Copyright © 1974, Kenneth Bulmer

Alan Burt Akers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

First published by Daw Books, Inc. in 1974.

This Edition published in 2005 by Mushroom eBooks, an imprint of Mushroom Publishing, Bath, BA1

4EB, United Kingdom

www.mushroom-ebooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 1843193647

Prince of Scorpio

Dray Prescot #5

Alan Burt Akers

Mushroom eBooks

CHAPTER ONE

Thisi the Fair borrows my Savanti sword

I, Dray Prescot, of Earth and of Kregen, once more trod the beautiful and brutal planet of my adoption, and in the engaging way of the Star Lords who had brought me here, was faced instantly with headlong action and deadly danger.

A bulky man in black leathers ran full tilt upon me, seeking to pin me to the ground with his rapier. The slender blade glistened redly in the mingled light from the twin suns of Scorpio. I do not argue when a man tries to kill me.

The guttural shouts and hoarse screams in my ears, the flickering impression of frenzied action all about me, and the black galvanic forms of men contorted in violent conflict running and stabbing and caught up in a confused melee washed around me; but the burly man with the bushy brown moustaches and the eyes of a killer lunged down fiercely upon me.

I rolled.

He cursed and dragged his blade free of the thin earth that dribbled over bare rock, swung himself forward for another essay at mounting me like a butterfly in a glass case. Nothing else mattered in the world — either this world or the world of Earth distant four hundred light-years — beside that professional killer and his blade.

“You panval cramph!” he said as he advanced, with a little more wariness this time, a trifle of cunning evident in his clear wish to spit me as I rolled.

I shoved up on my hands, getting my feet under me, not rising on hands and knees. I was, as always when I landed on Kregen, stark naked. There were no handy weapons — a sword, a spear, a helmet —

just me, Dray Prescot, naked as the day I was born.

A shrieking man ran past, his matted hair streaming, pursued by another of the killers in his black leather uniform. This screaming wretch, too, was naked, and so I reasoned that no one was surprised at my absence of clothes.

“Rast of a panval!” The killer lunged and I sprang, attempting to slip beneath the blade and so grasp him in my arms and break his back.

But he was quick. He eluded me, and a line of bright red wealed up along my thigh. Now it was my turn to curse.

Normally I never bother to shout and curse when in action; it wastes breath and I do not need my morale boosted in this way.

“By the Black Chunkrah!” I yelled. “I’ll take your Makki-Grodno infested tripes out and wrap them around your diseased neck!”

He was coming in again as I shouted and he looked at my face. He hadn’t bothered to look before; all slaves look alike to their indifferent guards. Now he looked. He checked. He faltered in his attack in so obvious a way that I knew I was wearing that old ugly powerful look, the facial expression men say gives me the look of the devil, and I did not waste my chance.

I fended off with my left hand and sent his rapier skewering empty air skyward. I took his throat in my right hand and squeezed, then I brought my left fist down and around and under and hit him in the belly. He would have shrieked, but no air could get past my constricting fingers. He wriggled and flailed and tried to shorten his blade to stab me in the back, but I glared into his eyes with what I know is a wild and maniacal stare habitual to me when someone is trying to kill me, and I choked him and flung him down like a harvested sheaf of grain. I took his rapier. His left-hand dagger swung still at his waist; of what need had he of main-gauche against an unarmed slave?

With the weapons in my fists I sprang up, and at a half-crouch, ready for the next fool to show up, I surveyed the scene.

The bare rocks, with their thin scattering of dirt cover in which straggly beach-grasses and thorn-ivy struggled to grow here and there, led down to a shaly beach. Scattered along the beach an enormous mass of timbers, bales, bundles, ropes, and spars indicated a shipwreck. At first I thought the naked, screaming running men and women had been oar-slaves, but what was left of the vessel did not match my knowledge either of a swifter of the Eye of the World or a swordship of the Sunset Sea. A fellow rolling with muscle, vociferous, authoritarian, yelled and waved his rapier. “Round ’em all up, you calsanys! Every last one of the Pandrite-benighted panvals.”

Like the other guards he was clad in black leathers, and tall black boots. Like them he wore beneath the leather tunic a garment whose sleeves covered his arms with bands of red and black. He wore a helmet, narrow-brimmed at the sides and curled up at the fore and aft brim, after the fashion of a morion. His face was congested, bloated, full of annoyance that his command had broken down in what to him was clearly a most messy business.

I looked at the sea — to me, then, an unknown sea — and felt the deep longing for the fresh sweep of the breeze and the clean feel of a keel beneath me scudding through the waves. Then I advanced on this man, this leader of men who slaughtered unarmed men and women as they shrieked and begged for mercy.

The jagged boulders beneath my feet felt decidedly uncomfortable after my sojourn on Earth wearing decent shoes, but I have spent most of my life barefoot, and I took little notice. The Star Lords, this time, evidently had asked a very great deal of me. As always I had been dumped down on Kregen naked and defenseless, and as always a crisis situation was presented to me. This time I had been flung headfirst right slap into the middle of the action.

I jumped down off the rocks onto the beach and for a moment the big ruffian was hidden from me by contorting bodies. A girl screamed right at my feet and I looked down and to my left. She sprawled on the shaly beach, and I saw that the chains between the fetters on her ankles had tripped and brought her down. A black-clad guard was quite callously, quite intentionally, preparing to drive his rapier through her stomach.

I bent and with the main-gauche slewed a scatter of the shale into his face. He cursed and sprang back. He saw me. His main-gauche came out with the practiced ease of the fighting-man, and I knew I would have to take him first.

He tried to circle me. That was a waste of time — of my time, for his was going to finish here and now. A second guard ran across with a four-foot-long javelin and hurled it at me. I swayed and the missile hissed past. The second drew both his blades. The girl lay, staring up with wide eyes; fear had drugged her emotions, so that she could no longer weep or cry out.

I wanted to get over this fight quickly. There were well over a hundred naked men and women in chains, and something like fifteen or twenty guards methodically butchering them. The two split up, to take me from left and right.

I have fought many times, and no doubt will fight many more times. These two were fair to middling examples of rapier men, which meant that, combined, they added up to a combination that could always take the better single man. I just had to be better than both.

They both succumbed, one after the other, to timed thrusts.

The shipwreck, the black shale beach, the susurrations of that unknown sea, the black rocks, and the evil thorn-ivy bushes coalesced into the backdrop for wild action and devilish murder. I dispatched two more guards. I could hear a roaring and a raging nearer the scattered timbers of the wreck and I ran toward the focus of the sounds, dropping another guard as I ran.

On the beach the big bull-roarer of a guard captain was down. He sat on the black shale looking stupidly at the stump of his left arm. The red and black sleeved arm lay on the ground at his side, still with the hand clutching his dagger.

Three other guards were backtracking rapidly. I looked at the man facing them, and I felt a painful and thrilling thump of blood from my heart tingle all through my body.

Oh, yes, I recognized who that young man must be!

Fair and open of face, with smooth blond hair, and eyes of an icy-blue, he fought with a grace and a delicacy that warmed my heart. Young, strong, confident, bold, he weaved a net of glittering steel before him, and, one, two, three, down went those guards, gouting blood.

He wore soft leathers cincturing his waist and drawn up between his legs, the whole held in position by a wide belt the buckle of which gleamed dully gold. On his left arm he wore a stout leather bracer. He wore soft leather gloves. On his feet he wore leather hunting boots. I had worn that gear once, myself, in the long ago. . .

And his sword. . .

Oh, yes, I felt all the strife and evil of two worlds flowing out and away from me and the beginnings of a new and altogether glorious promise. Here, before me, was my passport to paradise!

“Hai!” shouted this gallant young man, and he charged headlong for a group of guards who withdrew their reeking blades from the corpses of their victims and sprang up to face him. Before me, half crouched on the beach, a naked man clasped a woman close, the black iron of their chains harsh against their skin. They were middle-aged, with faces lined with care, and yet for all that, the man could look up at the young man with eyes wide with wonder.

“Now in the name of the twins! Where did he come from?”

“Hush, Jeniu, hush!” His wife dragged him down into the black shale, burrowing for shelter. I jumped over them, and because it seemed the right thing to do, as I leaped I shouted down to them.

“Remain quiet and you will be safe.”

“Opaz the all-glorious preserve us!”

So far I had seen no beings other than humans among these guards and the slaves they were butchering to prevent their escape. There were no representatives of the half-men half-beasts of Kregen, those other races of intelligent beings who share the planet with human men and women. The young man — I had the fleeting wonder if he might not also come from the planet Earth — had engaged nobly with the guards, and in pressing them back, was displaying fine swordsmanship. As I fought, indeed, as I do almost anything, I kept a weather eye open and alert. If a fighting-man sought to leap on me from the rear he more often than not found me suddenly facing him with a naked brand in my fist.

If you tread dangerous paths that is an essential to staying alive — on Earth as on Kregen. So it was that I had to stop twice more to deal with inopportunely-pressing men in black leather, with their red and black sleeves, and their morionlike helmets. I observed a naked man, with a shaggy mop of brown hair and brown hair on his body so that he resembled a great brown bear, wrapping his chains about the neck of a guard and apparently on the point of severing head from body. This huge man, as thick in the chest as the barrels in which palines are shipped for sea use, roared his delight. I saw the suns-light glisten and gleam along the hairy muscles of his forearms as he leaned back. He saw me as I stepped outside a guard’s lunge, dazzle him with what — I confess — was a flamboyant flourish of my dagger, and bring the rapier in for the terminal thrust; and Brown Bear yelled, hugely delighted. “Hai, Jikai!”

“Hai, Jikai!” I roared back. “We will finish them all very soon — and then I will strike off your irons.”

“Not until I am done with using them. Never, by Vaosh, would I have believed I could love my chains so much! Ha!”

All over the beach and the soil-covered rocks just above, the bodies of slain men and women sprawled. But many more had reached some kind of sanctuary among the rocks, and among the dead lay many more guards than any of the escaping slaves had any right to expect. Brown Bear had accounted for his share, and I, mine — and this glorious youngster to whose aid I now sprang had fought right well and nobly.

Perhaps he was too noble; certainly, for all his skill and training he lacked experience. Twice I had dodged flung javelins. I saw it all. I shouted — uselessly, vainly, stupidly. There was nothing else I could do but shout and hurl my dagger; but long before the dagger found its mark in the javelin-thrower’s throat, the cruel steel head of the flung spear smashed bloodily red out through the chest of the gallant young fighter.

It is not easy for me to speak of that moment. I can clearly remember that sharp steel javelin-head sprouting from the lad’s chest. I can recall with exact clarity the way the twin streaming mingled light of Zim and Genodras cast sharp ugly shadows down over the muscles of his chest and the smooth tanned stomach, before he doubled up and fell sideways, drew his legs in, and began to cough up blood. After that my next memory is of drawing my rapier from the leather-clad body of a guard, and looking around for more, and finding them all lying dead in the abandoned postures of complete destruction along the beach. Evidently, at the end, they had tried to flee from me.

I looked back up the beach.

A small clump of naked men and women had gathered, and more were creeping out from their hiding places among the rocks and boulders and thorn-ivy bushes.

The huge brown bear of a man stood a little way in front.

All stared at me.

None would approach.

I ignored them.

I went back to the dying youngster.

He lay still on his side, for the javelin prevented him lying in another posture. He was conscious and his eyes followed me as I approached. Those blue eyes were still bright and brilliant, but the face had drained of blood.

“Llahal, Jikai,” he said painfully, dribbling blood. “You fight right merrily.”

I did not reply with the rolling double-L of the nonfamiliar greeting of “Llahal” of Kregen; instead I said:

“Lahal,” which is used only to those one knows.

He looked surprised, but his weakness made him incurious and unable to ponder the matter overlong. I knelt by his side. There was nothing material I could do for him.

I looked at him, and I waited until I felt a light of intelligence in those eyes, struggling up past the engulfing waves of blackness seeking to drag him down forever.

I spoke.

“Happy Swinging,” I said. My voice was not my own; it was hoarse, strange, harsh. “Happy Swinging.”

He looked at me with the same shock his face had shown when the javelin pierced him through.

“Happy Swinging—”

“Tell me, dom. Where lies Aphrasöe, the Swinging City?”

He coughed and blood dribbled from his mouth, for he was almost gone.

“Aphrasöe!” He tried to move and could not. “I was there — there in Aphrasöe — only moments ago. I talked with Maspero and bid him Remberee — and then I was here. And—”

“Maspero is my friend. He was my tutor. Where lies Aphrasöe?”

The cords in his throat moved and shuddered, and I saw he was trying to shake his head. His voice was faint.

“I do not know. The transition was made — cold and darkness — and then — here. . .”

I had to know where Aphrasöe, the Swinging City, was situated on the planet of Kregen. Next to my concern for my Delia, Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains, next to my love for her, I must know the whereabouts of Aphrasöe. For Aphrasöe was paradise.

He was trying to speak again.

“Tell Maspero — tell him — Alex Hunter tried — tried—”

“Rest easy, Alex Hunter. You have come a long way from Earth, but now you are with friends.”

He looked up into my ugly face with its gargoyle-look strong upon it, and the bright blueness of his eyes faded and he sighed, very softly. His blood-smeared mouth smiled — he smiled, looking upon me, Dray Prescot — and then he died.

I stood up.

I turned to face the gathered naked people.

“Are any guards left alive?” I called. My voice rose harshly, bitter and cutting. The big brown bear of a man shouted back. “They are all dead.”

I nodded.

“As well for them they are. By dying they escape my wrath.”

Then I turned and looked out to that unknown sea and I did not weep. For many memories had poured upon me and I could face no one until I had purged myself of weakness.

CHAPTER TWO

Sweet and refreshing is canalwater of Vallia

The released prisoners wanted to build the cooking fires into conflagrations of joy, and I had to explain to them as gently as I could — and, Zair knows, I am a gentle enough man when the occasion calls for it

— that as no one of them knew where we were, and I did not, the night would almost certainly contain hostile eyes. We must cook our supper carefully, and post watches, and be ready with the gathered-up weapons to defend our newly-won freedom.

They all seemed to think I had been in the prison ship with them. On her way to the Penal Islands, a gale had driven her off course. No one knew where we were — but they all knew from whence they had come.

Vallia!

I was on an island off the southeast coast of Vallia. Somewhere over that sea lay the island empire ruled by the despotic father of my beloved. Over there lay my target, Vallia, the island I had vowed to reach and storm, bare-handed if necessary, and claim my Delia before all the world. Prosaic matters obtruded themselves now, however. The released prisoners were far too weak to march, and we had espied not a sign of life or a habitation of any sort. The prisoners could not march; I could not stay here.

The big brown bear of a man — Borg — said, when I queried him: “Prisoners, dom? Aye, we are prisoners, truly enough. Politicals.”

At a guess, I said, “The Racter party?”

He glowered. “Aye! The racters, may Gurush of the Bottomless Marsh take them all.”

I have spoken of the Racter party, those great lords, landowners, and wealthy tycoons who were bitterly opposed to the wedding between myself and Delia. These people were almost all of the Panval party, a more popular front, although containing many folk, I suspected, who had joined together in mere opposition to the ractors as through any common ideology.

Borg was a canalman. The canals of Vallia are one of the wonders of Kregen, spreading out over the entire island, fed by the awe-inspiring Mountains of the North, which have various names in their various districts. The canalfolk are a people apart and a way of life apart. Borg’s name was Ven Borg nal Ogier. Ven is a title applicable only to canalmen, as Vena for the canalwomen. Ogier was his canal, the Ogier Cut, from which he took his patronymic. That the canal was upward of six hundred miles long, with many branches and loops, spreading across many counties of Vallia, meant nothing. Mere land area was of no account to a canalman; he marked out his lineage in the canal his parents traversed.

“I shall go and find help,” I told Borg. “These people must be cared for.”

He had taken a guard’s leather tunic, but his arms and legs were bare. He carried the rapier and left-handed dagger as though he knew how to use them. He nodded in agreement.

“Good. Then, Koter Drak, I will come with you.”

Koter is pure Vallian, equivalent to our Earthly “mister.”

“No, Ven Borg. If you will, you would do best to look after these people. And without disrespect to you, I can travel faster alone.”

He glowered at me, and fingered the plain steel hilt of the rapier, but he saw my face, and agreed.

“By Vaosh the all-glorious! You are a hard man.”

“Sometimes I have need to be.”

My feelings after Alex Hunter had died revealed another facet, but I would not discuss that. The thought occurred to me to wonder if the Star Lords had brought me here because they knew Alex Hunter would fail? But that would indicate a prophecy, a power to foretell what would happen. I put nothing past the Star Lords in those days, but the idea made me prickle a little up the backbone. Then the further thought came to me that the Savanti had sent Alex Hunter on a mission similar to those I would have been sent on had I passed all the stringent tests of Aphrasöe, instead of having the Savanti boot me out of paradise. I still bore them no ill will for that. They had their nature as I had mine. Whatever the truth of the business, I was here on Kregen and — given I could avoid too obvious a collision with either the Savanti or the Star Lords — here I intended to stay and reach Vallia and claim Delia as my bride. And such was my mood, I was beginning to feel to hell with her father. So far, the thought that I must in some measure demean him in her eyes had halted me, had checked my footsteps, had held me back from the headlong rush to Vallia and the arrogant barging into Vondium I knew I would have, one day, to make.

I gently unwrapped and unstrapped Alex Hunter’s Savanti hunting leathers from him, before I buried him with solemnity and two prayers. Then I washed the leathers in a stream of clear water — how marvelously supple is the hunting leather of the city of Aphrasöe! — and donned them, pulling the end up through my legs and buckling up the wide belt. I hesitated before pulling on the boots, but I might need them if the going became rough. After my march across the Owlarh Waste and through the Klackadrin I felt my foot soles could march across hell without flinching.

And the sword.

The Savanti sword!

It was a beautiful specimen, with that subtle straight blade that in some alchemical way combines all the best features of a rapier’s flexibility with a shortsword’s harsh thrusting action, together with the slashing capabilities of a broadsword. I felt, then, handling that superlative weapon with its basket hilt, that even a Krozair longsword could not compare with the Savanti sword. I suppose, in mundane weapons, it most resembled an English basket-hilted sword of about 1610 with that cunning Savanti curve to the hilt to enable rapier work to be put in. The blade retained a brilliant sharpness of edge without continuous honing. I had no conception of how it could be done, then, and even today I am sure that no metallurgists of Earth could reproduce that exact mix of metals, that fantastic alloy. But then, as I knew to my cost, the Savanti, although mere mortal men, were capable of superhuman powers.

