Read Online Seg the Bowman by Alan Burt Akers - Free Book Online Page A

brought up as a handmaiden to serve a queen, this rude out-of-doors adventuring life could not hold aught of pleasure? Yet Milsi throve.
    Seg, wistful, was reminded of ancient days.
    He said, once: “Milsi, do you know the difference between fallimy and vilmy flowers?”
    She laughed in an off-hand way. “Of course.” Then she saw how serious he was beneath the casual attitude. “One is good for poultices, the other to clean disgusting corroded cesspits and cisterns.”
    “Yes. And you could tell them apart?”
    “Well, would I put a cistern-cleaning poultice on your wound—” She saw him. “Seg!”
    “It is all right. I am ashamed. I should not have said anything—”
    “Can you tell me?”
    “Not now.” He walked on ahead, very quickly, and even in the state he was in he knew Milsi would be safe with Diomb and Bamba. He should not have spoken! It was cruel, degrading. It was unholy. Poor Thelda! He had loved Thelda, he had. They had had their quarrels, as who hadn’t, but they had had a splendid life. And now she was gone, married to another man, and here he was, a wandering adventurer desperately trying to relive a part of his life that was dead.
    He was not the same Seg Segutorio who had so happily marched through the Hostile Territories, all those seasons ago, with Thelda, and with his old dom and Delia. No. He was different now. He’d been a great noble, lording it over rich lands, and he’d lost all that because he’d tried to outlaw slavery. He’d told kings and emperors what they could do. He’d commanded armies in battle. And now he had found a woman in his life for whom he could cherish a great and genuine affection, who might turn back the years for him, cause the clepsydra’s water to run back up into the upper vessel...
    Milsi wouldn’t so confidently, meaning the best, have slapped a harsh cistern-cleaning poultice on the wound in his old dom’s chest... Poor Thelda! She was gone. He no longer loved the woman who was Thelda and who was married to Lol Polisto. He recalled the love he had felt for the Thelda of long ago, when they’d marched through the Hostile Territories, when they’d struggled for an empire.
    No. It was so.
    He could find it in his heart to love this Milsi, for all the oddness he sensed about her history. He had not so much found in her a new meaning to life, as a new reason to live a proper life once again.
    As to her feelings for him, they remained obscure, despite that he felt she had been shafted with him by the same bolt of lightning. It was entirely possible when they returned to civilization and her home she would give him a cool “thank you” and then turn away and forget him.
    Well, so be it, by Vox! He knew what he wanted, now. So, if that was how the adventure turned out, he’d use what skill and cunning he had to alter that outcome...
    All that had happened was gone. It was smoke blown with the wind.
    “By Beng Dikkane!” he said, calling on the patron saint of all the ale-drinkers of Paz. “I could do with a wet right now!”
    Following on, Diomb kept up a stream of questions.
    “What is vosk? What are momolams? What is ponsho? What is dopa?”
    Half-laughing, Milsi explained carefully. She was mindful of the responsibilities she had taken on with her acceptance of the two dinkus as companions.
    Seg could not fail to notice the way in which she handled them, easy and yet with a quiet manipulation she must have learned as a lady in waiting to a queen.
    Bamba chattered as much as Diomb.
    “What is a spinning wheel? What are carts?”
    And Diomb: “What is a ship?”
    Seg slowed, ears cocked, listening.
    Milsi showed no hesitation in her reply. She spoke with the same sure conviction anyone would use explaining what a cart was.
    “Oh, a ship is a very large boat, and I have told you that a boat floats on water and carries people and things. Ships travel far over the seas, driven by the winds of heaven, and bring strange and exotic merchandise back