The Quest of Kadji Read Online Free

for a linen clout wound about his loins, the boy stooped and bathed in the cold waters of the Babdar, which, like a mirror, caught and held the image of his lean brown young body, broad-shouldered, smooth-chested, narrow-hipped, and long and rangy in the legs. He bent, grinning, and scooped cold water up in cupped palms, slashing it in his face, shivering at the bite of the chill Water as it dribbled down his naked breast and thighs.
    When he had cleansed himself, he opened the saddle pack and took out fresh garments, which he drew on over his shivering nakedness.
    In a few moments he wore the fringed kuruz , the high-strapped leggings, the broad girdle and belied cap of a lordless Free Sword of the Ushamtar. The Ushamtar warriors had taken no part in the battle between the foreign Rashemba knights and the sword-brothers of the Kozanga; no curse of banishment or outlawry lay on their heads; thus, in the guise of a wandering Ushamtar mercenary, Kadji could ride where he wished without fear. He hoped!
    Mounting his Feridoon pony, he rode boldly down to the gates of Nabdoor.
    The town, which was not large, was ringed about in the embrace of a wall of rough fieldstone covered with cream and white stucco. It had two gates fashioned of heavy wood, and up to the nearer of these rode Kadji. As a boy might, he had concocted a long and very complicated story to account for his presence here. It included a false name and a full genealogy, and much incidental and anecdotal material. But to the vast disgust of Kadji, the knights of the Rashemba garrison did not even question him. Huge and red-faced and surly, they looked down at him from the height of the wall, saw him for a Ushamtar mercenary, and gestured him through the gate with but a grunted word. He felt somehow cheated: but it was just as well. His tongue might betray him for a Kozanga. He had not the guttural accents of a true born Ushamtar, although he had not thought of this.
    He rode in, finding narrow cobbled streets and ramshackle houses and sheds dominated by huge warehouses of the merchant lords. At length he found an inn. And he found also a girl.
    iv. The Perushka
    KADJI HAD rented a place in the stables of the inn for his pony and was striding the streets bound for the nearest bazaar when he saw her.
    She was gloriously fair, slim and strong and no older than he, if as old. Her hair was a banner of dark red flame and her eyes, large and bold and startling in her clear tanned face, were smoky amber flaked with fiery gold. She had proud young breasts and a free-swinging stride that reminded him of the wild Kozanga girls; like them, she wore high boots and tight leggings which displayed the slim clean lines of her long legs.
    It puzzled him as to what she might be. No daughter of the merchant lords or princely artisans of Nabdoor would walk alone in the streets, for the townsmen were fiercely protective of their women and kept them behind walls; when, as seldom chanced, they were permitted abroad in the two town streets, they went heavily veiled and in giggling groups guarded by eunuchs. Not so, the flamehaired girl with eyes of smoky gold. She walked as freely as if she had no master—and no father, either. He was baffled, intrigued, and also—attracted.
    While he shopped at the booths of the bazaar, selecting dried meats and preserved fruits and black bread and an oiled sack of red wine for his long ride to the north, he eyed her. She might be, he guessed, a Perushka—a gypsy—for she wore the loose flapping aftar of that people, and the gaudy kerchief about her brows, and the gold bangles at earlobe and throat and wrist. But she did not have the roguish swagger, the bold flirtatious eye, the flaunting walk, which marked the Perushka women.
    And there was one thing else.
    By her side paced a gigantic plains-wolf, grey as smoke, with eyes of lambent golden fire. The bazaar-folk gave it and its mistress a wide berth, he noticed, and indeed it was a strange thing, and