“Well, Koter Drak,” said Borg, proffering a rapier and left-handed dagger. “You had best go prepared.”

I slung the baldric of the Savanti scabbard over my right shoulder and let the sword dangle at my left hip.

“I will take this sword, Ven Borg.”

“It is a strange blade, and yet a useful one, as I judge.”

I took the baldric off. I had grown accustomed to having my sword scabbards attached to my belt in such a way that all my upper body was free from strappery. I fabricated a sling, and the lockets would serve. Borg watched me, critically.

“On the canals we use the rapier and the dagger, the Jiktar and the Hikdar, but rarely, they being weapons not easily come by.”

“You have used them before, Ven Borg.”

He chuckled. The camp fire threw his mass of brown hair into deep tangled shadows across his face. He bit hugely into the thigh of a bosk — a rather less stupid and smaller relative of the vosk — from the provisions we had taken from the wreck. “Aye. I was accounted a fair swordsman, along the Ogier Cut, Koter Drak.”

I was not absolutely sure how these people had my name as Drak. Drak is the name of a legendary figure, part-human, part-god, who figures largely in the three-thousand-year-old myth-cycle the Canticles of the Rose City. Culture is widespread on Kregen, and the old legends and stories travel the world, and are repeated over and over again. Also, Drak had been the name of the Emperor’s father when he ascended the throne. I had a dim memory of saying, in response to a query, “I am Dra—” and then of a shout or a scream interrupting me. I believe it was the women called the Theladours; they had found a guard half alive, and had finished him off with their hands. Anyway, the beginning of Dray and the instant associations with Drak had named me. I did not care, then, what they called me, for I intended to leave them in the morning when the twin suns rose, and after finding help for them, see about taking myself across the stretch of sea to Vallia to the west.

Also, I did not fail to realize that the continent of Segesthes, and the enclave city of Zenicce, lay across the Sunset Sea to the east. In Zenicce stood my own proud enclave of Strombor. I was the Lord of Strombor. But Strombor and all my friends there would have to wait — as they had waited for years —

until I had won my Delia finally.

From the shattered remnants of the wrecked prison ship we took what we could of food and wine and I saw that the survivors, about a hundred and twenty or so of them, men and women, would not suffer from starvation before help could reach them. For what Borg said, I judged that he would be very careful how they accepted help; for as political prisoners their fate would depend much on the tendencies of their rescuers.

The political situation in Vallia was complex and finely balanced, the racters and the panvals in their eternal struggling for power, the Emperor now strong, now weak, eternally seeking help from one side, now the other, always asserting his own power and demanding absolute obedience from the citizenry. To hell with all that! Vallia, Vondium, and Delia!

Much banging and ringing of iron finally fell quiet and the last of the fetters had been cut off. I found a snug hole down between two boulders, and with a scrap of cloth from the ship to serve as padding and cover, went to sleep. On the morrow, after a great dish of fried bosk rashers and a jar of some sweet rose wine — a vintage of western Vallia, so Jeniu told me — I was ready to leave. They waved to me as I set off. They were a starveling crew, eating properly for the first time in many a day, their nakedness covered as best they could manage. I waved back, and I confess, to my shame, that I scarcely thought more of them except as people to whom I owed the duty of what help I could give. Beyond that — Delia!

“Remberee, Koter Drak!”

“Remberee,” I shouted back, striding on. “Remberee!”

Many times I have marched through country completely new to me, alone or with companions. Memories ghosted up — but I would not think of them now. I studied the land critically. It looked bleak, bare, somehow tired and dispirited. Clumps of thorn-ivy grew along the way and, a dismal prospect on Kregen, no palines. No palines! Not a country for me, I decided, and thereby, as you will hear, made a stultifying mistake.

The Suns of Scorpio cast down their opaz beams and the weather, although warm, was in no wise stifling. If what the prisoners had told me was true — and their ideas of where we might be were almost as chancy as mine — we must be on a latitude sixty or seventy dwaburs north of the southern coast of Vallia. That, as far as I could judge, would be on a latitude about the same distance south of Zenicce. I marched on and soon I walked through the remains of a village. The houses had been constructed of wood, and they had burned. There were bones among the ashes. The sad relics of an abandoned living-site passed to either side as I walked through what had once been a bustling main street. No birds waited to scavenge. This had happened some time ago, for the dusty vegetation was creeping back. The prospect opened up beyond this dismal scene and hills closed in on my left, so that I walked for a space beside a stream. Here vegetation had taken a hold and I saw many varieties of the myriad growths that flourish so freely on Kregen. Here, too, I came across paline bushes and so could pick a handful and munch them as I traveled.

Far away on my right and ahead, obscured occasionally by cloud and by intervening rises, the tall blue outlines of mountains jagged against the sky. Snow glistened on their peaks, so they were of a size. The forests thickened, and I saw lenk and sturm, an occasional sporfert, and many trees of secondary growths that are common both to Earth and Kregen. Grass grew more lushly — and then I walked out upon a great clearing where the neat rows of samphron bushes lay all untended, where the crops had ripened and seeded and rotted, and where I saw a small village laid waste, burned, destroyed, abandoned.

I began to wonder if I would ever find succor for the prisoner survivors here in this desolate land. The way I followed had seemed to me to mark itself out by its contours as a track and when this wended into a valley and ran side by side with a sheet of water, I felt certain I trod a dirt-packed way that once had been a highroad. Now grass and weeds thrust through, worts, ragbladders, creeping vines, and here and there the banks had slipped into the water. At the far end of the lake I came across a lock. Its wooden gates were closed, and I was downstream. It was such a lock as I was perfectly accustomed to back home on Earth. The navigators had made of the country a different place, and the genius that had put the lock to work, so that narrow boats and barges might rise and fall through mountains, had laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution.

Dangling over the lock gates a yellowing skeleton brought me sharply back to Kregen. Wedged in the skeleton’s backbone was an arrow.

I studied it. Knowledge of one’s opponent’s weapons is a psychological knowledge of him, as I have said before.

This arrow had not been loosed from a Lohvian longbow. It was shorter; the point was, although of steel, merely an arrow-shaped barbed wedge. The feathers, bedraggled, were not, to my mind, set by a master-fletcher. They were red and black.

Red and black had been the colors of the prison guards’ sleeves.

I left the arrow where it was, and saluting the skeleton’s departed spirit — what some Kregans call the ib

— I passed on.

That night I had to face a decision. I could not cross the stretch of water and reach Vallia to the west without a boat, and to find a boat I needed help. But I had also my duty to the prisoners, prisoners no more, although for how long they would retain their freedom I did not care to speculate. If I circled —

then I faced facts. This land had been raided dry. Slavers had done this. Their handiwork is all too plain. I must press on, look for the lay of the land where it was likely to find habitation, and then see about a boat.

The next day I swung a little more to the west, leaving the canal. I found only scorched earth and moldering skeletons. I wended back to the east, crossed the canal, and pressed on through woodlands and open spaces where great fires had raged and the growth was only just beginning to sprout through. This was hard going.

On the third day I came across a fine metal road. Oh, it was no road of Imperial Loh of ancient times, but it was easy to walk on. I felt absolute certainty that there was no other person near me; long before I suspected I was approaching humanity I would be off the road and into the trees. The road struck off due east.

This was taking me away from the coast, and I must perforce accept that annoyance, for I now saw that this land had been struck by raiders from the sea who had ravaged the coastal belt clean. I suspected these signs of destruction were more than two seasons old, and the still-dangling skeleton seemed to confirm that the inhabitants had not dared return. I was on an island, therefore I might find someone on the eastern coast or in the inland massif.

Drink was no problem, for the canalwater was surprisingly sweet. On reflection I assumed this to be the result of the absence of traffic. I saw a string of sunken narrow boats. Food was relatively easy to come by, a few carefully laid traps of plaited reed, a spirited rush, and a stupid bosk wriggled in the trap. Also, there were palines.

The impression I gained was that this had been a prosperous farming community of interconnected villages and towns, and the wild animals I might have expected — leems, graint, zhantils, and the like —

had been banished long ago and had not found their way back. These bosk, now, must be the descendants of domesticated herds. Then, as though to prove me right, I came walking down into a valley where crops grew in neat rows, tended crops, with the sign of mankind strong and orderly upon them. There were, however, indications that the harvest was poor, and here and there the ground showed dry and dusty. Indeed, it had not rained since I had landed here. The canal I had been following had curved away the previous day, but the road which had tracked the canal had seemed the more likely prospect. Feeling I had been proved right I trod on — warily! — and was most surprised to discover the road, wending with the course of the valley, swing away from that glimpse I had had of crops. I walked on for a bur or so, pondering, and then the explanation occurred to me. The road did indeed follow the natural line; those crops I had seen and the village they suggested must lie adjacent to them, had been sited away from the road, off the beaten track, hidden. They had been revealed by some local flaw in the tree cover.

At once I turned off the road and headed straight down into the valley bottom. In the event, my clever supposition, although right, was rendered totally unnecessary. As I slithered and scraped through the trees down the slope I saw below me the same confounded thorn-ivy hedge that surrounds any boundary of cultivated land against the wild. The thorn-ivy was not of recent growth, for what was wild had once been tamed, but it gave me a few nasty jabs and stabs and scratches before I went through.

Cursing, I stood up, and there, coming down smoothly and decently from the road above, was a side road, all neat and clean and easy. And I’d gone headfirst through a thorn-ivy boma!

So much for my cleverness.

“Sink me!” I started off to let rip a whole string of the curses of two worlds and several colorful cultures

— and then I stopped. I didn’t laugh, for as you know I laugh seldom and then in situations that seem not to call for laughter as the correct critical response; but I could see the humorous side of that slide down the valleyside and the crash through the boma. I was still picking thorns out of my shoulders when I walked into the single main street of the village.

The houses were more like huts: bark-logged walls, large leaves of the papishin trailed over a ridge-pole for roofs, mere holes for doors, and of windows not a sign. A pen contained a dozen or so bosks, squealing and grunting. A few ponshos, languid in the warmth, their fleeces, although heavy in poor condition, were actually nibbling the grass growing up between the logs of the huts. There was a well. I walked straight to it. It had adobe walls and a fractured cover, but there was a rope and a bucket. I threw the bucket down, hauled it up, and drank deeply, then plunged my head in the icy water. When I lifted my head and shook it like a ponsho-trag a quavering voice said: “Llahal, dom.”

I turned slowly. I turned carefully. I still held the well bucket in both hands and I could hurl that and draw my sword with blinding speed, if I had to.

The old man confronting me did not look any kind of threat.

He was old, for his hair was white and his thin beard draggled whitely across his shrunken chest. He must be at least two hundred years old, I judged. He wore a simple garment of orange cloth around his middle, hanging to his knees, with a broad fold thrown up and over his left shoulder. For only a single instant could the foolish fancy that he was a Todalpheme attract me; but I knew he was not, for around his waist he did not have a colored tasseled rope; the robe fell loosely.

“Llahal, dom,” I replied.

His weak eyes regarded me. “You are welcome to our poor village. We have little, but what we have is yours.”

The words might have been rote — as I wondered then, they might be a trap — but I sensed in this man that what he said was true; he and his people were friendly to me. I saw a number of other people gathering and saw instantly that they were all old or babes-in-arms, held by their great-grandmothers. I knew these signs of old.

They were desperately poor. The strong young men and the beautiful young girls had either been taken up as slaves or had run off into the central massif. These people were abject. They had been shattered by a continuous succession of slave raids, and they had no fight left. They accepted their fate with a fatalism that, while I could not share its abnegations, I could understand.

The old man, Theirson, led me to his hut and I sat on the packed dirt floor, and they gave me a bowl of fruit, gleaming rounds of the fabulous fruit of Kregen. I picked up a squish. I thought of Inch and his taboos, and then I did not think over those memories again. I munched a mouthful of squishes as old Theirson talked.

“You had best not linger here, Koter Drak. You are most welcome and we would love your help in the fields, for the work is hard and we are old. But no young man is safe. The aragorn, for whom the Ice Floes of Sicce most certainly wait, ride through and take what they will and no man dare say them nay.”

His wife, Thisi the Fair — she was old and stringy and her hair as white as his own — shivered. “Do not speak of the aragorn, Theirson, I beg you. If only the old days were here!”

I felt a peculiar sensation in my stomach, and I rubbed it. I felt hot and yet I felt cold. I drank a cup of water. I wanted all the information I could get; yet the hut walls were receding and closing, swaying, rippling like the bed of a mountain stream. My tongue seemed as thick as a chunkrah’s tongue. Theirson, Thisi the Fair, and others were looking at me with kind expressions, and talking, but their words boomed and echoed and hurt my ears. I fell full length, and lay there, unable to move. They were all looking down on me with worried, concerned expressions, and Thisi felt my forehead.

“It is the sickness,” she whispered. “Koter Drak — you must fight for your life!”

And then I swung away like a surfer on the bottom of a board with only the deep black-green of nothingness beneath me.

CHAPTER THREE

Thisi the Fair borrows my Savanti sword

Many visions passed before my inward eye as I lay stricken by the hallucination-fever of the sickness. I saw the smoke and heard the monstrous concussions of the broadsides as I sailed so slowly down on the Franco-Spanish line off Cape Trafalgar; I saw the swirling charge of the cavalry as we held the ridge of Mont Saint Jean; I fought with my clansmen, and swaggered as a bravo-fighter in Zenicce; I battled swifters of Magdag, and swordships with Viridia the Render laughing; I saw many things and I felt many things.

Through it all I, Dray Prescot, Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy, the Lord of Strombor, sunk so low and helpless, did not for one moment imagine that these old folk had poisoned me. In a way that only hindsight can justify I knew I could trust them.

For three days I lay there caught in that damned soup of fevered visions and for all that time they stayed by me and cared for me. On the morning of the fourth day I opened my eyes and looked through the open door and saw the jade and orange light of the twin suns falling in mingled radiance across the street, and knew I was once more myself, once more in control, once more a man. But I was as weak as an infant.

They were surprised.

“The sickness takes a man or a woman and holds them fast bound for a whole sennight.”

I did not tell them that I had bathed in the sacred pool of the River Zelph, in unknown Aphrasöe, and was thus assured of a thousand years of life and a natural constitution to throw off wounds and diseases rapidly. I thanked them. I had been a burden to them. I was still very weak, weaker by far than I had been after those horrific experiences crossing the Klackadrin, and for a space all I could do was sit in the suns-shine at the mouth of the hut and rest and recuperate.

I know, now, that my sickness was the result of drinking the canalwater. Sweet, it was, to be sure, and ever after was to prove so. But, to a man or woman not of the canals, to anyone not of the canalfolk, it was deadly. After the week’s fever-dreams, the victim very often died. That I had not was a tribute to the pool of baptism of the Savanti in Aphrasöe. Three days — half the six that usually constitute a Kregan week, for all that I render it into English as a sennight — was astonishing to them. I just sat in the sun and watched the dust devils on the street and struggled to grow strong. They had taken my Savanti hunting leathers to have them cleaned and I wore a simple breechclout of the orange cloth. The color came from squeezed berries abounding in the forests. I looked up as Theirson came from the hut with a bowl of bosk and taylyne soup. Just as Tilda the Beautiful had said, here in Vallia they did drink their soup hot. I sipped it gently, grateful for the soothing sensations in my abused guts.

“My sword?”

“It is safely hidden. Should the aragorn ride in and find a weapon—” Theirson’s wrinkled mouth pursed dolefully. “Rest and get well, Drak. Then you may take up the sword again.”

This did not seem good advice to me. About to argue with the old man and if necessary become objectionable until they brought out my sword, I became aware of a hush fallen over the village. Down the street and riding toward me through the streaming jade and crimson light advanced the aragorn. Theirson let a low moan escape his lips, then his face took on the look of one of those alabaster statues from Tomboram. Still holding the soup bowl he stood, bent over a little, in the doorway of his hut. I continued to sit.

This was close to eventide now, when the people trudged back from the fields after a full day’s work. I had seen them go out and I had seen them return. They were forced to work hard and relentlessly, persevering with the monotonous labors as the twin suns poured down their beams on the backs of their necks and their heads, until the old folk could barely stand to walk back in the evening. The results of their labors were stacked in the low barns at the end of the village, for harvests here, as is common in much of Kregen, occur when the fruits and the corns and the vegetables are ripe and not as a result of some unvarying round of seasons.

The great thanksgiving time of harvest is understood, however, on Kregen, and these old folk put by to that end. The aragorn rode in. I just sat there, stupefied, weak, watching them as they made their grand gestures, gave their orders, as the produce was brought forth and loaded on the backs of calsanys. I, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, just sat.

Whatever of harvest thanksgiving lay in the hearts and minds of these men, it did not touch the people of the village.

I looked at these aragorn.

They rode zorcas. Well they would, being proud and mailed men in their might. These zorcas were fine beasts, with the tall and spindly legs and the single twisted horn that brought back the memories of riding with the wind across the Great Plains of Segesthes. The aragorn had the habit of using the tight rein, so that the twisted horns upreared in a way at once proud and flaunting to observe, and damned uncomfortable for the poor zorcas.

They were men. On Kregen, of course, one habitually identifies species as well as race. Their armor shone resplendently: plate on back and breast and thigh, with thick purple-dyed leather for arm and leg. They wore the typical Vallian hat, with its low crown and wide brim with the dashing upcurled feather, and with those two slots cut in the brim over the forehead. At their saddle bows swung morions. They did not carry lances, and their weapons were rapier and main-gauche, and a sheaf of javelins. I wanted to get up and challenge them, but lethargy like a spider’s web adhering to my arms and legs drew me down.

The aragorn took the produce, hit a couple of old men over the head with their riding crops, stared around arrogantly, and announced they were staying overnight. From their small string of calsanys they produced food and wine of kinds that the villagers had not seen since this blight had been laid on the land. They turfed Theirson and Thisi out of their hut and Vulima and Totor out of theirs, commandeering them. There were six aragorn, with six slaves for servants, and three dancing girls, with golden chains through their nostrils and exotic transparent pantaloons and silver-mesh mantles. There was about these aragorn the simple belief that they were the masters, that what they said was law and must be instantly obeyed. No idea of opposition occurred to them.

