Chapter 20: The Trade

Orzad pulled his tired pony to a halt, muttering a curse under his breath as a whistling shriek echoed down the trail from somewhere up ahead.

"Tiger lizard!" He cast a worried glance at his back trail, toward where the King's soldiers were probably still hunting his tracks. "On the prowl, too. Wonder what it's after?"

Another whistling scream was answered by the bass honking of a gronch. Orzad guided his nervous pony to the crest of a nearby hill where he could look down on the trail. Sure enough, in a basin formed by crisscrossing ridges, the fighters moved through a shifting haze of dust kicked up by their pounding feet. The tiger lizard, a young one but little larger than Orzad's pony, circled warily around the larger gronch. It rose up on its hind legs to dart in at the other lizard, then dropped back to all fours as the gronch's lashing tail drove it back. The gronch kept its heavy greenish gray body close to the ground, its legs spread wide to give leverage to its muscular tail. The tiny head on its short neck was raised high to watch its crimson and blue black striped opponent.

The tiger lizard dodged in and out, trying to catch the gronch off balance, then gathered its powerful hind legs under it and sprang! A rising cloud of dust half obscured the scene, and Orzad's pony tried to bolt at the sudden clamor of honks and screams.

The tiger lizard leaped back out of range of the gronch's tail, its mighty jaws stained crimson. The gronch's neck and back showed gaping rents where the tiger lizard's teeth and claws had ripped and torn. Its honking took on a more frantic note as the tiger lizard's poison burned in its veins. The tiny head with its bulging eyes drooped sideways, and the tiger lizard leaped in, jaws agape. When the dust finally settled, giving the watcher a clear view of the scene of the battle, the gronch lay on its side, twitching feebly as the poison finished its work. The tiger lizard also lay still, crumpled against the side of a boulder. At first, Orzad couldn't tell what had happened to it, but then he saw that its head was bent back under its body at an impossible angle.

He watched until he was sure that both lizards were thoroughly dead, then urged his trembling pony forward. He was not surprised to see that the dead gronch still wore a few scraps of broken harness about its body, and had a ragged tear in its dewlap where it had lost its guide ring. The big lizards were normally tractable enough, but they would occasionally take it into their tiny heads to bolt and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop them.

His pony had been raised around the musky stench of gronch, and since he took care not to approach the tiger lizard at all closely he was able to ride on by with no trouble. His thoughts were on his back trail, where a troop of the King's own personal cavalry was undoubtedly sweating its way along his tangled trail. With any kind of luck he should have almost a day's lead on them by now, but he was too experienced at this kind of hide and seek to count on more than a few hours, if that much. His last brush with them had traded most of his small stock of bronze pointed arrows for three of their horses, and one man with a sword would stand little chance in a fight with a dozen or more trained soldiers.

His thoughts were jerked roughly back to the present by a disturbance alongside the trail not far ahead. Without stopping to ponder, he whirled his pony off the trail, taking cover behind a nearby pile of boulders. He leaped from the saddle, nocking one of his precious arrows in one easy motion. As he watched cautiously, his slitted almond eyes peering out from beneath bushy black eyebrows, the noise that had alerted him boomed out loud and clear. A deep buzzing, sounding almost like a hive of disturbed insects, rose and swelled, becoming higher pitched and fainter until it was an almost inaudible whine. A patch of darkness stained the air, rippling and swelling like oil on water. When it steadied, a rough oval half again as tall as a man stood on end by the side of the trail. It dipped slightly, its lower end cutting into the ground, the faint whine dying away entirely as it stilled.

Orzad spotted a whirl of dust as air gusted out from the oval, and his eyes narrowed even more as he realized that this thing he was seeing had depth to it. By shading his eyes from the sun, he was able to make out a hint of movement, a shadowy figure that drew closer until it stood just within the oval opening. His fingers tightened on his bow as he recalled tales of demons and sorcerers from his childhood. For a moment he was tempted to sneak away, but his curiosity was too strong.

The being that stepped from the strange oval, Orzad was beginning to think of it as some kind of a magical doorway, looked man like enough at first glance. It had the right number of arms, legs, and heads, the right features in the right places, even the right number of fingers on each hand. A still closer look, however, brought out a number of disturbing differences. The skin, for instance, was a light brown, fading to pinkish white where it was protected from the sun, not like his own normal yellow brown. The eyes were strangely shaped, too round and level, and even at this distance their color wasn't quite right. Orzad couldn't quite tell, but he had the uneasy thought that they were almost the deep blue of a tiger lizard's eyes, not the dark brown of a true man's.

Last of all, this being was tall, a full two hands taller than Orzad, who was accounted fairly tall among his people. The being's clothes, too, were strange. Not in their styling, for men of different cities often wore clothes of varying cut, but in their color.

