was to take place. Nionel’s fountains and lamp-standards and sidewalk furniture had all been brightly gilded. And the new Pavilion of the Great Ones had pillars of green serpentine twined with yellow roses, and a cloth-of-gold awning. All around the plaza’s perimeter was a greenbelt of lawns and blooming trees. The surrounding buildings were hung with effigy-pennons and swags of brilliant flowers.
The Howlers of Nionel, dressed even more sumptuously than their nonmutant cousins, crowded balconies and windows, thronged dozens-deep in the peripheral arcades, and overflowed into the side streets, cheering as the benevolent invasion poured into the square to the accompaniment of the Grand Loving Madrigal:
Come unto these yellow sands
All those who seek a lover.
Dance ten times around the flowering tree,
Choose your sweetheart and pay the price.
But beware of love-thieves!
And beware the disguised Foe!
Shun mama’s-boys and shrewish maids
And potential in-laws with empty pokes!
O King and Queen of May, reign generously.
Kind Goddess, bless this time of joy and wooing.
Let the two tall fires be kindled at midnight,
And grant to those who pass between eternal love
Sugoll and his party came to the Pavilion of the Great Ones, where the Howler lord dismounted and ascended to his throne Katlinel, who would play Queen of the May to Sugoll’s King, waited with the gorgeous crowd of Firvulag nobility, headed by the Great Captain Galbor Redcap and his wife Habetrot, and the legendary artisan-mates Finoderee and Mabino Dreamspinner. King Sharn and Queen Ayfa and most of the Gnomish Council were away in Goriah at the Tanu festivity. But they were hardly missed, so great was the excitement among the Little People at having the Loving in Nionel again.
Two full generations had passed since the last Maying in the city. During the time of the Tanu ascendancy, the Firvulag, for sorrow and hurt pride, had let their Grand Loving degenerate into scattered local observances. Nionel had been a site to shun rather than cherish when it seemed that the Field of Gold would never again host the Games. But now all that was changed. As the new arrivals took their places, they were buzzing about the splendid renovation job the mutants had done. (Truth to tell, the dear old town had never looked better.) What with Brede’s successor having solved the sticky problem of the Loathly Brides—why, it seemed that this would truly be a May Day to remember.
“Next, they’ll crown Sugoll and Katy with flowers,” Crazy Greggy said to Chief Burke. “And then they’ll issue their first official command and the not will start!” He tittered with antic glee.
“Surely not a literal riot,” said Sister Amerie Roccaro, setting down her cup of coffee. They were all securely ensconced in a side wing of the pavilion—the thirty-three sidetracked adventurers bound for Hidden Springs and their impromptu festival guide, Greg-Donnel Genetics Master. The mob of nearly a thousand bareneck refugees that they had shepherded to Nionel from the Lac de Bresse was dispersed among the local populace for the holiday. Dressed in borrowed Howler finery, the human emigrés were virtually indistinguishable from medium-sized members of the Firvulag race.
Greggy said, “You just keep a sharp eye out, Sister. Sugoll briefed me on what happens next. See? Here comes the Little Green Army now!”
The flock of children dressed in leaves approached the thrones of Sugoll and Katlinel. The King of the May lifted his flowery sceptre.
“O valiant Greenfolk, defend our sacred festival from the Foe! Search every hiding place, every mousehole and secret cranny, lest foul interlopers invade our Grand Loving and steal away the precious brides and grooms.”
A piercing shriek went up from the elfin host. They scattered pell-mell into the crowd of adults, impudently lifting petticoats and rooting through bundles. The adults responded with yells and swats and used their musical instruments to set up a deafening clamor. The urchins were not at all discouraged. They ranged out among the Howler celebrants, concentrating on the east side of the square where the eating es
tablishments were situated, clambering over tables, upsetting the sunshades, and stealing whatever food was insufficiently defended.
“No Tanu ever show up as clandestine participants, of course,” Greggy said. “I’m afraid that the Little People have rather an inflated opinion of their own desirability! But just to keep the fun going, a few adolescents from Nionel are tricked out in fake glass armor to play boogieman. And—whoops! Here they come!”
A squad of mock invaders, armed with big soft balloon-cudgels, dashed into the plaza from a side street. Squealing, the Little Green Army converged and produced its own weaponry. In a moment the air was filled with flying colored eggs. Some were stuffed with confetti and some contained heavily perfumed dye-water. There were eggs stuffed with sneezy fungus spores, with feathers, and with honey. A few were unblown and fresh from the nest, and the less principled among the children flung missiles that were hard-boiled or even addled. When the “Tanu” were struck, they retaliated with ferocious wallops from their balloons and momentary glimpses of some hideous phantom aspect, The leaf-clad imps were unfazed. Scores of them leaped at the faltering, besmutched Foemen and pulled them down to the yellow sand. The enemy expired to the tune of lugubrious groans, exploding balloons, and the crackle and crunch of a few leftover eggs. Then ropes were brought and lashed to the glass-armored ankles, and the victorious Greenfolk hauled their captives away while the adults laughed uproariously, relaxed, and settled down to enjoy a long picnic breakfast.
“The little nippers have a beanfeast of their own in another part of town after they peel off their leaves and wash up,” Greggy said. “For the rest of the festival, they’ll have their own separate entertainment. Puppet shows, games, and the like. That way the grownups won’t be inhibited in their own merrymaking.”
“The leaf-clad army was weirdly evocative of parts of Frazer’s Golden Bough,” remarked Basil Wimborne “The banishing of malevolent influences before the start of the fertility rites! One wonders what the original, more violent aspect of the ritual might have been in primitive days on their home planet?”