I realize I have not given you any description of their faces. I find I approach this with diffidence. Even then, as I sat in the dust, I could see in their faces what so many people have seen in mine. There was the same harsh intolerance, the same fierce and predatory demands of instant obedience, the same intemperate damn-you-to-hell arrogance, that old devil’s look I know I assume. And yet I know many women have looked on me with a kindly eye, and I get along with children famously, and I venture to think that if any traces of that show in my face they were absent from the countenances of the aragorn.

“Get this dolt out of the way,” said one, as he swung down from his zorca.

“He is sick, master, badly sick.”

“Then I’ll drive out his disease!” and with that the aragorn put his boot up. He intended to kick me in the face. I moved my head sideways, yet I felt that treacherous lassitude upon me and I was slow. The aragorn’s boot took me in the shoulder and I toppled backward into the dust. They laughed.

A couple of the villagers scuttled across to help me up and away. I say scuttled advisedly. The villagers bowed, and remained bowed, in the presence of the aragorn.

The absolute terror these men spread about them could be seen in little things. In the way people ran to hold their zorcas’ heads, for instance. The constant trembling in their bodies, their hands shaking, their words disconnected. In the sudden rigidity with which they reacted to the words of the aragorn, so it seemed as though mere words could strike them to stone. The aragorn took whatever they wanted, and destroyed casually and without thinking in their search for hidden food. All valuables had long since vanished.

I thought of my sword, hidden I knew not where, and sweated it out. That night I heard the shrill laughter, and the clashing of ankle-bells — I have never made up my mind if ankle-bells are the height of refined sexuality or the depths of depravity, or if they merely denote shocking bad taste — and although I could not see these men I could guess the games they were up to, the wine they were drinking, the food they were guzzling.

I still felt weak in the morning.

“Where is my sword, Theirson?”

“No, Drak. No!”

Thisi the Fair moaned. “You will surely be killed.”

“My sword!”

But these old folk possessed courage and tenacity where their friends were concerned. They could do nothing about the aragorn, and so were beaten. But for me, they could save my life. Who am I to say they did not? I was aware then, and subsequently have been more than grateful, that I was privileged to be called their friend.

So I, Dray Prescot, had to watch with bowed head and a face over which I had drawn a corner of an orange cloth as the aragorn, leisurely, insolently, prepared for departure and then rode out. They rode their zorcas well. Easily and lithely in the saddle; tall, bold, strong men, absolute masters, absolutely in command; oh, yes, they bore the outward semblance of warriors. But I knew that the ordinary fighting-men of Kregen among whose number I had been proud to include myself, were as different from these men, these aragorn, as are the zhantils from the leems.

When they had gone I said to Theirson: “Do they often ride in and take everything you have?”

“Whenever they wish. We cannot stop them.”

I noticed that the villagers seemed to be beyond the point at which mere ordinary curses could do anything for them in their mortal anguish against the aragorn. The aragorn were mercenaries, of course, working with the slave-masters. Now they were living in high fettle in various of the castles and fortresses of the island, going out on their raids, drinking and wenching, quarreling, quite happy to live here on the backs and the sweat of those they had not run off into slavery.

“They make sure we have enough on which to survive. That way we can work for them.”

“How long is it to go on for?” said Thisi. Her veined hands trembled. “We must have offended the invisible twins in some way not vouchsafed to us.”

“Not so,” I said. “These are men, and therefore may be killed. I am a man of peace, but now give me my sword.”

They tried to dissuade me. I was arguing with them, most vehemently, when I found myself sitting on the ground. I was weak, still — damned weak! I struggled up, and swayed, and blinked my eyes, and Thisi gave me a cup of water, and I knew I must wait until the marvelous powers of the waters of baptism cleared the poison from my system altogether.

On the sixth day everyone carried out the simple devotions that marked the religious observances of these people, much after the fashion of those I had witnessed in the argenter Dram Constant, where the invisible twins were honored and revered as the mystical twinned godhead of all things. Then, even though the sixth day might reasonably be called a day of rest, the people trudged off to the fields. The work would never wait. I tried to go with them, and fell down, and had to crawl back alone, for they could not be allowed to waste their effort on me, a stubborn onker, when the fields and the incessant work demanded everything they could give. For strong young lads and girls, the agricultural work would have been easy — as it had been in the good old days.

Four days after that I was strong enough to insist on being given my sword and chopping wood. I noticed how I had to make a conscious physical effort to slash through branches that normally I would have cut through with a supple twist of wrist and forearm. But I persevered. The people had told me that the rescued prisoners on the beach were not likely to be interfered with; all that area had been slaved out and the aragorn or the slave-masters no longer went there.

The island, I learned, was called Valka. Valka had been the name taken by an oar-slave who had been a good companion with me in the swordships. The nearest way of explaining his use of the name — for he came from the main island of Vallia — is to suggest that a man from California might choose the name of Tex as an alias.

I donned my Savanti hunting leathers.

There seems little point in belaboring my feelings at this time. You will know something of the kind of man I am; inaction in times of peril is anathema to me. I resent an insult, and if a man seeks to kill me I own to the moral weakness, thoroughly reprehensible, of attempting to kill him first. I chopped a great deal of wood in the next few days, swinging my sword arm, using my left arm, also, working the sinews and muscles, feeling the jolting power of the sword blows. What Maspero, that gentle man who had been my tutor, would say, I did not know. He swung a sword, complaining of his own weakness, also. But the swords the Savanti use in their sport deliver a psychic blow that does not kill, does not even harm. This sword had lost that power, assuming it had ever possessed it, and Alex Hunter had been equipped as an ordinary fighting-man of Kregen — with this single exception of the sword.

On a bright morning when a little pink mist lifted from the treetops and birds sang with what I can only describe as a trilling note I told Theirson I must say Remberee.

“For one thing, good Theirson, I am eating far too much.”

“You are always welcome to share what we have, Drak.”

“And for that I thank you. But I ought to return to the beach and tell the people there what has happened.”

“They would be advised—” And then Theirson paused, and looked helpless. Indeed, what to advise those escaped prisoners?

“I will think of something,” I said.

He sighed. “If only the old Strom were here. He was a man! He ruled Valka with a rod of iron, and with justice and mercy. A girl could walk from one end of the island to the other without fear in those days.”

“Why does the Emperor permit these things?”

His distress was obvious. “We do not know. Perhaps the Emperor does not know what goes on in Valka. We are the most cut off of all the Stromnates.”

I didn’t necessarily believe that, but I knew what he meant.

A Strom is the nearest equivalent to a count, and a Kov to a duke; the Strom of Valka had been early killed in opposing the slave-masters and their mercenaries. After that the island had become a mere slave-droving ground. Although, so Theirson told me, in the central massif were many, many young men and women who had escaped from their villages and towns. The chief city of Valka, Valkanium, lay fast held in the clutches of the slavers and the aragorn, the men of prey who feasted on the carcass of the island.

“They guard themselves well behind their iron gates and their tall black towers,” said old Theirson. Thisi the Fair came hobbling fast along the main street. She panted. Her white hair had fallen free of the wooden pins holding it — for all her silver pins from the Street of the Silversmiths in Vandayha had long since been stolen — and the sunshine glistened off the sweat along her forehead.

“You must give me your sword, Drak!”

“Willingly, Thisi,” I answered in as uncharacteristic a speech as ever I could make. “But give me a good reason.”

She halted before me, twisted her head to look up, and tried to push her hair into place. “Why, I would clean the hilt for you, and, too, I would show it to Tlemi, who would recapture his youth.” She cackled, and there was strain in her laugh. “He is too old to work, and he lies on his pallet dreaming of the past.”

“The hilt is clean, Thisi.” I drew the sword and held it out to her, hilt first. “But show it to Tlemi, with my blessing, and tell him once a warrior always a warrior.”

“Aye,” she cackled, grasping the hilt and holding it as awkwardly as one can imagine. “I know about warriors, Drak.”

“I will pause a while before going into the fields, Drak, and drink a cup of water with you.”

“That will give me great pleasure, Theirson.”

So we sat in the early sunshine and drank our water and talked of the lack of rain and the crops and the old days in Valka. Truth to tell, I recall, I wanted to learn as much as I could of this island of Valka. This village had been raided often, and the pitiful attempt to hide it away from the main road and canal had been completely unsuccessful. That the roads here were reasonably good was a result of the old Strom’s grandfather, who liked to race zorca chariots, a sport he could not practice on the canals. Presently Thisi came back. “Tlemi had tears in his eyes,” she said. “The old fool. Over a mere sword!”

She looked a great deal calmer.

Thisi leaned over and whispered to her husband.

He started, and looked down the road, and then at me, and back at Thisi. He swallowed. “Here, Drak. Cover yourself with this old cloth—”

But I understood, and I cursed myself for a credulous simpleton.

They cared for me, these old folk, and they did not wish me killed. I had done nothing for them. I had brought merely sickness, and another mouth to feed. More altruistic love for a fellow man is difficult to find.

I stood up.

“I will go to Tlemi’s hut and get my sword, now—”

“It is too late, Drak. Look!”

I looked.

Riding in their pride and their power, the aragorn astride their zorcas moved up the street. The old folk stumbled to their knees as the mercenaries passed. Absolute power they held, absolute control, a will never challenged.

And I, Dray Prescot, stood like a loon in the dust before them, empty-handed.

CHAPTER FOUR

A surprise for the aragorn

Theirson’s hand gripped my ankle and jerked, and stunned by the folly of my own actions, I lost my balance and tumbled into the dust at his side. He whispered fiercely, in an agony of terror.

“Put your forehead into the dirt, Drak! For the sake of the glorious Opaz himself! Else you are a doomed man — and we with you. ”

Those last words, alone, could make me bend my stubbornly and stupidly proud neck. I bowed. I cringed. I, Dray Prescot, double-inclined to these cramphs of aragorn. The zorca hooves twinkled past. Following them the calsanys lumbered along, tails flicking. Tethered to the last two calsanys by lengths of rope were two people, a man and a woman. I could see only their naked legs. They stumbled as they were jerked along. The woman fell. Now I could see her. She was young, with long brown hair and a thin but vigorous figure, clad only in a wraparound of the orange Valkan cloth. She was dragged by her bound wrists. An aragorn reined back and beat her with his crop until she rose up silently, and stumbled on, dragged by the calsany. Theirson’s hand gripped my arm.

Then the party had passed and the aragorn were yelling for the headman and Theirson was rising and shuffling forward, head bent.

“Bibi!” said Thisi. I looked at her. Tears coursed down her cheeks. “Bibi — my granddaughter.”

Many secret societies exist on Kregen, as anywhere else, I suppose. Societies exist devoted to this end and that. On Valka, with the absolute dominance of the slavers and the mercenaries, and the disappearance of so many of the younger people into the central massif, a clandestine organization must grow up to resist. Given the normal strengths and fears of human beings — and of the halflings, too —

this is natural and inevitable. Bibi, Thisi’s granddaughter, must have come down with a message from the center. They — she and her companion — had been caught. Now the aragorn wanted to find out why she was visiting here.

I stood up warily, and looked up the street.

Theirson was talking to the aragorn. They looked to be the same six, evidently backtracking because of their captives. Other village people crouched abjectly by their huts. The six slaves stood by the calsanys, and the three dancing girls put their heads out of their preysany-palanquin covers and chattered like parakeets. The palanquins were gorgeously decorated with filigree work, and the poles by which they were slung were lavishly bound with silver wire. The preysanys — a kind of superior calsany — were likewise highly decorated and feathered.

I stood there and I looked down on Thisi.

My voice carried all that harsh, intolerant authority, and I know my face must have glared with that hateful devil’s look.

“Run, Thisi, and bring my sword. Tell Tlemi I have need of it.”

“But, Drak—”

“Run.”

She ran.

In the days immediately after I had been captured and taken as a slave into the marble quarries of Zenicce, coming at a stroke from Zorcander of my clansmen to slave, I fought blindly and obstinately against restraint until beaten into submission. That happened only when I was unconscious. I still react in the same way now, on occasion; but I have tried to school myself. As I stood there looking upon these indifferently cruel and despotic aragorn I kept telling myself to wait. I had to wait for Thisi and my sword. I did stand, and how I did it is a mystery, for I longed above all else to hurl myself forward and fling myself upon these sadistic overlords and tear them from their jeweled saddles. I was spared the wait.

One aragorn glanced at me. He frowned. He lifted his crop and beckoned.

“Stupid cramph! If you cannot incline before your master I will teach you! You will scream for mercy —

but we aragorn no longer know what mercy means.”

At this his companions guffawed.

The orange cloth hurriedly thrown around me still hung from my shoulders, and it was evident that the mercenary had not yet appreciated I was not an oldster like the rest. I shuffled forward. I kept my head lowered.

When I reached the zorca I looked up.

I had put that simpleton’s look on my face. Zair forgive me, but I take a pride in that look, for it makes me look an idiot of idiots, and gives me great and unholy — and very petty, I confess — feelings of gaiety and secret knowledge that I play a prank, that I disguise Dray Prescot.

“You stupid, Doty-rotten cramph! I’ll teach you—”

I looked up at him. His arm was raised to bring the crop down across my face, possibly to blind me, certainly to mark me. His companions laughed.

“Kleesh,” I said.

I prided myself, then, that I spoke so rationally. A kleesh is violently unpleasant, stinking, repulsive; and yet applied to me the name serves only to make me yawn. Applied to most men, I have noticed with sure unconcern, it is a guaranteed explosive firecracker.

His face contorted, he roared and brought the crop down in a violent slashing blow. I moved in, took his foot from the stirrup, jerked it up, hauled it out — I didn’t care if his leg parted from his hipbone — and tossed him swinging over my shoulder into the dust. I took a pace toward him and brought my foot down on his face. Then, without thinking about it, I ducked. The flung javelin scraped over my back. It struck the ground with such force that it snapped. I disregarded it. I leaped sideways, turned, surveyed the five remaining mercenaries. One was already in action, gouging in his spurs cruelly, hurtling down on me, his drawn rapier pointed and low, aiming to spit me. I slid off the orange cloth, whirled it once and enveloped that rapier in the folds, and dived to the side.

The others were reacting now. Bibi and her companion, a personable young fellow with a thin face but merry eyes, huddled together, bound and helpless. I shot a look down the road. No sign of Thisi. The aragorn had seen I was unarmed, and they were taking no chances of my reaching their fellow lying in the road with a red pudding for a face. Mercenaries are ever conscious of the value of seizing a weapon from an adversary. They were roaring and yelling all the time, of course, threats and curses and detailings of what they would do to me and the rest of the village. I needed nothing extra to spur me on; had I done so the threats against my friends here would have been a spur and a brand. Two came at me, with a third cursing and trying to rein his zorca around with them. I had to dodge and duck and weave. They were even taunting me now, cries such as some warriors use, mercenary tricks that, even if they did not realize it, meant they had admitted they were not faced by a helpless old man of the village.

The utter surprise they had, the sheer impossibility of an old man suddenly dragging one of their number from the saddle and breaking his neck, had now passed. But that uncanny business of a helpless victim abruptly turning on them, savagely, had for a mur unnerved them. Now they were upon me again, ready to drive and hunt me, to have sport, to flick and lash with their rapiers, not to kill but to torture. Forced thus to skip this way and that I worked my way to the side. They reined their beasts around, the spindly legs of the zorcas perfect for this kind of wheeling curveting work. They performed caracoles very well, these aragorn. But I wormed free, turned, leaped, and, as I had done on that beach so long ago in Segesthes, I was upon the haunches of the nearest zorca and with an arm around the neck of its rider was dragging him back. I had to be quick. If I knew these people they’d care nothing for their comrade and would hurl a javelin to kill me, risking his life.

I snapped his backbone and then made a grab for his rapier. But he had twisted in his agony and I missed. I had to let myself go and slide off the zorca. The javelin hissed into the dead man’s back. On the ground I danced, as it seemed, between javelins.

Again I risked a glance down the street — and here came Thisi, hurrying and stumbling. She carried my sword.

The calsanys were uneasy and were milling, the two bound prisoners were being dragged across, and I saw they would stagger between me and Thisi. A zorca rider saw Thisi. He shrilled his anger and drew a javelin from the sheath strapped to his saddle. I saw Bibi open her mouth, but her scream was drowned by the roars from the aragorn. Her companion staggered across and fell against the javelin-man’s zorca. The javelin missed. The calsanys barged against Bibi’s friend and he fell. The zorcaman reined away, raving, drawing his rapier. Bibi pulled her man into the calsanys. I could leave them, but not for long. The stink of blood and dust stung my nostrils, rank and raw, but they have been familiar smells to me all my life.

I ran toward Thisi.

“Here, Drak! May Opaz have you in his keeping.”

I forced myself to speak. “Thank you, Thisi.”

I took the brand. The hilt had never felt so good in my fist before. I turned.

There were four of them left, and they were completely incapable for a single moment of understanding defeat. They had cowed these people, enslaved all their young men; their slightest word was law, their littlest whim a command. Here was a man, all but naked, impudently attempting to challenge them. That two of their comrades were dead would mean only an excuse for an orgy of revenge. They had no conception that they would not slay me.

They wore armor and the man on the zorca whose back I had broken had not died of the javelin, for it had failed to penetrate his backplate. I balanced easily, the sword held low, and I laughed at these professional killers.

A shrill screaming that had been fracturing the air all the time gurgled away as I laughed. The three dancing girls, who had so short a time ago been laughing from their preysany-palanquins, had been shrieking and screaming; but when I laughed they stopped, and they remained silent thereafter. Then, I confess it not without a knowledge of how foolish and inflated it makes me appear, I shook the Savanti sword at them, and I shouted: “Bite on a sword for a change, you cowardly kleeshes who murder old men.”

Their rage was a wonderful and edifying sight.

They dug in their spurs and they charged.

I am a clansman, of the Clan of Felschraung, and I have faced the earthshaking charge of a whole hostile clan astride their voves. The zorca is not an animal a clansman uses in the massive barrier-smashing charge.

“Fools!” I said, and set to work.

