The Man Who Counts

VI

To the south was Lannach, an island the size of Britain. From it Holmenach, an archipelago, curved northward for some hundreds of kilometers, into regions still wintry. Thus the islands acted as boundary and shield: defining the Sea of Achan, protecting it from the great cold currents of The Ocean.

Here the Drak’honai lay.

Nicholas van Rijn stood on the main deck of the Gerunis, glaring eastward to the Fleet’s main body. The roughly woven, roughly fitted coat and trousers which a Sailmaker had thrown together for him irritated a skin long used to more expensive fabrics. He was tired of sugar-cured ham and brandied peaches — though when such fare gave out, he would begin starving to death. The thought of being a captured chattel whose wishes nobody need consult was pure anguish. The reflection on how much money the company must be losing for lack of his personal supervision was almost as bad.

“Bah!” he rumbled. “If they would make it a goal of their policy to get us home, it could be done.”

Sandra gave him a weary look. “And what shall the Lannachs be doing while the Drak’honai bend all their efforts to return us?” she answered. “It is still a close thing, this war of theirs. Dra’ho could lose it yet.”

“Satan’s hoof-and-mouth disease!” He waved a hairy fist in the air. “While they squabble about their stupid little territories, the Solar Spice Liquors is losing a million credits a day!”

“The war happens to be a life-and-death matter for both sides,” she said.

“Also for us. Nie?” He fumbled after a pipe, remembered that his meerschaums were on the sea bottom, and groaned. “When I find who it was stuck that bomb in my cruiser—” It did not occur to him to offer excuses for getting her into this. But then, perhaps it was she who had indirectly caused the trouble. “Well,” he finished on a calmer note, “it is true we must settle matters here, I think. End the war for them so they can do important business like getting me home.”

Sandra frowned across the bright sun-blink of waters. “Do you mean help the Drak-honai? I do not care for that so much. They are the aggressors. But then, they saw the wives and little ones hungry—” She signed. “It is hard to unravel. Let such be so, then.”

“Oh, no!” Van Rijn combed his goatee. “We help the other side. The Lannachska.”

“What!” She stood back from the rail and dropped her jaw at him. “But… but—”

“You see,” explained Van Rijn, “I know a little something about politics. It is needful for an honest businessman seeking to make him a little hard-earned profit, else some louse-bound politician comes and taxes it from him for some idiot school or old-age pension. The politics here is not so different from what we do out in the galaxy. It is a culture of powerful aristocrats, this Fleet, but the balance of power lies with the throne — the Admiralty. Now the admiral is old, and his son the crown prince has more to say than is rightful. I waggle my ears at gossip — they forget how much better we hear than they, in this pea-soup-with-sausages atmosphere. I know. He is a hard-cooked one, him that T’heonax.

“So we help the Drak’honai win over the Flock. So what? They are already winning. The Flock is only making guerrilla now, in the wild parts of Lannach. They are still powerful, but the Fleet has the upper hand, and need only maintain status quo to win. Anyhow, what can we, who the good God did not offer wings, do at guerrillas? We show T’heonax how to use a blaster, well, how do we show him how to find somebodies to use it on?”

“Hm-m-m… yes.” She nodded, stiffly. “You mean that we have nothing to offer the Drak’honai, except trade and treaty later on, if they get us home.”

“Just so. And what hurry is there for them to meet the League? They are natural wary of unknowns like us from Earth. They like better to consolidate themselves in their new conquest before taking on powerful strangers, nie? I hear the scuttled butt, I tell you; I know the trend of thought about us. Maybe T’heonax lets us starve, or cuts our throats. Maybe he throws our stuff overboard and says later he never heard of us. Or maybe, when a League boat finds him at last, he says ja, we pulled some humans from the sea, and we was good to them, but we could not get them home in time.”

“But could they — actually? I mean, Freeman van Rijn, how would you get us home, with any kind of Diomedean help?”

“Bah! Details! I am not an engineer. Engineers I hire. My job is not to do what is impossible, it is to make others do it for me. Only how can I organize things when I am only a more-than-half prisoner of a king who is not interested in meeting my peoples? Hah?”

“Whereas the Lannach tribe is hard pressed and will let you, what they say, write your own ticket. Yes.” Sandra laughed, with a touch of genuine humor. “Very good, my friend! Only one question now, how do we get to the Lannachs?”

She waved a hand at their surroundings. It was not an encouraging view.

The Gerunis was a typical raft: a big structure, of light tough balsalike logs lashed together with enough open space and flexibility to yield before the sea. A wall of uprights, pegged to the transverse logs, defined a capacious hold and supported a main deck of painfully trimmed planks. Poop and forecastle rose at either end, their flat roofs bearing artillery and, in the former case, the outsize tiller. Between them were seaweed-thatched cabins for storage, workshops, and living quarters. The overall dimensions were about sixty meters by fifteen, tapering toward a false bow which provided a catapult platform and some streamlining. A foremast and mainmast each carried three big square sails, a lateen-rigged mizzen stood just forward of the poop. Given a favoring wind — remembering the force of most winds on this planet — the seemingly awkward craft could make several knots, and even in a dead calm it could be rowed.