They weren't the dark crimson of the Trader's Guild, nor yet the bright yellow of the money lenders. They weren't priestly green, or even the dull brown of the common citizen, the farmer and herder, that Orzad wore. Instead, they were of many colors mingled together without rhyme or reason. The deep blue reserved only to those of royal blood, strange shades of yellow, brown, and green, even colors that denoted no known caste or trade ran side by side or crossed over one another in a meaningless jumble.

Another figure stepped through the magic doorway. Orzad could not repress a gasp of amazement. Instantly, the two beings sprang into coordinated action. The first one flung himself sideways, sprawling behind a boulder, while the second one darted the other way, dropping out of sight behind a heavy clump of brush. Faint rustling sounds reached him, and Orzad cursed himself roundly. The demons, or whatever they were, had him neatly boxed in! If he wasn't careful... His thoughts ground to a halt as a voice called out a sharp command from behind him. He slowly, carefully, turned his head, his spine crawling. The second demon had moved with uncanny speed and stealth to come up behind him. The command was repeated, and he could well guess its meaning.

He straightened up slowly and carefully from where he crouched, lowering his bow and letting it fall at his feet. The small object that pointed at him so steadily looked like no weapon he had ever seen, but this was no time to be testing its powers.

At close range, this demon looked even stranger than its fellow. It was clad in a one piece black garment that clung to it like a second skin, leaving no doubt that this one was female. The shocking thing about this demon was its color. Its hands and face, and every other bit of it that he could see, were almost as black as its garment!

As he preceded the she demon back to the magical doorway, Orzad saw that another she demon had appeared, standing just inside the doorway and watching him with unconcealed interest. This one was dressed like her sister demon in tight fitting black, but her skin was a clear pinkish white with only a hint of a pale golden tan, and her hair was the pale gold of ripening grain fields.

By now, Orzad was beyond any feeling of surprise. It was with a mood of dumb resignation that he stopped in front of the first demon, waiting for whatever might happen. At the back of his mind a faint worry about the soldiers on his trail stirred, to be forgotten as the demon spoke. The voice was deep and strong, but the strangely accented words meant nothing. Shrugging his shoulders, the demon tapped himself on the chest, speaking the single syllable, "Nurm," and pointing to Orzad with raised eyebrows.

Orzad spoke his own name in return. It was only his 'spoken' name, giving these demons no further power over him. No more, that is, than what they already had. He glanced around, noting that the white she demon had gone back inside the doorway. The black one had climbed to the top of a nearby hill, leaving the two of them to themselves. Instead of making him feel better, this only deepened his resignation. This demon, or sorcerer, or whatever he was didn't seem to feel the need of any particular caution in dealing with him.

"And yet," Orzad thought to himself, "he was careful enough when he didn't know what he was facing."

For the next couple of hours, Orzad found himself teaching this 'Nurm' demon words of his language. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for this, for of course all men spoke but one language, but he found himself cooperating almost eagerly. His unease at these strange beings was forgotten for longer and longer periods as his curiosity grew ever stronger.

The white she demon took the black one's place on the hill partway through the afternoon. Orzad's pony had been brought closer, and given water and a strange grain that it munched on cautiously, shortly after this strange language lesson had begun. The dark she demon disappeared into the magic doorway, reappearing in a few moments bearing a tray and a folding stand. Smiling, she offered him a darkly foaming liquid in a delicately wrought cup.

He sniffed at it cautiously, finding a strangely familiar aroma. A tentative sip brought a broad smile to his heretofore impassive features. He drank the rest of the cup's contents down in three deep, satisfying gulps, holding his cup out to be refilled from a squat brown bottle. Here was a beer such as a man might dream of during a long desert journey, cold and clear, but with a dark strength to it that warmed a man's heart even as it cooled his belly! Orzad made a hasty reassessment of his captors. Surely, any beings who could brew such a beer could not be all bad!

The language lessons went more smoothly after that, and he noticed that the words Nurm was most interested in were those of trade, and of the things that he and his people might be the most interested in buying and selling. Particularly surprising to him was Nurm's interest in his need for iron, the quest that had gotten the King's cavalry on his trail to begin with. The dagger at Orzad's waist, with its bone blade so carefully edged with iron, the bronze backed iron of his short sword, the few bronze tipped arrows that remained in his quiver, all were studied with unconcealed interest. Nurm also studied just as carefully the crudely polished gems in the handles of his dagger and sword, and the gold and silver ornaments that decorated his riding gear.

"Why do you travel here?" That was Nurm's first question when he had gained sufficient command of Orzad's language to make himself clear. "We saw no villages nearby."

"Soldiers." Using a thin sheet of white stuff and a marking stick, he strove to convey that some ten or twelve soldiers were an unknown distance behind him.