I here proved, at least to my own satisfaction, that the Savanti sword was, and again, at least in my hand, a better weapon than the rapier. I had no main-gauche. The first man simply tried to spit me through as though I were a target at practice. I flicked his blade aside and as he passed I struck his thigh. The stirrup alone kept his leg from falling off.

The second man, seeing this, attempted to rear his mount back and slash me down the face. The zorca is a nimble animal — perhaps there is no more nimble animal on all Kregen, certainly there is none on this Earth — but I was quicker and slid the blow, reaching up and forward, and so passed my blade through his guts just beneath the corselet rim. I withdrew and flung myself sideways. The next man’s blow would have clanged off my helmet comb had I been wearing one.

Mind you, unless you are a superb horseman or zorca-man it is deucedly difficult to fix a man who insists on dodging all around you and intends to unseat you or smash you or in some other unpleasant way do for you first. The third aragorn came out of his stirrups all flailing with my left hand gripping his left boot. He tried to cut down on me, but my blade deflected his blow, and as he struck the ground I sliced the sword down. The way I was feeling must surely be indicated by the fact that his head jumped clean off his shoulders and rolled under the middle preysany-palanquin, whereat its occupant swooned and fell out, a heap of jumbled silks, gold, and bells in the dust.

The fourth aragorn had no intention of quitting, I’ll give him that; he was angry, so enraged that he roared in, screaming abuse, swirling his rapier, madly intent on finishing me off. I didn’t want to kill this one. Him, I would like to question; but the fool ran himself onto my blade. It went through his throat. By Zair, but he was a fool!

Mind you, I must take a share of the blame. But, there they were, six dead aragorn littering the dusty street of the village.

Then it began to rain.

If the villagers wanted to take that as an omen, they might. Certainly, the raindrops felt cool and sweet. I walked over to the palanquins. The two petal faces regarded me in horror. They were not particularly pretty girls, but curved and complaisant, as I judged, able to wiggle their hips and rotate their bellies and jangle their bells. I spoke quite pleasantly.

“How do you wish to die? Would you like to be hanged, burned, beheaded? Perhaps you prefer drowning? I am in no hurry. Just make up your minds and then let me know.” They cowered back, shattered, shrunken, unable to implore, seeing in my face only darkness and evil. I swung back. “Oh —

there might be a way — but no. I am sure you will wish to die.”

Then I strode off and left them. Bibi and her man were freed. His name was Tom — yes, the same as our Earthly Tom, although not deriving from Thomas — and although thin he was well-muscled and active and a very merry man altogether. He eyed my sword.

“Lahal, Koter Drak,” he said, for Thisi had whispered the name by which they knew me. He shook his head. “I would not have believed it possible had I not seen it with my own eyes.”

“Lahal, Koter Tom of Vulheim,” I said, for that was where he came from, a port town up the coast that was now a mere pile of rubble and burned beams, razed, destroyed, and abandoned. He looked about, lifted his arms, and let them drop.

Certainly, the situation called for considerable thought.

The dancing girl woke up from her swoon and when she was given the news by her two companions promptly swooned again. The six slaves stood docilely by the calsanys, soothing them. They would be a problem. There were four men and two women, hardy, short-statured folk with thick oily black hair and flattish noses, bought in a market far from Valka, I judged. That made me realize they were probably in a special relationship with the aragorn; slaves, yes, but privileged slaves, doing domestic work and quite unlike the whipped and beaten slaves for which Valka was scoured.

“We had best tie ’em up, Tom,” I said. We had quickly dropped formalities. But the use of Koter is obligatory in Vallia unless you know a man well. We felt, Tom and I that we did know each other tolerably well. Time telescopes when you fight together — and his action in spoiling the aim of the javelin man, when he must have thought he would be instantly cut down, was as brave a stroke as any in any being’s book.

“Will you really kill the girls?” Theirson wrinkled his nose up. He eyed me with a look that struck me as altogether too knowing.

They had heard him, for we were using Kregish.

“Certainly,” I said. “The aragorn are evil, and these perfumed dancing girls are likewise evil.” I heard them squeak, and sniffle, and realized they were crying now. That was one crisis over. “Of course,” I said loudly, taking Theirson by the arm and walking him away. “If they understand just how evil the aragorn are, and are prepared to mend their ways, then perhaps—”

By that time I had lowered my voice and walked sufficiently far off for them not to overhear us.

“I doubt that I could kill them, Theirson. I am a man of peace. I seldom kill in cold blood.”

“Seldom?”

“For my sins.”

“You are a strange man, Drak. Harsh and hard and merciless. Yet there is mercy in you. I will see what we can do with those girls.”

Tom had joined us. He had possessed himself of the leathers of an aragorn, a rapier, and a main-gauche.

“They’ll have to be watched. But they will give us valuable information.” I told Tom about the released prisoners on the beach.

“Panvals?” he said. “They can be useful to us, too.”

The street was cleared, and the bodies stripped and buried. The slaves were placed in a hut, and an old man with a rapier stood guard over them. The largesse on the calsanys was distributed and the calsanys and preysanys themselves herded in with the village animals. We made the place spick and span again. And then we discussed what best to do.

I made my position clear. I would find a boat and go to Vallia. I saw Tom looking at Theirson. Tom would marry Bibi as soon as that could be contrived, and between them they could look forward to no life at all. Unless. . .

No one did any work in the fields that day. That night we ate well and drank wine for the first time in many a long day.

Then we commanded the dancing girls, who were half dead with fright and horrendous expectations, to dance for us. The ordinary dancing girl, such as one finds in taverns and dopa dens and even in higher establishments of pleasure, never appeals greatly to me, almost certainly on account of my experiences with my clansmen where the girls dance gaily and freely and with a fierce joy that finds its greatest expression of art — and where they’d stick you with a terchick if you called them dancing girls. Slavery and dancing are obscene bedfellows.

I had never touched the Triangular Trade, but I knew.

After that I called the three of them over and said: “Have you chosen?”

They fell on their knees, the tears streaming — and, of course, I could not let the cruel farce continue any longer. I told them, simply, that they must henceforth cut themselves off from the aragorn, and help the villagers. Later, when things had worked themselves out, they might be dancing girls again. It was not a satisfactory solution, but I was afire to find a boat and sail to Vallia. Tom was doubtful I’d find a single boat along the west coast of Valka. When he understood that I had no objections to stealing a boat from the slavers or the mercenaries, and if necessary, bashing in a few skulls in the process, he said that, yes, there were boats; but the skull bashing would be hectic and heavy. That suited me only in one way; but Valka, however pleasant an island it really was despite the depredations, could not hold me at all, and if skull bashing was necessary, then skull bash I would. Speed, now I had almost reached my goal, seemed to me the prime requisite. Tom accompanied me back to the beach. The prisoners were astonished to see me. Under the direction of their self-elected leaders, of which Borg was one, they had begun to sketch out a camp for themselves off the beach and on the banks of a little river where we tracked them. They were warned about the water in the canals, whereat Borg laughed hugely, a true canalman.

Tom and I departed, and after some difficulty, discovered a slaver camp where we stole a boat. The skull bashing did not, in the event, prove necessary. Tom waved goodbye. “Remberee, Drak!” and:

“Remberee, Tom!”

I hoisted the dipping lug and the little boat curled out across the sea. I felt at last my peculiar destiny was running in ways I could understand when the black clouds gathered and a gale blew with incredible, immediate violence and the waves broke mountainously high; with a sick heart I recognized all the symptoms I had met before. This had happened on the inner sea. The Star Lords were forcing me back. I could not go on. The Star Lords were saying plainly: “You may not go to Vallia! Return to Valka, Dray Prescot, and perform there the work to your hands.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The true history of The Fetching of Drak na Valka

I would not accept this dictate of the Star Lords.

What did I know of these mysterious and lofty beings then? Practically nothing of value, save their power. They had flung me back and forth between Earth and Kregen like a tennis ball. They could rouse the wind and the sea against me.

The boat grounded and waves sheeted over me, and I stood up and shook my fist at the sky and cursed the Star Lords, horribly and comprehensively. The wind slackened and the stars shone through the cloud wrack.

She of the Veils, the fourth moon of Kregen, drifted like a wan ghost, and against the pallid orb the shape of a giant hunting bird stretched like an accusing brand.

“The Gdoinye!” I yelled up, my head thrown back. “What do I care for you? It is Vallia and Vondium for me,” and I finished with a fine rattling series of foul oaths.

The raptor up there, black in the starlight, catching an occasional gleam from She of the Veils, was the messenger and spy of the Star Lords. A giant bird with, I knew, a scarlet coat of feathers and golden feathers about its eyes and throat, it circled above me now in wide planing hunting circles. That raptor had watched over many of the crises of my life on Kregen. Now I picked up a stone from the beach and hurled it aloft. Oh, yes, believe me, I was mad clean through.

And then — then something happened that had never occurred to me before on Kregen and was never likely to occur on Earth.

The Gdoinye folded its wings and stooped. It dropped like a shot from a tower straight toward my head. I shouted aloud in my glee and hauled out my sword and threw it up, the blade a pinkish-silver brand in the night.

“I’ll tickle your feathers for you, you kleesh of a bird! You won’t spy for the Star Lords when I’ve spit you and roasted you and thrown you to the vosks!”

With a harsh cry the bird spread those gorgeous wings all black in the moonlight and swooped over my head. It circled insolently low above me, contemptuous, out of my reach. At my side swung a main-gauche Tom had insisted I take, and I could have drawn it and hurled it fairly into that scarlet-feathered breast. But I continued to shake my sword and rave at the Gdoinye. Looking back, I know I had forgotten I carried the dagger. My rage was terrible and ludicrous, pathetic. Then — then the thing happened that stunned my brain.

“Dray Prescot!”

I fell silent, numb, gaping.

The bird — the bird spoke to me!

“Dray Prescot, you are a fool.”

How could I argue that?

“Dray Prescot, we did not bring you to Valka. Had you a grain of common sense you would have understood. Was not the lad Hunter from the Savanti? Were you not brought to aid him?”

My sword felt as heavy as the chest of gold we dragged from Dorval the Render’s tower.

“Vallia!” I shouted up. “I must go to Vondium!”

“Not so, Dray Prescot. You have been selected. Therefore you must.”

“As I did in Magdag? When you dragged me away in the hour of victory?”

“If you presume, you will be put down.”

“Presume! I served you as I thought fit! Star Lords! You are less than rasts that crawl upon a dunghill!”

“We are what we are. The Savanti try to be what they are not. They brought you here untimely.” Then the bird emitted a shrieking squawk that might have been the laughter of the gods, or the gloating of demons. “Your Delia does not miss you, Prescot—”

I interrupted. “In that you lie!”

“Listen, fool. You remember that Delia saw you the very next day after her capture in the Esztercari enclave, yet you had wandered and adventured and swaggered like any ruffler for years?”

Now I understood, or thought I did, and a tide of pure relief flooded me through and through. I had spent years with my clansmen and had been back to Earth, and for Delia it had all been like a single day. I saw the Gdoinye rising higher and I shouted something after it, but it merely screeched an accipiter-like insult at me, and winged away, vanishing in the moon-drenched shadows. But — I felt free! I felt released from a bar of constricting steel. I would make my way to Vondium in Vallia and claim my Delia — and only I would suffer the pangs of parting and separation. To me, then, these thoughts came as a great benediction, for I did not care how I suffered so long as not a single hair of the head of my Delia was harmed.

A flutter of white beneath She of the Veils made me turn my head and there flew the white dove of the Savanti. It flew around, and I thought its flight as agitated as ever I had seen it. The white dove spied for the Savanti. I shook my fist at it and shouted: “And what have you to say for yourself?” But the dove merely circled and then flew off, a white fluttering speck, pink-lit, inconclusive under the moons of Kregen.

So it was I think you will understand that I started up the beach with a grim purpose. Now for Valka!

To explain the high purpose and the desperate resolves of the next six years I would do best to quote you the song made by Erithor of Valkanium; but he was of Valka and composed in the Vallian tongue, the Vallish, and even when translated into Kregish the majesty and power of the words are lost, the alliterations meaningless, the rhythm fractured. To translate further into English, however marvelous a tongue our English language truly is, would be to cripple the beauty and the magic and leave only dry facts. And, in glory and blood and effort and sacrifice, the facts were never dry. There are many kinds of singers in Kregen; call them what you will, bards, skalds, troubadours, minstrels, trouvères, tsloivoidees, and of them all, few were held in higher repute than Erithor of Valkanium. How we sang in the high hall of the fortress of Esser Rarioch overlooking Valkanium!

This song Erithor made, the song that is still sung and will be sung for as long as there are singers on Kregen, is called The Fetching of Drak na Valka. There are wild savage passages full of the purple passions of battle, storm, and onslaught; and there are the longer wailing laments that surge rhythmically into heroic acceptance of the good men dead and gone, good men never forgotten. The song tells of Kylie and Kylon, the famous twins who held the bridge to Ussanore Ovoidach, and Nath of Vandayha, Jeniu and Vokor, Carli and Vomanus, and Yathmin ti Vulheim, whose broken body I clasped in my arms as she died, seeking to stroke the blonde hair from her face where her blood matted and clotted and the shining brown eyes dimmed and dulled.

I can never listen to The Fetching of Drak na Valka without a reaction that brands me as a human being, full of folly and sentiment and sadness, and, yes, pride too, nonetheless that pride is bruised and broken, the foolishness of a man who has known good friends and lost them. The song tells how we roused the island of Valka. How the prisoners huddled shivering on the beach took up arms, and how we marched, and how the aragorn resisted us, and how we routed them, and grew stronger. How the young men and women came down from the central mountains, the Heart Heights of Valka, and took weapons from the slavers and the aragorn and all their mercenaries, for the aragorn brought against us Ochs and Rapas, Fristles and Chuliks. And the singing notes of the harps rise and the drums roar and once again I am transported back to the many battlefields and the stratagems and the night surprises when the seven moons of Kregen shone upon courage and selflessness and high endeavor.

The Fetching of Drak na Valka!

No man knows the profundity of feeling I experience, for my name is indissolubly linked with the island I love, the island of Valka, that was to become a home in which I might find perfect peace and security, happiness and love. But, then, as we first sang the seven hundred and seventy-seven verses of the song, I had only the faintest inkling of what Valka was to become to me in the days ahead. The song tells of Tom of Vulheim, and Ven Borg nal Ogier, Theirson and Thisi the Fair, and their granddaughter Bibi, old Jeniu, the wise counselor, and his wife, Thuri, who in supporting him supported us all.

And only when Jeniu presented me with the fiat of the whole assembly of Valka, the pitiful remnant of men and women who had formed the assembly in the old Strom’s day, led still by Tharu ti Valkanium, was the double meaning of the song’s title born in on me.

For we had cleared the island of the aragorn. We had killed until the rivers ran red. We had driven them into the sea and watched as their armored forms toppled from the chalk cliff-tops. We had taken the slavers and sent them packing.

And when more slavers came, seeking to scourge the island again and sweep up more human victims for their vile trade, we had met them with a wall of steel and an invincible purpose. We had organized, for I had put all my own experience in these matters at the disposal of the Valkans, and our Jiktars and Hikdars, our Deldars, had led disciplined formations into action. Once again the island was a fair and clean place in which to live and bring up children. And the word spread and the slavers came no more for, as the song triumphantly proclaims, no longer was Valka a supine carcass rotten for plunder. The slavers, with their patents from the court of Vallia, turned aside from Valka and sought easier conquests. And then — and then I understood what they all meant by the word “fetching.”

For I had fetched the men and women out of the Heart Heights, and I had fetched them weapons, and organization and the understanding that they could triumph if they willed it. And then they fetched me. Grim Tharu ti Valkanium, sword-girted, robed in the orange of the high assembly, strode the length of the high hall of the fortress of Esser Rarioch, and inclined to me — whereat, I remember, I was moved to anger, and bade him stand up like the man he was, and never cringe — and, with a smile, he said: “And for you, Drak, Strom na Valka, all men will bow. Aye! And joy in it, for it will show the world what we think of our Strom!”

I was astonished.

But they were serious. Everything had been arranged behind my back. I had known nothing. The song does not tell of these circuitous dealings, the messages, the sacks of golden talens dispatched, the complicated resorts to law, and the quoting of precedents. I was the Strom of Valka. The whole island was my fief. Everything upon it, whether living or dead, whether of man or nature, was mine, inalienably mine.

I tried to refuse, and saw the hurt in their eyes. I sat back in my seat and marveled. This, I felt sure, was no outcome envisaged by the Star Lords or, given that I had completed what poor Alex Hunter had set out to do, the Savanti, either. But I have remarked before of this strange and frightening charisma I possess, unasked, unsought, that serves me sometimes so well and sometimes so ill. Now I could only stand before them all, and humbly take what they offered. The rapiers leaped, glittering in the torchlight in that great hall.

“Hai, Jikai! Drak, Strom na Valka! Hai, Jikai!”

And so the seven hundred and seventy-eighth verse was added to the song. The emblem of Valka is the reflex-compound bow, placed horizontally, half drawn and aimed upward. Vertically upon this is a trident, as though about to be shot from the bow. The Valkans are great fisherfolk. Also, up in the rolling hills and wild crags of the Heart Heights that form the broad central massif of the island, they are proficient bowmen, using not the great longbow of Loh and Erthyrdrin but the shorter, stiffer, compound bow of cunning double-reflex curves, such as is used by my clansmen. We had driven our arrow storm into the aragorn, and they had shriveled before us. But, once on a time, Tharu ti Valkanium said to me: “We of Valka are great bowmen. Yet the Emperor keeps a personal bodyguard of the Bowmen of Loh. We are just a distant province, rich for plunder, ripe for slaves.”

And I had said to him: “You are great bowmen, still, Tharu; but no longer is Valka a province ripe for plunder!”

The other favorite weapon of the Valkans is the glaive. I do not mean by glaive a sword, in the archaic meaning of the word, gladius, a sword; but in the meaning in general use of a pole-arm, of the fifteenth century or so. The Valkan glaive is formed of a long narrow head, somewhat more robust than a bayonet, mounted on a shaft about five feet long. From the head along the sides run strengthening pieces of steel that serve also to prevent a slashing sword blow slicing the shaft in two. With the glaive the warriors of Valka go up against rapier men with complete confidence. So, in the fullness of time I, Dray Prescot, of Earth, became Drak, Strom na Valka. If there was any regret that my own name had, by a chance, not featured so far in Valka, I had quickly gone along with the name of Drak, for I saw that this might serve me well as a disguise and an alias when I penetrated Vallia. For the name of Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombor, would be that of a wanted man there.