It held about a hundred Diomedeans plus wives and children. Of those, ten couples were aristocrats, with private apartments in the poop; twenty were ranking sailors, with special skills, entitled to one room per family in the main-deck cabins; the rest were common deckhands, barracked into the forecastle.

Not far away floated the rest of this squadron. There were rafts of various types, some primarily dwelling units like the Gerunis, some triple-decked for cargo, some bearing the long sheds in which fish and seaweed were processed. Often several at a time were linked together, to form a little temporary island. Moored to them, or patrolling between, were the outrigger canoes. Wings beat in the sky, where aerial detachments kept watch for an enemy: full-time professional warriors, the core of Drak’ho’s military strength.

Beyond this outlying squadron, the other divisions of the Fleet darkened the water as far as a man’s eyes would reach. Most of them were fishing. It was brutally hard work, where long nets were trolled by muscle power. Nearly all a Drak’ho’s life seemed to go to back-bending labor. But out of these fluid fields they were dragging a harvest which leaped and flashed.

“Like fiends they must drive themselves,” observed Van Rijn. He slapped the stout rail. “This is tough wood, even when green, and they chew it smooth with stone and glass tools! Some of these fellows I would like to hire, if the union busybodies can be kept away from them.”

Sandra stamped her foot. She had not complained at danger of death, cold and discomfort and the drudgery of Tolk’s language lessons filtered through Wace. But there are limits. “Either you talk sense, Freeman, or I go somewhere else! I asked you how we get away from here.”

“We get rescued by the Lannachska, of course,” said Van Rijn. “Or, rather, they come steal us. Yes, so-fashion will be better. Then, if they fail, friend Delp cannot say it is our fault we are so desired by all parties.”

Her tall form grew rigid. “What do you mean? How are they to know we are even here?”

“Maybe Tolk will tell them.”

“But Tolk is even more a prisoner than we, not?”

“So. However—” Van Rijn rubbed his hands. “We have a little plan made. He is a good head, him. Almost as good as me.”

Sandra glared. “And will you deign to tell me how you plotted with Tolk, under enemy surveillance, when you cannot even speak Drak’ho?”

“Oh, I speak Drak’ho pretty good,” said Van Rijn blandly. “Did you not just hear me admit how I eavesdrop on all the palaver aboard? You think just because I make so much trouble, and still sit hours every day taking special instruction from Tolk, it is because I am a dumb old bell who cannot learn so easy? Horse maneuvers! Half the time we mumble together, he is teaching me his own Lannach lingo. Nobody on this raft knows it, so when they hear us say funny noises they think maybe Tolk tries words of Earth language out, ha? They think he despairs of teaching me through Wace and tries himself to pound some Drak’ho in me. Ho, ho, they are bamboozles, by damn! Why, yesterday I told Tolk a dirty joke in Lannachamael. He looked very disgusted. There is proof that poor old Van Rijn is not fat between the ears. We say nothing of the rest of his anatomy.”

Sandra stood quiet for a bit, trying to understand what it meant to learn two nonhuman languages simultaneously, one of them forbidden.

“I do not see why Tolk looks disgusted,” mused Van Rijn. “It was a good joke. Listen: there was a salesman who traveled on one of the colonial planets, and—”

“I can guess why,” interrupted Sandra hastily. “I mean… why Tolk did not think it was a funny tale. Er… Freeman Wace was explaining it to me the other day. Here on Diomedes they have not the trait of, um, constant sexuality. They breed once each year only, in the tropics. No families in our sense. They would not think our” — she blushed — “our all-year-around interest in these questions was very normal or very polite.”

Van Rijn nodded. “All this I know. But Tolk has seen somewhat of the Fleet, and in the Fleet they do have marriage, and get born at any time of year, just like humans.”

“I got that impression,” she answered slowly, “and it puzzles me. Freeman Wace said the breeding cycle was in their, their heredity. Instinct, or glands, or what it now is called. How could the Fleet live differently from what their glands dictate?”

“Well, they do.” Van Rijn shrugged massive shoulders. “Maybe we let some scientist worry about it for a thesis later on, hah?”

Suddenly she gripped his arm so he winced. Her eyes were a green blaze. “But you have not said… what is to happen? How is Tolk to get word about us to Lannach? What do we do?”

“I have no idea,” he told her cheerily. “I play with the ear.”

He cocked a beady eye at the pale reddish overcast. Several kilometers away, enormously timbered, bearing what was almost a wooden castle, floated the flagship of all Drak’ho. A swirl of bat wings was lifting from it and streaming toward the Gerunis. Faintly down the sky was borne the screech of a blown sea shell.

“But I think maybe we find out quick,” finished Van Rijn, “because his rheumatic majesty comes here now to decide about us.”