Also, through this incident, I had discovered that titles — for what they are worth — were obtainable as much by merit and effort as by birth and heredity in Vallia. Once I had cleared Valka and established myself in fact as the chief of the island, and the whole people concurring, I became a Strom and no one would say me nay. I did discover that a great deal was owed to the panvals I had rescued; for they had joyed in arranging the contracts, bribes, and agreements in Vondium, and in obtaining the Emperor’s great seal and signature — Earthly custom is paralleled in this on Kregen — on the letters patent. The illuminated patent itself was kept safely locked away in the fortress of Esser Rarioch. Now a Strom, with all the responsibilities of rebuilding the island’s economy and reinforcing her people’s confidence, I plunged headlong into work. Do not think I forgot Delia. More than once I took a boat out toward Vallia, to the west, and invariably the storm clouds gathered and the lightning and thunder roared and crackled menacingly, and the waves sought to smash the boat to fragments. Valka was a rich province, as I found, and by management I made her richer and more pleasant. Also, storing up credit for the future I had sworn must come, I so arranged matters that the high assembly could function with greater and greater freedom and authority. Tharu ti Valkanium often told me I was placing power into their hands, whereat I would say: “And do you believe I do not trust you, Tharu? And the elders? After all we have been through together?” And, again, I would say: “One day, Tharu, I must leave Valka, for a space, and go upon a mission that is dear to my heart. When that day comes, I want the island to continue to prosper, andyou to remember me, so that when I return — with my bride — the whole future will be bright and glorious.”

“We will not forget, Strom Drak, we will never forget.”

Already, the girls were preparing the elaborate dresses and jewelry and all things needful that the Stromni, my bride, would require. Erithor of Valkanium could not make a song about that triumphal return yet, but he would strum out a merry tune, and hum words beneath his breath. When the girls of the place begged him to continue he would laugh and say: “Not so, you handmaidens of frivolity! I but tune my strings against the day the Stromni comes!”

How could I tell them that this Stromni was a princess, was the Princess Majestrix of all Vallia?

One day, among a group of friends on the terrace of Esser Rarioch with all of Valkanium spread beneath us and the suns of Antares blinding back from spire and tower and gabled roof, and the wide sweep of the bay beyond where the sea sparkled its impossible Kregan blue, I began idly to hum and then sing a few snatches of The Bowmen of Loh. There were no ladies present, and we had been drinking the strong red wine of southern Valka, a vintage called Vela’s Tears, after the maiden who features in the music drama The Fatal Love of Vela na Valka, a drama which you may imagine is highly popular on Valka itself.

Erithor drew his slender fingers across the strings of his harp with a harsh and jangling discord. I looked up in surprise. They were all looking at me — Tom, Tharu, Theirson, Logu, and even Borg, who was a Vallian, stared also — and I looked at them in surprise.

Tharu said: “We do not sing that song in Valka, Strom.”

I never apologize. It is a weakness. I said: “The song is mild and harmless, but if I have offended you, my friends—” And then I stopped. We had sung songs together a hundred times more bawdy, and they had not complained.

“The Emperor keeps a personal bodyguard of Bowmen of Loh. Therefore we do not sing that song.”

I nodded. “I see. Rest assured, it shall remain among the great unsung epics.”

At this they all laughed. On Kregen there are many classics that are honored more in the breach than the observance in their rendition, as on Earth. The tension of the moment was broken, but I was displeased. I like that song. It reminds me of Seg Segutorio, and that memory, then, was bittersweet and full of a masochism I relished as a punishment. I was young then, as you know, young and headstrong and foolhardy, although trying to control myself. I could take pride that I had not, back in Theirson’s village, rushed with empty hands on the aragorn. I was learning, slowly. What was more disturbing was the evident antipathy these good people of Valka had for the Emperor’s choice of a personal bodyguard. I welcomed their hatred of the Racter party, who, although never in the open, were the instigators of the slaving raids, for they gained much of their wealth thereby. I did not relish this hatred of my beloved’s father.

For all that I would have to walk in and teach him how to behave to a son-in-law, a prospect full of unpleasantness.

This incident, I believe, finally made me make up my mind to act positively. I had been growing lethargic

— oh, not in the amount of work I dispatched each day, but in the attitude I had adopted. I love Valka and I could see all the fantastic promise of the island even then. I had become wrapped up in the place. I saw it as the home to which I would bring Delia of the Blue Mountains in triumph as my bride. Encar of the Fields came in then with a query about the new acreage of samphron trees we were clearing — from the gnarly-trunked samphron trees we pick glossy purple fruits which the watermills crush into fragrant oil — and after Encar waddled Erdgar, fat and out of breath, with a problem on the supply of shaped and seasoned knees for the new ships he was building down in Valkanium’s dockyards.

“Erdgar,” I said. “There is a journey I must make. I shall need your best-found ship. Rose of Valka, possibly? And fully-provisioned.”

“Rose of Valka, ”wheezed Erdgar the Shipwright. He took a glass of wine, sniffing it appreciatively.

“Aye, she is fleet and well-found and might venture into the Southern Ocean, if needs be.”

This was a neat way of asking me my destination. The breeze blew on that high terrace of Esser Rarioch and the scent of yellow mushk, clustered with bees in its shelter, smelled very sweet. My friends were relaxing after the day’s toil; soon we would go down to the great hall to eat and drink and sing the old songs — and the new, aye, the new! — and life was exceedingly good.

“Zenicce,” I told Erdgar. “I will go to Strombor.”

This, as it seemed to me, was a cunning plan, for I might thus be able to detour the gales that prevented me from reaching Vallia. And I had a hunger to see Strombor again.

“Strombor! The devils of Esztercari drove out the good folk of Strombor! There was a story that they had in their turn been driven out. I pray the invisible twins it is so.”

Tharu drained his glass. “Many of us were born of parents who escaped from Strombor.”

My surprise was complete.

It made sense. Valka lies about a hundred and fifty dwaburs southwest of Zenicce. And the Stromboramin were likely to stick together in the urgency of their departure in the few ships available to them in those days of horror.

While Erdgar the Shipwright wheezed and fussed over Rose of Valka I took a journey into the Heart Heights in connection with the construction of a new dam. I found I welcomed these duties of economist, husbandman, canalmaster, and organizer of a province. My party of engineers, secretaries, and supply officers traveled into the interior in a narrow boat. Through lock after lock that had been recently repaired and put back into service we mounted the ladder of water. The weather remained wonderful, the crops were ripening, there was not a slave within sight, and my only regret was that my Delia of Delphond was not at my side to share all these delights with me.

One warm and pinkly-golden evening as the Maiden with the Many Smiles and She of the Veils floated together in the sky I walked for a space on the canal bank, sunk in thought. The glorious pink and golden evening turned blue with a lambent refulgence of blueness I recognized with a savage surge of feeling. I looked up. Against the starshot sky with those two moons of Kregen floating so serenely I saw the luminescent blue outline of a gigantic scorpion. This was the sign! This scorpion with arrogantly upflung tail was the sign that in some way either brought me or indicated I was to be brought to Kregen. I had seen this phantom sky scorpion on Earth. Now I was seeing it on Kregen!

The old familiar blueness enveloped me and I was falling and twisting with the blueness roaring in my head — and I did not struggle, I did not shout my defiance, I merely waited for what the destiny of the scorpion would bring me.

CHAPTER SIX

The scorpion and the glacier

It is not my intention to speak freely or to go into details of my life here on this planet of my birth. Although I usually returned to some crisis or other and I spent some exhilarating years here, to put it mildly, my chief interest and absorbing passions were ever fixed on the planet of Kregen orbiting Antares in the constellation of Scorpio four hundred light-years away.

Often I would stand and gaze into the starry sky, hoping and praying that the lambent-blue form of the ghostly scorpion would once more summon me, naked and unarmed, and pitch me headlong into bloody and violent adventure. The man whose name I do not mention who held my growing fortune in trust for me served me faithfully and well, and his descendants after him. He was always pleased to see me and asked no questions I could not answer. He and his sons knew of this habit of mine of looking up at the stars, but they passed no comment. I know they understood I was not as ordinary mortals. I found myself in Paris during the July days of 1830.

There was a time loop involved here; I had had the word from the Gdoinye as to that. I did not understand what was involved then; and even today, the mechanics of time distortion remain vague. I had spent more Terrestrial-span years on Kregen than there were between my first arrival there floating down the River Aph to Aphrasöe, the Swinging City, to meet the Savanti in 1805, and 1830. Caught up in the excitements of the dismissal of Charles X and the installation of Louis Phillipe, I played a part. Only after the seventh of August, however, was I free and able to walk alone by the Seine. The blue lambency caught me up swiftly, and the scorpion drew me willingly across the parsecs, hurtling through the empty dark to resume my destiny upon Kregen under the Suns of Scorpio. Even before I opened my eyes I knew I landed in a part of Kregen I had never visited before. The cold cut in like scalping knives.

As usual, I was unarmed, naked, left entirely to my own resources. I felt free, overjoyed, triumphant, profoundly thankful.

What, I wondered, was the emergency that had brought me back this time?

Whatever it might be I would deal with it as fast as I could and then, ascertaining just where I had been flung on this terrifying if beautiful world of Kregen, make my way to Vallia, march into Vondium, and confront the Emperor, demand from him his daughter in marriage. Yes, I had hesitated and hung back long enough. Only the gift of a thousand years of life had made what I had done possible. But my patience had run out. By Zim-Zair! No matter if the Emperor was belittled in the eyes of his daughter, and thereby I ran the risk of hurting her feelings — I had absolutely no fears that I would lose her love, as she knew she would never lose mine. I would take that risk and inflict that amount of pain on my beloved, believing sincerely that she would understand I moved not only for my own pleasure and greed and pride, but also for her sake as well.

I opened my eyes.

I shivered.

Snow lay everywhere in a thick, pale pink blanket through which the dark firs thrust like withered fingers of a buried army of crones.

A hundred yards off lay the crumpled shape of an airboat.

My task lay before me.

The wind cut into my naked hide and I knew that if I did not find clothes and food very quickly I could give up all hopes and ideas of finding my Delia again.

The airboat had landed badly and her petal shape had been grotesquely twisted. From the small aft cabin I dragged out four bodies. These men were Vallians. Under the heavy ponsho fleeces they wore the buff coats and the long black boots I knew so well. Selecting the body of the largest, I stripped him and donned his gear. The warmth of the ponsho skin struck in most gratefully and I shivered in reciprocal delight. Now I could attend to the two men still alive. Unconscious, they breathed stertorously; but an examination convinced me they were not seriously injured. These two men, then, were the reason I had been returned to Kregen.

The airboat had crashed through spiky fir trees to come to rest in a V-shaped valley between peaks. Up there the snow and ice glistened uglily. The thought occurred to me that we were stranded in The Stratemsk, a fate of almost certain disaster. The Stratemsk, although not the greatest range of mountains upon Kregen, are so vast, so tall, so hostile, that the imagination shrinks from their contemplation. Downslope a panorama spread out where the valley ended, and between craggy outcrops the snow could not smooth or render less sinister a glacier began, vanishing below cloud. That, then, was our way out.

A cry brought my attention back to the flier. One of the men had crawled to the shattered opening. His face glared out on me more white, more stark, than the snow and the dark fir trees.

“What happened? Where are we? Who are you?” The voice carried that habitual ring of authority, so that I knew I was in the presence of a man accustomed to command, a high dignitary, a man of power.

“You crashed. We are in the mountains. I am Dray Prescot.”

He moved back as I approached, and before I reached the opening the second man crawled out. He was younger, handsome, his brown hair a fairer tint than the normal Vallian, although nowise of that outrageous chestnut glory of my Delia’s hair.

“Dray Prescot?”

The older man pushed through quickly and the younger was, perforce, thrust aside. The elder wriggled as he crawled out onto the snow, and turning his head spoke in a low voice to the younger. He stood up, and swayed, and I was at his side, supporting him.

“You’d best rest easy, dom. You’ve had a tidy whack.”

He drew himself up, although still clutching my arm for support. Blood had dried along the clean-shaven upper edge of his beard, frozen, glittering coldly.

“I am Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur, and this is my nephew, Jenbar. You address me as Kov, and my nephew as Tyr. Is that understood?”

I held him and I looked into his eyes. I knew those eyes of old, I had seen their like many times in the faces of men accustomed to absolute power. Corrupt, sadistic, merciless, yes; but the eyes of men accustomed to moving the strings of this world, as they manipulate those of Earth. The friendly name of dom — the nearest equivalent in English is mate, and in American, pal — had affronted him. It was necessary to put our relationship on its proper footing instantly, and now I cursed that my stay on Earth had loosened my tongue. For these men were Vallians, and I had given them my real name. I should have remained Drak, Strom of Valka. So I simply said: “Very good, Kov. We must collect what things are necessary and travel as far downslope as is possible before nightfall.”

He grunted. “Quite so.” He turned to his nephew. “Jenbar — do you feel fit enough to walk?”

“I do not!” Jenbar spat out, with a curse.

Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur, merely looked at the young man, and then pushed past back into the shattered cabin. I had buried the naked body of the man I had stripped, and if Furtway bothered to notice he probably assumed the disappearance had been caused by the unfortunate man being flung out as the flier crashed. He began taking ponsho skins from the dead bodies. Jenbar studied me.

“Koter Prescot,” he said, at last, and his voice betrayed his weakness. “I ask you to pardon my ill-temper. But I think you will understand it when you see our condition, and good men dead. I thank you for your assistance. I will try to walk bravely.”

I warmed to him then, responding to his frankness. I, too, would have been in a filthy temper had my airboat crashed in these surroundings.

In truth, our surroundings were unpleasant in the extreme, and if we were caught out here by nightfall, desperately dangerous. The airboat might provide some shelter, and I fancied we might manage a fire with tree wood, but I preferred to make the effort to reach lower altitudes before dark.

“Oolie Opaz!” exclaimed Jenbar. “What a miserable business!”

His expression warned me that there might be more than a mere curse in his intentions; for I had once seen the long lines of chanting men and women, garishly clad and strung with blossoms, winding in and out of the streets of Pomdermam, the capital of the nation of Tomboram on the island of Pandahem.

“Oolie Opaz! Oolie Opaz! Oolie Opaz!” they would chant, singing and swaying, hour after hour the same metronomic hypnotic words, swinging up and down the scale, changing key, on and on maddeningly. This hypnotic chanting held power. It sucked a man in, singing, until his eyeballs rolled up and he drifted away to a white and empty state of which philosophers and mystics talk. I contented myself with a nod to the ponsho fleeces.

“Best to dress yourself warmly, Tyr Jenbar. The way will be long and hard.” Then, because he was young and there was in him a steely inner strength I could perceive, I added: “I know you will march well, but I will be here to help you if necessary.”

He looked downslope. His features hardened and a ridge jumped into life along his jaw, for he was clean-shaven. His face held a strong damn-you-to-hell look, and I guessed that ferocity was not for me, perhaps not even for the fates that had flung him here, but for the hostility of the way we must tread. He chuckled. “It will be a task for Tyr Nath! But we will win through, Koter Prescot. We of Falinur always win through to our desires in the end!”

“So be it,” I said, and busied myself in making what small preparations we could. So we set off, the three of us, and, in truth, had I not been with them, hurled there across the gulf of four hundred light-years by the inscrutable purposes of the Star Lords, they would not have survived. I fancied the Star Lords had brought me to Kregen this time, for this business bore all the hallmarks of their handiwork, and not that of the Savanti.

We struggled through waist-high snow, which glittered with the frosting colors of jade and crimson as the twin suns struck through from a sky of purple and indigo. We reached the end of the valley, after many halts, and there stretching below us lay the beginning of the glacier, a tumbled confused mass, with the clouds drifting above it, obscuring the panorama beyond.

I am no man to love fir trees, for they look thin and harsh and dispiriting; I am a man who loves the wide-leaved expansive openhearted trees of the south. Fir trees are valuable for spars, and other artifacts, but here I welcomed their presence as clear proof we were below the tree line. As soon as possible we must reach below the snow-line.

“We will slide,” I said.

They did not argue. They had become stupefied — puggled is the old word for it — and they meekly accepted my dictates. I spread the ponsho fleeces. We lay upon them, belted together, and I pushed off

— and we went.

We went!

It was a mad helter-skelter of a ride, a wild swooping rush of icy-cold wind and the hiss of the ice and jouncing bouncing and the desperate booted thrusting to avoid debris and the moraines that built up as side glaciers joined the main stem. Four times I had to haul us painfully to a halt, against the scraped sides, so that we might not crash full tilt into the low pile of rocks. Then we had to slip and slide over the obstacles, find a fresh glide path, and so down once more on the skins and take off with a breathless swooshing. My face was numb. Ice smothered me and I had to brush the crisp glassy crystals from my eyelids. The cold continued to cut intensely, and our very progress intensified its freezing grip. We had taken rapiers and daggers — for very few men, and they either fools or protected in other ways, travel Kregen unarmed — and with a dagger in each hand I was in some measure able to control and direct our descent. I thrust the daggers angling downward, and by varying the pressures from side to side could both slow and steer us. But it was exhausting work and I sweated a little, which is excruciatingly unpleasant in such cold temperatures.

We plunged boldly into the clouds.

“Have a care, Koter Prescot!” Furtway’s words were weak. The cold was numbing him through to the marrow. If he was to survive we must get down — and get down fast.

The rate of descent was slowed by the daggers. We left a wide swathe of ice chips spilling across the glacier after us. If we hit a rock now. . .

The clouds thinned, thickened, whereat I thrust hard with the daggers, thinned again and then we were through them and almost on the lip of the glacier.

I lunged sideways, plunging both daggers over onto the right. We swirled in a great fanning of ice chips and for an instant I thought we would skate right off the ponsho fleeces.

“Hold on!” I yelled, and ice cracked and flaked from my mouth.

We held on. Just short of the lip of the glacier, where it calved and in a great crevasse and a white thunder fell a thousand feet, we skidded and slewed into the side. We hit the scored bank of ice and snow, tumbled out, and so lay exhausted.

“Up!” I said.

They moaned.

“Let me lie, rast,” said Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur. “I am tired and would like to rest.”

“If you rest here you will never rise again.”

His eyes were closed and so he did not see my face as I leaned over him. I gripped him beneath the shoulders and stood him up, but his legs buckled and he slid down again. I turned to his nephew.

“Up,” I said. “Now is when you must march like a man.”

He groaned and sat up, and tumbled over sideways.

“Life is sweet and there is much to live for,” he said, the gush of white mist spuming from his lips at each word. “Now I know that, but I cannot feel it. I am done for. Leave me, Koter Prescot. It is soft and comfortable and warm here.”

“It’s as cold as the Ice Floes of Sicce,” I said, “which is where you’ll find yourself if you do not brace up.”

I stared at them. If they died I would have failed the Star Lords, and then I would be flung contemptuously back to Earth. I might rot there for years. I could not face that. These men must be saved, so that I might remain on Kregen and seek my lost love and demand her from her all-powerful father.

The task was extraordinarily difficult and painful, but I got Furtway up on my back, bundled with ponsho fleeces, and buckled him in place. I put my left arm around Jenbar and dragged him up, and so, carrying one and dragging the other, I set off.

There was no ice pick, so I could not probe for crevasses. If we fell, we fell. The cold was biting into my brain now; all I could do was put one foot down in front of the other, thankful for the tall Vallian boots. Socks are known on Kregen, but, like the men of the Foreign Legion, most Kregans have no truck with socks. I would have welcomed a good thick warm pair right now.

The memories I have of that nightmare descent grow vague and more vague. I was aware of the green sun Genodras sinking in an eerie smothering of emerald and jade, and then the world turned into blood as the red sun Zim held for a short space the sole domination of the sky. At this time the overlords of Magdag would gather in their colossal buildings and pray to Grodno, the green-sun deity, for protection and grace. Or so the peoples of the Eye of the World believed; I had witnessed the rites held during an eclipse of the green by the red, and I guessed the overlords did not act as the world suspected. I was no warmer, but the trees were thickening and the snow — the eternal, damned snow — was petering out in drifts and crunching sheets through which I plunged to feel the hard rocklike ground beneath. The Maiden of the Many Smiles floated up into the night sky among the hosts of stars, and two of the smaller moons hurtled low overhead. In their pinkish light I trudged on. I had no conception of time or distance; all I knew was that I must go downhill. There had been a vague glimpse of a vast hilly plain when we quitted the clouds, cloud-bedappled. Now, as I lifted my head to look up and so out over the plain beneath, I saw that dark expanse beneath the moons spattered and dotted by myriads of specks of light.

Nearer, five hundred yards downslope, a light beamed up, warm and friendly and beckoning. I headed for it, fell against the wooden door, and went on hitting the door until it opened.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Naghan Furtway and I play Jikaida

“You are a strange man, Koter Prescot.”

“Many men have said that, Kov Furtway. And it is true.”

We sat around the plain wooden table in the neat cabin and drank the superlative Kregan tea and warmed ourselves by the fire that crackled and sparked in the hearth, while Bibi, the lady of the house, fussed around us, delighted and yet awed at entertaining a real live kov in her house.

“How were you in the mountains, then, Koter Prescot?” asked Jenbar.

“I was lost. Believe me, I was hoping you were going to rescue me.”

They laughed at that.

Warmth, a good sleep, and now a piping hot meal of roast rolled-vosk-loin and a vegetable-pot, together with chunks torn from a long Kregan loaf and that Kregan tea I had sampled with my clansmen, had revived the three of us.

Bibi’s husband, Genal, was out chopping more wood. They lived well up here in the mountains, with a great store of food put by in the shed protected from snow-leem and deep-frozen by the weather, and Genal could bring in enough ice to be packed and shipped down to the plain to keep him and Bibi in moderate affluence. Genal the Ice, they called him down there.

“More tea?” fussed Bibi. “It is still fresh, Kov Furtway.”

He held out his cup and watched as Bibi filled it and he drank. He did not say thank you. In everyday life he never had to say thank you to anyone, except. . .

“We bring our ice from Drak’s Seat,” said Jenbar. “By Vox! I’ve seen enough to last me a lifetime. In Vondium ice is all the rage, but not for me, Oolie Opaz, not for me!”

Vondium!

I was in Vallia. I must be. Vallia . . . Vallia!

‘Tell me, Tyr Jenbar. Just how far away is Vondium?”

He stretched and yawned and answered offhandedly: “Oh, I don’t know. Three hundred dwaburs perhaps, a bit more probably, something like that.”

“At least that, Jenbar,” said Furtway. “We had crossed most of these accursed Mountains of the North from Evir before we crashed. May the Invisible Twins smite those cramphs of Havilfar!”

I nodded. “One would think they did themselves a grave disservice by selling airboats that fail so often.”

Furtway grunted and reached for the palines that Bibi placed in a diced-wood bowl upon the table.

“They are arrogant in their power. Only they, as far as we know, possess the mines. One day, Opaz willing, one day. . .”

Jenbar laughed and took up the palines.

“My uncle has an old dream, Koter Prescot.[1]We of Vallia are proud and strong; we produce all we require and may buy what we will all over the known world. But we cannot make an airboat.”

I nodded and the conversation drifted. The impatience to be gone sawed at my nerves. Vondium lay something like fifteen hundred miles due south. I had to get there — and I managed to retain wit enough to understand that through these two, Furtway and Jenbar, I might reach my objective faster than I could by traveling alone. They would provide transport.

Evir, across the mountains to the north, was the most northerly province on the island proper, although, as is common on Kregen, the coastal waters were peppered with small islands. One of those islands —

and not so small, at that — was Valka. If I said I was a Strom to these men now, they would not believe. But the name Dray Prescot was likely going to prove a handicap.

The clothes I wore, the black boots on my feet, the rapier and two daggers, were all from the corpse in the airboat. In addition, I had taken his money, as also the money from the others, for old mercenary habits die hard. The Kov and his nephew had not recognized either the clothes or the weapons, for they were of the plain and workmanlike cut common to the middle classes of Vallia. I suppose one might call that great mass of self-interested, self-centered, and intensely self-loyal people the gentry of Vallia. With this garb I fancied I could fend for myself in somewhat better style than I had when I had at last crossed the Klackadrin and reached Pa Mejab on the eastern coast of Turismond. In my view neither Furtway nor Jenbar were fit to travel yet, for we were still high in the mountains and the weather was bitterly cold. Since Genal the Ice had told us he would be taking an ice-load down the mountain in three days’ time, it was easy enough to persuade them to wait that long. I did not want to wait, but I already knew what Kov Furtway proposed.

Roads are not as good as they might be in Vallia, and no one, as far as I then knew, had shown the interest in zorca chariot racing that had caused the old Strom of Valka to pave a number of his roads across the island. The roads are, however, perfectly capable of speeding zorca couriers along their tracks which would not accept wheeled or sledged traffic. Heavy traffic goes by canal in Vallia. Furtway intended to dispatch a zorca courier from the post town below in a fold of the foothills with a message —

and a damned intemperate one it would be, too, I could guess — to his villa in Vondium to send a fresh airboat for him.

On that airboat I intended to enter Vondium.

All the great lords of the provinces of Vallia maintain splendid and sumptuous villas in the capital city, and use them whenever business or pleasure calls them to Vondium. When the lord is not in residence the villa is kept up, if on a reduced scale, for no chatelaine knows from one day to the next if the lord might arrive. And if all is not in apple-pie order and everything ready immediately for comfortable occupation

— exit one chatelaine and enter a sufficiently energetic and zealous new one. So we had three days to kill.

We sang songs and we told stories and we played Jikaida.

Kov Furtway was inordinately fond of Jikaida. This is the board game popular on Kregen involving an elongated form of chessboard — the actual number of squares may vary along with the numbers of men, and the different sizes are dignified by different degrees — which, together with chess, checkers, and Halma-like moves for the men, combine to form an engrossing game of mock war. Genal the Ice and Bibi had a board, for one is usually to be found in every house in Kregen, if sometimes a little rooting about in cupboards is necessary, and we settled down to a tournament. The men were blue and yellow.

“Blue,” said Furtway, not giving me the opportunity to guess his closed fists. “You take the damned blue.”

Jenbar chuckled, but the sound was such as I had heard Thelda utter — or my many friends of Pandahem. “Blue, the color of the Opaz-forsaken Pandaheem cramphs! My uncle, Kr. Prescot, never plays the blue.”

“As you wish.” I thought of that great battle in Magdag. “I, too, have a fondness for the yellow.”

We played. Furtway was skilled, tough, ruthless, unscrupulous when he could thus win a point or a piece. I reacted at first with vigor, and gradually the yellow pushed back the blue along the board, and I was aligning my sights on his left-wing Chuktar, when I paused and considered. I came to the conclusion it might be judicious to let this man win. After all, a board game can be turned into profit and advantage, as I well knew; and there is to some men a superior form of winning in contriving their own defeat. So I fumbled a Deldar’s move, and with a flashing smile and a triumphant gesture, Furtway removed my right-wing Chuktar.

“Your concentration lapsed, Kr. Prescot. Always, at Jikaida, as in life, you must bend your mind to the task in hand.”

“Yes, Kov Furtway. You are right, but I am most anxious to reach Vondium.”

They had, of course, asked me my business in the capital. I had fobbed them off with a casual story of a consignment of cortilindens coming into the port, and turned the conversation, managing to bring up the subject of the Emperor and his wayward daughter. Both men did not attempt to hide their feelings.

“The Emperor is the Emperor, and his will is law. But we sometimes have to take measures for his own good. The Princess Majestrix, now, is willfully disobedient in refusing to marry.”

I saw Jenbar nodding in agreement.

“She is the most beautiful girl in all Vallia — in all the world, I truly believe — and she must marry some day. Happy the man who claims her hand.”

“The man whom the Emperor wishes her to marry,” I said, speaking with care, and yet seeming casual.

“He is a good choice?”

“That fool!” cried Furtway. “Why, Vektor of Aduimbrev is totally unsuited, for all that he is wealthy and powerful and has the Emperor’s ear.”

“Vektor is a get onker!” Jenbar spoke with passion. I knew of the passion my Delia could arouse in the hearts of the men in her bodyguard and retinue; I had seen its results aboard the swifter Sword of Genodras, and I warmly applauded his defense of my beloved. If there was any degree of this kind of feeling abroad in the country, then perhaps my task in persuading her father the Emperor that I was the one Delia of the Blue Mountains should marry would not be as difficult as I had surmised. But I wanted to know more narrowly where these men stood in the greatest enterprise of my life.

“But the racters, they desire it, do they not?”

Jenbar snorted. Furtway cunningly captured a zorca patrol led by a Hikdar and, with the blue pieces in his hand, stared at me. “The racters run the country, no one can deny that. But in this they are wrong.”

“Yes,” said Jenbar. “But where do you stand in this argument, Kr. Prescot?”

I was merely a Koter, and therefore only a small step up from the great mass of the ordinary folk among whom I truly belong, as I sometimes think; the question, however, was not patronizing, as might be supposed, coming from the nephew of a Kov. Jenbar really wanted to know.

“As for me,” I said, attempting to forestall an imminent attack on my exposed right wing, “I do not think the Princess Majestrix should marry Vektor of Aduimbrev.”

“Ah!” quoth Furtway, and demolished a Jiktar and two Hikdars. “You have lost the game. Place the pieces for another. As for Vektor — when your business with the cortilindens is finished, call at my villa. You will be welcome. You are a man of resource. I can find work for your hands, aye, and your brain.”

“Thank you, Kov Furtway. I shall look forward to that.”

This might be very useful. A man as powerful as a Kov on my side would weigh heavily in the scales. I played considerably better the next game, taking both his wing Chuktars, but eventually letting him push a strong force through the center and so rout me. His passion for the game was unslaked, and I saw how much of his life was reflected in the pieces on the board. Vallia, as I understood it, while being preeminent on the outer oceans, maintained a minuscule army, mainly composed of honor guards and the like, and employed mercenaries whenever land warfare was involved. The interior police, however, and the aragorn, were prominent in the political affairs of the islands. On the third day a shrill cry brought us to the door and we saw toiling up the slope toward us a shaggy old quoffa dragging a cart on its runners, its wheels removed and slung on the sides. The quoffa looks like a perambulating hearth-rug with bunchy shoulders and hindquarters — it has six legs, but the Earthly nomenclature trips from the tongue — and a dogged old head from which the steam blew in great snorts like one of Mr. Stevenson’s new engines. The carter was a Relt, at which I was much surprised. But the Relts, those less formidable cousins of the bird-headed Rapas, are often found in employment in many countries. He shouted again and Bibi chuckled and bustled about, for this was her regular delivery of four weeks’ supplies. Also, the Relt would take away a heaping load of ice on the downward run, and Genal would give him orders for the number of carts he required for the main delivery. After a great meal and a single glass of an excellent vintage from Procul, a full and rich red wine, we bade Remberee to Genal the Ice and Bibi. They were given a handful of broad gold talens, with the head of the Emperor on one side and the — smaller — head of Furtway on the reverse, charged with a checkerboard. I considered this carrying a passion for a game to a fault, that it should be the man’s emblem and figure on his coinage, but it turned out that the checkerboard was the Falinur insignia. I had privily sorted through the coins I had taken from the dead men and found some with the Emperor on the obverse, and faces and designs I did not recognize on the reverse; these I handed to Genal and Bibi with my sincere thanks.

Then we clambered aboard the cart, warmly wrapped against the chill of the ice blocks, even though Genal had reduced this load on our account to make a space, and off we went. The sliding descent on the runners was wild enough, but when the Relt replaced the wheels, and off we went again, I felt my opinion change, and knew the wheels were worse. At last the faithful quoffa could be put back into the shafts and we trundled decorously into the large village, almost a small town, nestling in the valley.

Clean through the center of the town ran a broad canal, bridged here and there, but unmistakably the artery of commerce and travel. There were many long narrow boats afloat. The ice went straight aboard one of them, together with ice from other ice-gatherers, and the boat pushed off at once.

“I’d have thought it would melt too soon, aboard a barge,” I said. The Relt rubbed his beak in the habit they have, and said in his squeaky voice: “This is ice for only a few dwaburs south. Ice for farther afield goes by airboat. Look.”

We all looked and there was an airboat — drab, gray, battered — rising over the houses and heading south.

“That is for us,” said Furtway in the voice of the Kov. We paid the Relt and walked across to the airport. Yes, we could book a passage south, it would cost us the same price as it cost the ice-shippers, and we would have to provide our own food, sleeping equipment, and an indemnity. In case of accident we must sign away the right of our heirs to claim against the ice-shipping Company of Friends. I was to learn a great deal more of these Companies of Friends which control so much of the trade and industry of Vallia. Both my companions made no bones about signing, so neither did I. The airboat carried us — not particularly comfortably and in somewhat chilly conditions — a hundred dwaburs south, where we were set down in the bustling market town of Therminsax. From this place Furtway was able to dispatch a zorca courier — one of the officers charged with maintaining the zorca communications over the island — on payment of a sizable sum and proof that he was who he said he was. This he did by means of his seal-ring. My own seal-ring as Strom of Valka, the ring sent from the Emperor via my panval friends, lay now with my Savanti leathers and my Savanti sword on the towpath back in Valka. Although — surely my friends would have found that little pile of possessions by now. They must have been sorely puzzled wondering where I had gone. Perhaps they thought I had taken that journey I had told them of. If they thought that, they were almost right, but why I should choose to go stark naked must have driven them to their wits’ end to find explanations. While we waited we put up at The Swordship and Barynth. I have often noticed how nautical names for pubs are common in inland parts. The inn was comfortable and obliging. Furtway claimed Jenbar to play Jikaida. I went for walks about the town, soaking up the atmosphere, relishing the clean red and white houses, the tidy gardens, the squares and shady colonnades, spending a long time leaning on the canal wall overlooking the towpath and watching the narrow boats as they glided by. Many of them were hauled by whole gangs and tribes of people, sturdy, open-faced folk in practical outfits, men and women, of breechclouts and short-sleeved tunics, open at the throat. They hauled with a will, and once the narrow boat was under way she could be kept going and on course by just half a dozen girls or lads to pull, and the old skipper to steer. I saw no draft animals, not a single quoffa, and this did not surprise me. There were very few halflings hauling the narrow boats, although I did see a complete outfit of two narrow boats in tandem dragged along by a squealing bunch of Ochs. On the second day I saw a sight that brought me, with my fists clenched, staring painfully at the canal. A narrow boat approached. She was not gaily painted as were all the others I had seen, decorated with fantastic scenes from myth and legend, from song and story, and with all the flowers of the field — this boat was all a dun gray and she was large and clumsy. But the thing that so disturbed me was her motive power. Along the canal towpath trudged a gang of people, all stark naked, all hairy and dirty, all heaving at the tow rope under the merciless whips of guards.

I stared, hatred welling.

The guards were big fellows, mostly humans, but a Rapa or a Fristle stalked here and there. They whipped their charges on. The narrow boat moved lumpily through the water, heavily laden. I just stood there. The guards were dressed uniformly in buff leather jerkins, wide across the shoulder, and with the tall black Vallian boots. The sleeves of their shirts were banded red and black. I had seen those uniform colors before.

I, myself, wore the buff jerkin, but my sleeves were buff also. I knew that these banded sleeves in their color coding were the signs worn by servitors of great lords or parties; but this red and black, these were the colors of the government, of the Emperor!

I, Dray Prescot, could not just stand there.

But I had to.

For I dared not do as I instinctively desired to do and rush upon these slave-herders and rout them and free their slaves; the trouble that action has caused in the past is beyond calculation. A girl stumbled and fell and dragged the tow rope down in her despairing clutch. She brought down an old man and one or two others, so telling me how weak they all were. The guards whipped them. But the girl just lay there. Her brown hair drifted out across the muddy tow-path. I saw the rawhide cutting into her. Could I just stand there? This same scene must be reenacted many times every day. One more repetition would make no difference at all.

None.

The girl moaned and tried to shield herself with her spindly arms. She shrieked afresh as the lash bit into her.

No difference.

I had been learning cleverness. I had controlled myself back there in Theirson’s village. I had not rushed upon the aragorn until I had a weapon.

I had a weapon now.

But — the trouble this would cause. The Emperor in faraway Vondium, the Kov Furtway here, all my plans, the love I bore my Delia of the Blue Mountains. One young girl being whipped to death was a common enough sight, Zair knew. What had it to do with me?

There was nothing I could do. Nothing.

I jumped the wall and ran down to the towpath. I spoke in a rational and quiet voice, calmly, reasonably.

“To hit her any more will do no good. She cannot rise.”

The guard swung, the whip poised. Four of his fellows turned toward me as the chanks of the inner sea turn toward their prey.

“This is no business of yours, dom. Clear off!”

“But,” I said, “if the girl cannot pull, why beat her?”

“She’ll pull.” The guard had fine strong white teeth. He smiled. “She’ll pull. Now clear off. This is Emperor’s business, as you well know. We are not answerable to you.”

“I think, dom, you are, unless you release her.”

“Release her? You’re either a get onker or you’re mad! The Emperor’s slaves are sequestered property. Clear off, or you’ll be in more trouble than you can handle.”

The guard sounded no more truculent than any man interrupted in his work. He spoke as reasonably as I. He could not understand what I was talking about. I tried for the last time.

“Please” — I said please! — “ do not hit her any more. If you cannot release her give her time to rest.”

Another guard ran up, swearing horribly. He wore a red and black cockade in his broad-brimmed hat, above the feather. The narrow boat had gone on with her momentum and now the tow rope stretched back from the bitts on her bows.

“What’s going on here? If you Doty-rotten cramphs can’t keep your rasts of haulers in line I’ll soon Jikaida your backs! I’ll make you yell, by Vomer the Vile!”

“It’s this one here, sir,” said the guard who had been trying to explain to me. I said, “This girl cannot pull any more. Flogging her will do no good—”

I was interrupted. The guard wore a rapier. He ripped it out. He flourished it in my face. He looked to be in a most apoplectic rage.

“This barge is on the Emperor’s service — as you well know! Take yourself off before it is too late!

Jump, rast!”

I knew little of the pecking order in Vallia; that it is complicated is true; I didn’t worry about my lack of knowledge.

“It seems you insist I must make you show mercy,” I said. I started to draw my rapier. I was already working out how not to kill them all, when I heard a man in the towing party yell. “By Vaosh! Behind you, Ven!”

I turned. I was slow. The blow struck behind my ear and I pitched forward, struggling to retain my balance. A black booted foot kicked out. I heard a coarse laugh. “Swim in the canal, cramph!” And then I smashed face-first into blackness.

CHAPTER EIGHT

On the canals of Vallia

On my back I floated with the mild drift of the current, for here near the inflow of river water, controlled and sluiced, the canal waters possessed a definite movement of their own. The sky above me towered enormously high, palely blue, with the intolerable glare of Antares blinding down and streaming variegated highlights from the tiny waves I made as I floated. I knew what I was doing there. I had been stupid, as usual, and slow, which for a man in my trade is unforgivable. I knew, however, why I had been slow. My aims had been confused; a desire to do what naturally occurred to me to do and my so-clever newfound rationality had played me false. I would far better have simply rushed in swinging as in the old days. Then, instead of me floating in the canal with a muzzy head there would be six bully-boy guards floating there, and with rapier-thrusts through their bellies, like as not.

In the future I wouldn’t be slow, and I’d hit first — as I usually did. Worry over Delia had fogged my mind. Here I was, actually on the same landmass as her, breathing air that might waft down for her to breathe and so waft back to me. An idiotic notion, but one that suited my idiotic mood.

Through the water toward me the smooth stem of a narrow boat bore on. I saw the gaily painted strakes and the fanciful representations of monsters and flowers, musical instruments, and spreading proudly to either side of the stem, the lavishly decorated picture of a Talu, one of those eight-armed mythical — as I still thought — dancers of the sloe eyes and the cupid’s-bow mouths. I had seen such a Talu carved from the mastodon tusk in that perfumed corridor of a decadent palace, when a slave girl in the gray slave breechclout had dropped and smashed a jar of water. I had cannoned into the statue and toppled with it in my arms, the eight arms a wagonwheel of wanton display about me, the fingertips touching. I confess I was still thinking about that mastodon-tusk carving as the rope hissed into the water and I was hauled aboard.

The majority of Vallians have been blessed with the kind of strong beaked nose I have myself, and the man who stared down on me now wiped a hand across his powerful nose, and grunted:

“Welcome aboard—”

He did not add the customary Koter, or even dom, or, given the circumstances, Ven. I saw the expression on his face and knew precisely what he was thinking. If you’re not a canalman, he was saying, without speaking, then you’re a dead man.

“Thank you for pulling me out. It’s all right. The water won’t harm me.”

He perked up at that, and smiled.

“You’d best come below. Dry you off.” As I nodded to thank him and bent to descend the short companionway ladder, he whistled. I had lost my hat.

“That’s a crack you’ve had on the back of your head, Ven. Like to have killed a man.”

“I’ve a tolerably thick skull. Too thick for some folk.”

Someone yelled from up forward and my host halted to yell back. “He’s of the canalfolk. He’s had a knock, but he’ll live.”

In the small but beautifully appointed cabin with everything in its place I sat at the table and drank strong Kregan tea. Made with the canalwater, it tasted somehow as good as any tea I have ever had. “I am Yelker, skipper of the old Dancing Talu.” I knew, from my talk with Borg, that he would be Ven Yelker nal Vomansoir, for this was the Vomansoir Cut.

Thinking of Ven Borg made me remember my resolve.

“I am Drak ti Valkanium,” I said. This was true.

“We’re headed south so I can’t offer to take you back to Therminsax. It is a pleasant town, and we always enjoy our stopovers there. But we are for Vomansoir.”

My clothes were drying, so I sat there with a blanket about me as a girl bustled in, tut-tutted at the way my tunic had been clumsily hung up by Yelker, glanced a quick and intense look in my direction, gathered up my gear, and started up the ladder again. She paused and tossed her heavy brown hair back and stared over her shoulder. She wore an off-the-shoulder white blouse, attractively tailored beneath her bodice, and the movement emphasized her beauty, as she well knew it would. I could guess all too easily why she did not wear one of the tunics or jerkins common to the canalfolk.

“You men can’t look after a thing. I’ll hang these on the line.”

When she had gone with a flash of long bronzed legs, Yelker sighed. “That’s Zyna, my daughter. Her mother didn’t spank her enough when she was young enough for it to be effective.” Then he roared into the speaking tube that led forward, the brass mouthpiece dazzling. “Mother! That girl of yours is showing off again.”

A muffled series of shrieks and squawks spattered from the brass mouthpiece. Yelker shoved the whistle back and sighed.

“I don’t know what good canalfolk are coming to these days.”

“Ven Yelker. Will you take me south with you?” I reached for the lesten-hide bag of money I had taken from the dead men, and realized it was in the pocket of my tunic. “I will be happy to pay you—”

He held up a hand. “Not so, Ven Drak. You are a canalman, and I am a canalman. If one cannot do the other a goodness without seeking reward, then the spirit of the canals is dead.”

“Did you see how I came to be in the canal?”

“I did not. I would not ask, but I own I am curious.”

I told him of the incident. He frowned and bashed a fist down onto the table.

“Pardon me for saying it, Ven Drak. But you are a fool!”

I sat.

“Don’t you have Emperor’s barges on Valka?”

“I have not seen one. We pull our own boats, there.” I had expressed my astonishment to Borg over the non-use of draft animals, and he had simply scratched his head and said that men and women always pulled the boats. How otherwise would they get exercise and build their muscles? Animals, to haul narrow boats! He thought the conceit highly amusing.

“Well, you surprise me. We hate them. They are unfair competition. And the poor devils who are sent to the Emperor’s canal barges — well, just steer clear of them, that’s all. They have absolute priority and right of way on any cut. They force us out into the center and make us drop our tow as they pass. Oh, and they do pass!”

I had seen what I had seen. I could imagine the horror of the haulers, racing to drag their unwieldy barges past the elegant narrow boats of the canalfolk, driven on by the whip and the knout.

“I do not like it, Ven Yelker.”

“Neither do I, Ven Drak. But neither you nor I can do ought about it. And here comes Mother.” I stood up, clutching my blanket, as Sosie descended into the cabin, a plump, smiling, brown-eyed dynamo of a woman. I saw that she kept Yelker in order. I wondered where he hid his booze.

“You’ll need feeding up, young man,” she said, and the sharpness of her tones made me smile — me, Dray Prescot, made me smile — for I detected the warmth and humanity aboard this narrow boat Dancing Talu. Other members of the family were introduced. There were ten of them, not all blood relations but crew members indentured from other families and other boats. More often than not two or three families crewed a boat. The big thing was to keep moving. Once the initial inertia of the boat had been overcome and she was gliding with that stately smooth passage of a craft on inland waters, the whole gang could cease hauling and leave two or three to keep her moving. Naturally, I took my turns at hauling. We were all busy at locks. Then we would sweat and haul until our muscles cracked and Dancing Talu was under way once more. Then young Wil would go haring off to close the paddles down and shut the lock gates, and then come racing back along the towpath to take a wild flying leap onto the deck. If young Wil with his wild mop of hair and his agility had been unable to drink the canalwater he’d have been a dead rascal inside a day.

We were going south!

We were riding the Vomansoir Cut and going south toward Vondium. I knew a man, a Chuktar, the Lord Farris, who came from Vomansoir. I had met him once, briefly, aboard the Vallian Air Service airboat Lorenztone. I did not think I would make inquiries and look him up. He knew me as Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombor, and the man who aspired to the hand of the Princess Majestrix. I needed to be a lot closer to Delia than Vomansoir when I revealed my identity. Vallia is riddled with canals. Traffic flow remained dense and constant. The local authorities of towns maintained the cuts, under the Emperor’s personal fiat, and they had put into operation a system of traffic control at intersections. Every lock worked and was efficient, and did not lose too much water. The suns shone, the sky remained clear, I hauled at the tow ropes, operated the locks, fetched and carried, and all the time we rode on southward and I was drawing nearer and nearer to my Delia. I think I achieved a kind of tranquility. I had always underestimated canals, I now realized. Also, I observed the strong fellow-feeling of the canalfolk, and as I absorbed their language and its peculiarities, a task made easy by the potency of the genetically-coded language pill given me in Aphrasöe by Maspero, I reached the understanding that they considered themselves not only a people apart from ordinary Vallians, but a cut above the rest. I was not going to give them an argument on that.

The weather grew warmer as we progressed south, although with the much greater band-spread of temperate climate on Kregen the differences between Vondium, in the south, and Evir, in the north, are nothing like what one would expect on Earth. The Mountains of the North are cruelly cold, as I had discovered.

Winding lazily southward through the center of Vallia flows the Great River, the Mother of Waters, She of Fecundity, which empties into the Sunset Sea where Vondium is situated. Because of the lazy windings of the river, which bears many names along its length, canals sometimes use it when convenient; most often they have been cut by men with a disregard of the river’s course. Once we crossed the Great River on a long-striding aqueduct, like twenty Pontcysylltes rolled into one. Through the low-rolling hills to the south we traveled past tree-hung banks where the mirrored reflections gave a strange duplicating effect of aerial navigation, as though we floated in air. The water changed color occasionally as minerals washed down from the hills; generally it reflected the sky and the clouds, the overhang of trees, the grasses, wild flowers, and rushes of the banks. In a glass it sparkled silvery pure, clean, sweet, refreshing, and — if you were not of canalfolk — deadly. Between towns the thread of water ran through open country, vast sweeps of moorland, or massy forests, through tangled byways and past the outskirts of magnificent lordly holdings. Sometimes there were no traffic arrangements at crossings, where cut met cut.

Yelker roused himself on an afternoon of lazy sunshine and drifting cloud, and consulting with Rafee, the bulky-shouldered man who acted as his second-in-command, shouted an order to ’vast heaving. He jumped lithely to the bank and with Rafee strode ahead to where the canal curved beyond a clump of missals, leaning over the placid water. Only one other boat was in sight, a red and green craft that had been gently following us for the last day or so.

“What is it?” I said to Zyna.

She tossed her brown hair back and said: “The Ogier Cut. It crosses here.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking of Borg.

The deep, quietly green-breathing heart of the country surrounded us. The green of the banks reflected in a double bar along the edges of the canal, the placid water pent between, dimpled occasionally by the plop of a fish, the high arch of the sky, the faint refreshing breeze, all added up to create images of perfect peace and quietude. I jumped to the bank.

“I will come with you, Drak.”

“With pleasure, Zyna.”

We walked up the bank together, the towpath, as is usual, wide enough for three people abreast. Just past the clump of missals there was a winding-hole where boats might turn. A little beyond that the canal widened again and I saw the Ogier Cut coming in from the east and west. At this watery crossroads stood Yelker and Rafee, and they were frowning at the long procession of boats on the Ogier, streaming past at right angles to the Vomansoir.

“This will take time, Yelker,” Rafee was saying.

I had picked a spike of grass and I was chewing this as I walked up. Yelker turned at sound of our footsteps.

‘Time, Drak,” he said. “And time is money. They will never pause to let us through.”

“I don’t see why not.” I walked up to the ridge of the bank and looked east. The boats continued pulling steadily toward us for as far as I could see until the canal curved, a distance I estimated as three-fifths of a dwabur. “There are a lot of them. This, as Rafee says, will take time.”

“We must then go back to the boat and brew up and wait.”

“Why? Surely they can hold up just long enough for us to slip through?”

“There are no canal wardens out here. It is every man for himself.”

About to ask him — almost tauntingly — what of the vaunted comradeship of the canalfolk, I stopped. They had accepted me as a canalman who had, sorrowfully enough, become mixed up with ordinary Vallians. I must be of the canals, for I could drink the water. But I must not show too much ignorance.

“I will take a little stroll,” I said. And then as Zyna perked up, smiling, I added swiftly: “Alone.”

Dancing Talu carried hoffiburs from Therminsax and if they did not reach Vomansoir in good time they would go rotten. Any delay was to be avoided. We could be stuck here for the rest of the day. From Vomansoir the boat would take lissium ore back to Therminsax, a busy and lucrative trade. As I walked slowly along I could just see a shining sheet of water dim and vast along the eastern horizon, and knew this to be one of the many great lakes that make the interior of Vallia so pleasant a place. The procession of boats on the Ogier Cut passed endlessly. The haulers walked carelessly enough across the wooden bridges built over the Vomansoir Cut. Other bridges, of a distinctively different pattern, crossed the Ogier north-south. I walked along the western bridge and stood leaning on the parapet, chewing my grass stem.

The scrape of a bare foot on the bridge made me turn.

Zyna walked up, boldly enough, although there was a little diffidence she hid admirably. She smiled at me. Over her shoulder I could see the red and green boat had pulled in astern of Dancing Talu, and her people and ours were clumped on the bank, talking and gesticulating.

“You should not send me away, Drak.” She pouted at me, and the glance from her man-killing eyes would have done the business for any young buck of the canals.

“Nevertheless, Zyna, go back to your father and tell him to unmoor and begin hauling. The other boat also. They must be ready to shoot through the Ogier the moment a gap appears.”

“But—?”

“Do as I say, young Zyna, or by Vaosh, I’ll tan your bottom!”

“You wouldn’t dare!” she flashed back. And then — she giggled. I thought of Viridia the Render, and I sighed, and surmised that my handling of girls is calculated to make them exceedingly wroth with me.

“I guarantee, young woman, that if you believe you would enjoy that, you are wrong. I have a hard and horrifically horny hand.”

Whereat she giggled again. I pushed up from the bridge parapet and took out my grass stem and threw it on the gray barges of the Emperor with their arrogant right-of-planks and advanced toward her — and she ran off, shrieking with merriment.

It was precisely at crossing places like this that the gray barges of the Emperor with their arrogant right-of-way held an advantage. They would simply haul straight on. The stentor braced in the bows would lift his triply-spiraled brass trumpet, maneuvering it up and around, with his arm thrust through the spiral, the blaring trumpet mouth high and blasting forward, and peal the shrill commanding notes that would make all canalfolk hauling give way before the Emperor’s barge. Those long low gray barges flew the flag of Vallia, the vivid yellow saltire on the red ground. As I stared back down the towpath I saw Zyna reach the knot of folk clustered where the stem and the stern of the two narrow boats nuzzled. Faces turned to look up at me and I waved. It had not occurred to me to consider that Yelker would not instantly do as I had said, and I felt a twinge of astonishment as he and Rafee and a few others together with men and women of the red and green boat started off along the towpath toward me. Truly, the habits of a Strom, a Zorcander, a lord, do not wash with canalfolk!

“What is all this about, Ven Drak? By Vaosh, if we move into the Ogier our tows will be cut swifter than the throats of a litter of leems!”

“Maybe not so, Yelker, maybe not.”

“You have a plan?”

I hadn’t thought of any plan. “No. No, I’m just going down there and ask the first haulers I come to, to hold up for us.”

They gaped at me.

A man with a black spade beard, the skipper of Pride of Vomansoir, guffawed. “Ho! You’ll find yourself in Gurush’s Bottomless Marshes if you try that, Ven Drak!”

“Why?”

But, of course, the reason was obvious. No hauler is going to ease his boat back to a stop if he can avoid it; the effort of overcoming inertia to begin movement again is the toughest chore of the canalfolk, in and out of locks.

I said, “They will do as I request.”

Yelker said, “I am a man of peace, Drak. You possess a rapier, and we do not see many of those on the cuts. But your rapier is aboard, and I will not let you get it.”

He didn’t know the risks he ran by telling me I could not do something, but I had no desire to use an edged and pointed weapon in this fracas. All I knew was that time was running out and I must press on to Vondium and Delia, and a line of narrow boats prevented me.

“Then, so am I. But, nevertheless, Yelker, get ready.”

And I turned away from him and walked down the bridge and so on the Ogier Cut.

CHAPTER NINE

The headless zorcamen

Narrow boats keep to the left riding the Vallian cuts and so by walking down from the western bridge I could walk back eastward along the southern bank of the Ogier Cut. Past me went the stream of boats. Their haulers looked up and some smiled, others nodded, one or two called out a casual “Llahal, Ven,”

to which I replied in as casual a fashion.

Six young folk on a rope passed, four jolly laughing girls and two young lads who seemed mightily bashful as they saw me watching them. I let them go. All along the placid deep-green water approaching me the boats swam smoothly on. They differed in a subtle fashion from those riding the Vomansoir Cut, but they were narrow boats, gaily decorated, brilliantly painted, their high central ridgepoles draped with multicolored canvas concealing the loads beneath. Now walked steadily a man and wife, robust, fresh-faced, firmly-muscled. I nodded to them as I climbed up the wooden bridge, giving them all the room they needed as they dragged the tow rope across the bridge railing. The wood was smooth and so highly polished by the passage of countless ropes that it shone blindingly in the light from Zim and Genodras. It took, on busy bridges, a surprisingly short time for the wood to wear away and become unsafe and so have to be replaced by the wardens.

I descended the other side of the southern bridge over the Vomansoir Cut. I let two barges go past, hauled by four men apiece, agile as they flexed out the tow ropes as they ascended the bridge. I walked on. Now I had to believe that Yelker would do as I had said. His argument had been surprising; I had to remind myself I was simply an ordinary mortal here, no longer a Strom. Ahead of me the narrow boats stretched out of sight, a moving, gliding patchwork of color along the glinting waters of the canal. There are in any society men who for whatever obscure reasons of psychology desire to shine, to be noticed, to do things with an air that will draw the attention of everyone exclusively to them. We all know people like that. I had never been like that, but had found that simply by doing what I felt I had been impelled to do I had gained many of the results of a greater striving. Sometimes a man, to show his strength and prowess, would haul a narrow boat alone. The average rate was around a third of a dwabur a bur and by traveling at night the boats could cover sixteen dwaburs in a day. I was looking at this one man who wished to show off.

He came striding on, head down, muscles bared to the air with his jerkin unlaced and open over his chest. He was a fine-looking man, with plenty of manly hair on that chest, and a well-proportioned head with fiercely jutting beard and arrogant moustaches. He carried the tow rope over his left shoulder so that he could lay his weight against it to control his boat. I judged that, indeed, she was his, for after the fashion of many of the canalfolk he wore adornments of gold and silver about him, golden earrings and golden bands around his arms, and these were of a fine quality.

The sound of the boat’s passage in that rhythmical series of gurglings and plashings swelled as he drew nearer. I could see no one on the deck of his boat, which was a large specimen of canal craft, a good hundred and fifty feet long in Terrestrial measurements. A brute to handle in a congested way, as I well knew.

I approached.

“You look as though you could do with some help over the bridge, Ven.”

He looked up, not having heard my approach.

“I do not think so, Ven.”

“Oh, I am sure you do.”

I fell in at his side and walked pace for pace. Ahead of us the bridges grew nearer, and the Vomansoir Cut.

“I am Kutven Ban nal Ogier, and by your clothes you are not a canalman, by Vaosh! I need no help. Or do you wish to drink canalwater?”

A Kutven was a high-ranking man among the Vens. The canalfolk had many degrees, of course, and among them there was the Lord High Kov, and the Lord High Strom, and so on down to the ordinary Kutvens and Vens. I made myself laugh.

“Oh, come now, Kutven Ban! Of course you need help to climb that bridge.” I put a hand on the rope. I was keenly aware of the ludicrous situation. Here was I ready to brawl with a fellow canalman over rights of way, and yet all my thoughts were centered on the Princess Majestrix of this land. Truly, I relished the irony. “Take your hand off that rope. By Gurush of the Bottomless Marsh! Do you hear me, leepitix?”

“I hear, Ven, and I am not amused. I do not like being called a leepitix.” A leepitix is a twelve-legged reptilian wriggler about a foot long who infests the canals and has a nasty bite. They can be frightened off by splashing. “Clear off!”

He let go the rope with his left hand and struck out. I ducked, tripped him up, yanked the rope in hard. It came with the peculiar soggy resistance and welling movement typical of a boat in narrow waters.

“I’m only trying to help you, Ven!”

He yelled and tried to stand up, whereat I cast a bight of the rope about his ankles and so pitched him over again.

“Look out!” I yelled. I jumped up and down and waved my arms at the boat which now headed majestically into the bank. “Look out, Ven! You’ll have her aground!”

He was shrieking and raving by this time. A head popped up over the hatchway coaming of his boat. Yells floated up. The stem grounded about a yard out, and the stern began to swing. The cut, here, just after the winding-hole farther back, narrowed so as to present the shortest distance for the canal architects to bridge. The boat’s stern drifted across and grounded on the far bank. Now people were yelling and running from all directions, it seemed, and I heard a series of splashes as people dived in to swim to the bank as the quickest way ashore. I yelled at a crone with gray hair who ran shrieking with her frying pan held aloft.

“Kutven Ban tangled himself up in the rope. Quick! We must help.”

Other voices joined in a chorus of disbelief. I was making a great play of unwrapping the rope from Ban. He tried to hit me and I put my foot on his head, purely by accident, and he gobbled into the muddy grass of the towpath.

“Help us!” I shouted.

The crone started to hit me with the frying pan.

I ducked and Ban struggled up, foaming, and I gave the end of the rope a kick and it slid into the water like an eel. A big fellow with a red jerkin and silver earrings ran up. Two or three boys joined in and a couple of girls danced about. Other people formed a ring.

Ban was purple.

“He tangled in the tow rope and fell over,” I shouted. I spread my hands. “Look at the following boats.”

The fellow in the red jerkin spun around as though I had kicked him in his breechclout.

“Oh, by the mighty Vaosh himself!” he moaned.

Men and women were tumbling out of the boats to get onto the bank, where the haulers were laying back and being dragged on squeaking heels along the path. The next boat homed in on the boat wedged diagonally across the cut and bumped in a great groaning of wood. The following boats began to pile up. I looked around. Now boats were filling the cut in a series of zigzags and presenting a scene of utter confusion.

I looked around with a certain satisfaction on my handiwork.

Then I looked the other way and saw Dancing Talu and Pride of Vomansoir gliding across the empty stretch, and the other boats on the Ogier Cut calmly receding into the distance. Ban glared up, spitting mud, struggling to rise.

“You really should be more careful,” I said.

I could not immediately run off and jump aboard Yelker’s boat. There might be reprisals. So I started in on a fresh series of explanations for the benefit of fresh arrivals.

“Poor Kutven Ban!” and: “Ban shouldn’t do it all himself.”

I looked at Ban. He shook his broad shoulders and cocked his fists, spat mud, bristled, and started for me.

I said, “It is better that it was an accident, Ban. I do not think I wish to hurt you, but if it is necessary, I will.”

He roared, threw back his head to glare in hatred at me — he looked in my face. He stopped. He hesitated. His right foot scraped the towpath. He lowered his fists.

“Maybe, at that, ‘twas an accident.”

“By Vaosh, Ban,” I said. “You’re a man after my own heart.”

The clustered ring of people quite clearly were prepared to take their cue from the Kutven. He suddenly began roaring and raving to such effect that the ring burst asunder, and men and women, boys and girls, flew to their boats and a gang tailed onto the tow ropes of Kutven Ban’s boat and began to drag her parallel to the banks once more. I shouted in a very genial way, “Remberee!” and walked off. Dancing Talu pushed on southerly and I hauled with a will, but I was not so prideful or so foolish as to wish to show off and haul by myself, although capable of it, and I noticed that Zyna would very often be there with me, hauling with her slender firmly-rounded body thrusting into the rope. In the normal course of events life on the cuts is leisurely, but now, because the cargo of hoffiburs might go rotten on Yelker, he maintained a good pace and by nightfall we had left Pride of Vomansoir well behind. We pushed on, the leading hauler with a lantern balanced in a lantern-hat, an arrangement of cradles and slings strapped onto the head and around the chin, angled back so that the lantern swung horizontally, although the hauler’s head inclined down with the strain of pulling.

It was the next night we saw the headless zorcamen.

Yelker ran up onto the forepeak of the boat and yelled, and Zyna let out a shriek of pure fear.

“Get back on board!” roared Yelker. “Let the rope go!”

Zyna clasped my arm. Her fingers shook.

“Drak! Drak! The headless zorcamen!”

I slipped the rope off my shoulders, got a grip on Zyna, and plunged bodily into the water. A few quick overarm thrusts with my free hand and I could heft her clinging body up with my other hand to the waiting grip of Yelker and Rafee. I followed them up. I stood on the narrow catwalk around the sheeted cargo space, dripping water, and stared narrowly into the blackness.

My eyes adjusted quickly — and then I saw them.

A long line of cowled and cloaked figures they were, as I thought, dark against the sky where four moons floated. Then a closer inspection revealed that, indeed, the cowls were merely hunched shoulders, the cloaks trailing, and that the zorcamen rode headless across the moors.

“Rubbish!” I said. “By Zim-Zair, a trick, a cheap trick.”

“Of course, Drak. They are men like you or me, dressed up to look horrific. But many men still believe them to be supernatural apparitions.”

I had had experience of headless horsemen, and the headless coachman, for in the land of my youth smuggling was a fine art.

“What purpose do they serve, then, Yelker? And why do we stop?”

“They are dangerous men. Those they do not frighten off, they kill.”

“Are we to stop, then, because of buffoons like that?”

“It is wise. So long as they believe they terrorize the district, we are safe. If they detected resistance, disbelief carried to action, they would strike us mercilessly.” He coughed, and added: “And there are Mother and Zyna, Sisi, and the girls to consider.”

“Yes,” I said. After a pause, when I had sufficiently controlled myself, I said: “Who are these kleeshes?”

“They ride the moors. Hereabouts is all the domain of Faygar, the Strom of Vorgan. He is a known racter. But he owns allegiance to the Kov of Vomansoir.”

“So?”

“So the racters must show their strength in some way when all the usual ways are denied them.”

There were twenty of them, riding head to tail, a long serpentine line of hunched shapes against the moons. They looked eerie and menacing, completely horrifying to an untutored mind.

“By Zair!” I said. “I have a mind to take my sword and teach them a lesson. And, come to that, I could use a zorca.”

Yelker passed no comment on my vainglorious boasting. He said: “You would leave us, Drak?”

My thoughts were turned to Vondium and Delia of the Blue Mountains. I had no wish to appear ungrateful to Yelker or his family aboard Dancing Talu. But I could not but speak the truth.

“I would be in Vondium as fast as the fleetest airboat could take me, Yelker!”

He sighed. “We shall lose you at Vomansoir, then. I value your presence aboard mightily. We would have lost much time crossing the Ogier Cut. By Vaosh, I would not have believed it!”

Rafee let out a cackle.

The zorcamen rode on, and their leader trended over the dark horizon, and so they vanished, one by one. Racters they were, out to terrorize the people of the district, to extort, to maim, and to kill. Well, they meant nothing to me. I had let my chance go. To the Ice Floes of Sicce with them all!

After a space we resumed our hauling, but Zyna remained aboard the boat. I had detected in my actions since this arrival on Kregen a change of attitude, a laxness, a half-heartedness, a kind of softness most displeasing to me. I could guess why this was. You who have listened to my story will know that I tend to think like a civilized man, and to consider all the angles of a problem, and then to act like a savage barbarian, and jump in with my sword in my fist. Much of that must come from my Earthly ancestry mingled with the years I spent among my clansmen, fighting my way up to be Zorcander and Vovedeer. And, too, I am not a twentieth-century man, despite my veneer of the ways of speech and the automated culture of these times. I come from a lusty, brawling, robust age, when a belaying pin or a sailor’s knife settled an argument. I am not your ordinary hero of polite fictions, such as are still to be found in the scented courtly poems of Loh or of Vallia itself. But, equally, I am not your simpleminded if quick-witted barbarian, like my good friend Wulk of the northern hills.

I had become soft and vacillating and slow. And I knew why this was. Despite all my protestations that I would go to Vallia and there confront Delia’s father, this dread Emperor, I had quailed from the task. I thought Delia understood my reasons, I fancied she saw that I had no wish to tear down the image she held of her father, all the love and affection built up through childhood and girlhood, all that warm close family kinship to be torn asunder, broken, destroyed, by a rough uncouth clansman not even from her own world!

As the twins circled through the night sky of Kregen, forever orbiting each other, I hauled the tow rope and I faced my problem. I had to go on. My feet had been set on this path by the Star Lords themselves. I must go to Vondium and stalk into the Emperor’s palace and there, before the world, claim my Delia. I must!

There must be no more shilly-shallying. I made up my mind, then, in the puny pride of my heart, vaingloriously boasting to myself and to the moons and the stars, that I would fulfill whatever of destiny had called me to this strange and terrifying planet.

I can look back now at myself as I was then so long ago, and smile. But I can truly say that no thought of the actual power and might and majesty of Delia’s father the Emperor entered my mind. He was just a man. He could be made to do what I wanted him to do. It was on Delia, and on Delia’s feelings, that all my thoughts centered. This I swear.

We saw no more headless zorcamen and two days of hard pulling with many locks to bite into the actual distance traversed of our eighty-lock-miles-a-day travel, we came down into Vomansoir. I had expected just another town, perhaps a city, something like Therminsax. What I saw enchanted me. Vallia is full of strange and exotic places and out-of-the-way retreats. Vomansoir straddled the Great River and six canals joined here in a wide stretch of hectically busy waterways. We trudged in and got our berthing ticket and tied up at the hoffiburs wharf run by a Company of Friends with whom Yelker usually dealt.

Every canal ran in through a series of lock flights, for Vomansoir is situated in a great natural bowl. As we descended we could see the surrounding slopes terraced and cultivated so that not a square inch of space was wasted. Colors rioted everywhere. Trees and bushes and flowers all blended into an enormous patchwork quilt of dizzying splendor. The river, She of Fecundity, ran in and out of the bowl through colossal canyons. Along the banks were moored vessels of surprising size. Beyond them the quays hummed with throngs of people busy about the everyday tasks of living. Zorca chariots clattered and whirred here and there, quoffas dragged carts of humbler duties, men and women rode saddle zorcas, and I saw again the half-voves I had last seen in Zenicce. Vallia, however, has no voves in the natural state, although there are small herds here and there bred up by men. Everything was magnificent. The women wore flowing free gowns of myriads of colors; the men in their Vallian gear were not content thus to be left in the shade and their wide-shouldered tunics and jerkins were also brilliantly colored. I saw many of the men working on the quays and at the warehouses, as in the factories and the streets that dealt in various items of merchandise, wore the shirts with the banded sleeves, and while many of these banded colors were gray and yellow, the colors of Vomansoir, there were many also of other colors, sometimes three colors banded together. The red and black of the guards were in evidence, and I saw, with a bunching of my jaw muscles, gangs of slave haulers at work. Also, I saw men with black and white sleeves.

“Racters,” said Yelker, when I questioned him. “You are cut off in Valka, Drak, to be sure. By Vaosh, but they flaunt their superiority!”

I witnessed a clash between men of a racter employer and men wearing white and green banded arms over the priority of unloading a narrow boat. They fought with cudgels. They struck each other doughty blows. Yelker put his hand on my shoulder.

“Let them be, Drak, my friend. I am a man of peace, and you, I know, are a man of violence. But they go their ways—”

I was profoundly shocked.

“I, too, am a man of peace, Yelker! How can you call me a man of violence?” I considered. “I only tripped Kutven Ban!”

Rafee let rip with his coarse cackle at this. I could see their point. But I was annoyed. I am never violent

— at least, not stupidly so, not unthinkingly, not when it will hurt people for whom I cherish affection. At least, so I hope.

I turned to collect my gear from the cabin I had used, up in the bows. “At least,” I said over my shoulder, “I never hit an old man or an old woman for fun.”

Then I stopped. “Well, Yelker — and you, too, you grinning onker, Rafee — if I am violent it would be because I saw someone doing just that! I’d be inclined to hit him and thus attempt to show him the error of his ways.” Like, I thought with some remorse, I had shown that argenter captain in Pa Mejab the error of his ways for slapping young Pando.

I bid them all Remberee and took myself off. They were sorry to see me go. I hoped they’d get back through the Ogier Cut without bother this time, although the lissium ore did not share the same urgency as the hoffiburs.

Finding a posting station was not easy, for I had made up my mind to continue by zorca. I did not have the price of an airboat ticket, assuming I could find a Company of Friends operating an airline here. The oldster with the stubbly chin scratched that stubble, and spat in the straw, and sized me up. My beard had been trimmed neatly. But folk in Vomansoir were clean-shaven as a rule.

“You must be in a mighty hurry, dom.”

“I am. The zorca will be safe, for I am accustomed to riding them. Here.” I held out coins with the portrait of the man I wished to see. “What will it cost?”

Strange words, those, for Dray Prescot on Kregen!

In the event I hired a zorca and left a whacking deposit as a guarantee of my honesty. Vallia has a functioning banking system, as must any country which trades at such a high intensity, and I could collect the deposit when the zorca was either returned or unsaddled at the Vondium stables. I bought some food, and with a few silver coins left clanking rather dismally in the lesten-hide bag, I set off. Vallian roads are foul. They are better now, but I speak of the time when I rode south through the sun-drenched land seeking an interview with my prospective father-in-law. The zorca made good time, considering, and I wended my way south through towns and cities, crossing the canals, watching the lazy progress of the narrow boats, spurring on harshly when I saw a gang of hauler slaves dragging an Emperor’s barge, giving a quick sailor eye to the boats sailing on the Mother of Waters. I passed huge cornfields that took a day to traverse, immense dark forests, where twice I fought off footpads. This made me frown, for I had taken Vallia to be civilized. I would not allow myself to become fatigued. The zorca held up wonderfully well, and I fancy he recognized he had a zorcaman on his back. The twin Suns of Scorpio chased in jade and crimson across the sky each day, the nightly procession of moons cast down their pinkish light, and I hurried on.

I reached Vondium.

I will say nothing of that altogether marvelous place now, and, truth to tell, at the time I scarcely heeded all its marvels. It was all too easy for me to hear the news. It was the subject of conversation in all the myriads of pleasant open-air restaurants along the quays beside the canals and waterways.

“The Emperor? Oh, that naughty daughter of his! He is not in Vondium. He has gone to Delphond to teach her a lesson!”