Copyright © 1973, 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 1973.

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 1843193493

Warrior of Scorpio

[Dray Prescot #3]

Alan Burt Akers

Mushroom eBooks

A BRIEF NOTE ON THE TAPES FROM AFRICA

Although this is the third volume chronicling the strange and fascinating story of Dray Prescot, the editing has been so arranged that each book can be read as a separate and individual volume. After publication of the first two volumes[1]of the adventures of that remarkable man, Dray Prescot, on the planet Kregen beneath the Suns of Scorpio some four hundred light-years away, I was completely unsure of the reception they would be accorded. So far Prescot’s story has been given to us in the form of cassettes he cut on Dan Fraser’s tape recorder in that epidemic-stricken village in a famine area of West Africa. Having been afforded the privilege of editing the Tapes from Africa, I have kept the promise Fraser made to Dray Prescot, and I have already written of the profound impression that calm sure voice makes upon me, and of how I feel uplifted as that voice quickens as the fire of memory burns brighter in remembered images of passion and action and headlong adventure. The response has been surprisingly profuse and laudatory and there has been no opportunity for me to make adequate reply. We feel, in truth, that it is to Dray Prescot himself that we must look for that reply. The value of this account of life on Kregen is incalculable and the absence of certain of the cassettes containing portions of the story is a tragic loss. To my urgent inquiries, my friend Geoffrey Dean, to whom Dan Fraser had entrusted the Tapes from Africa and from whom I had received the cassettes in Washington, replied with sad and shocking news.

Dray Prescot had unexpectedly appeared in the famine area in West Africa and had been assisted by and then in turn had assisted the young field worker Dan Fraser. Now, Geoffrey told me, Dan Fraser was dead. He had died, mockingly, cruelly, wastefully, unnecessarily, in a stupid automobile accident. With the death of Dan Fraser we lose the only direct link we had with Prescot. For Fraser was the only one of us ever to have seen Prescot in the flesh. Dan described him as being a man a little above middling height, with straight brown hair, and brown eyes that hold a light of incisive intelligence and a strange dominating quality that goes with the abrasive honesty of the man. His shoulders made Dan’s eyes pop. And now Dan Fraser is dead and the whereabouts of the missing cassettes may never be known. We must, it is clear, be thankful for what we do have. Of the transcribed material I have deleted as little as is necessary, and have edited lightly; but a few items remain to be mentioned. The first is the pronunciation of the word Kregen. Prescot rolls this out as though an acute accent rides the first “e” —

Kraygen — with a hard “g.” Despite his long sojourn on Kregen he often refers to things as an Earthman would — for instance he will say “sunshine” when, as Kregen orbits the binary Antares, he means

“suns-shine.” “Sunshine,” however, trips more easily from the tongue. Clearly, since Dray Prescot cut these tapes in the 1970’s, he must be possessed of much more information now about Kregen than he was at the times of which he speaks. The whole planet could have changed in character and the most powerful of impressions remains that if it has done so then Prescot himself will have had a large hand in that change. But those long-ago days were as new to Prescot then as they are to us now, and without artifice he recalls those stirring times as he felt and experienced them. But, nevertheless, there are two levels of story unfolding and we must be mindful of that as we read. I have sought the advice of a distinguished author of long experience whose help has been invaluable, and, good friend that he is, whose sage counsel will one day receive the acknowledgment that is its due. We agree that in speaking of his life, some scenes and impressions have remained more vividly with Dray Prescot; it is as though when he speaks into the microphone he is living through these episodes again. Dray Prescot, born in 1775, presents an enigmatic picture of himself. Through his immersion in the pool of baptism of the River Zelph he is assured of a thousand years of life, as is his beloved, Delia of the Blue Mountains, for whose sake he was first hurled back to Earth by the Savanti. I feel it is clear he has thought long and carefully just what a millennium of life will mean and has come to adjust to and accept that fate. Returned to Kregen by the Star Lords — of whom he has given us no information — as a kind of interstellar troubleshooter, he rapidly rose to the position of Zorcander among his Clansmen of Felschraung in Segesthes, and then became the Lord of Strombor of the enclave city of Zenicce. At that point the Star Lords, apparently having no further use for him, returned him once more to Earth. Some time elapsed before he was recalled to Kregen beneath Antares to find himself on the continent of Turismond, thousands of miles away from Segesthes, and up to his neck in problems. He witnessed the horrors perpetrated by the overlords of Magdag, escaped their slavery, became a corsair captain of a swifter — a Kregen galley — on the inner sea, the Eye of the World. We here lose portions of his story through the lamented absence of those missing cassettes, but we do know he was accepted into the mystic and military order of chivalry, the Krozairs of Zy, becoming Pur Dray. Returned to Magdag he organized the slaves and led a revolt which in the full tide of success was placed in jeopardy by the intervention of the Star Lords.

At the head of his slave phalanx he was surrounded by the lambent blue radiance that, together with the occasional appearance of a gigantic scorpion, accompanies a transition. In this case he was threatened with another ignominious return to Earth. However, once before he had managed by the exertion of a willpower we can only marvel at to negate the immediate effects and to remain on Kregen. So, now, he exerted all his willpower to remain on Kregen.

This volume, Warrior of Scorpio, takes up his adventures from that point and in the process almost exhausts the cassettes in our possession, leaving only a very few to see publication. Unless Dray Prescot is able in some way to reveal some of his story, and this of course assumes he can in some way be afforded the opportunity of seeing the volumes already in print, this incredible saga of brilliant action and high adventure, of chilling cruelty and superlative courage, will come to an end. Geoffrey Dean called me on the transatlantic phone to tell me of the tragic death of Dan Fraser.

“I am firmly convinced Dray Prescot is determined to have his story told,” Geoffrey said over the line. “If it is humanly possibly — or superhumanly, given the intervention of the Star Lords — I believe, Alan, he will find a way of continuing to reach us and of carrying on with his story.”

Even if the story does end here — and somehow I believe Geoffrey is right in his assessment and I await the confirmation that will come with a fresh communication from Dray Prescot — still I am convinced that on Kregen four hundred light-years away Dray Prescot, Pur Dray, Lord of Strombor, Kov of Delphond, Krozair of Zy, will continue his own living story.

Alan Burt Akers

Chapter One

Pawn of the Star Lords

“I will stay on Kregen!”

In my nostrils stank the odors of blood and sweat, oiled leather, dust, and my ears rang with the sounds of combat as swords clashed and clanged and pikes pierced mail and crossbow bolts punched into armored men. I could smell and hear, but I could see only an all-encompassing blueness lambent about me, and my gripping fist closed on emptiness where I should be grasping the hilt of my long sword.

“I will not go back to Earth!”

Everything was blue now, roaring and twisting in my head, in my eyes and ears, tumbling me head over heels into a blue nothingness.

“I will stay on Kregen beneath the suns of Scorpio! I will!”

I, Dray Prescot of Earth, screamed it out in my agony and despair. “I will stay on Kregen!”

A wind riffled my hair and I knew that old vosk-skull helmet with its panache of yellow paint had vanished with my long sword.

I was lying flat on my back. The noise of combat flowed away, dwindling. The screams of dying men and wounded sectrixes, the grunt and harshly indrawn breaths of men convulsed with the passions of battle, the clangor and scrape of weapons, all died. And the blue brilliance of light about me wavered and I sensed the inward struggle as obscure forms moved and merged past the edges of my vision. Against my back pressed hard earth — but was it the dirt of Kregen or of Earth?

That last battle against the overlords of Magdag had been violent and emotional and transforming, but any taint of battle-lust or battle-fever in me had been banished at a stroke by the unexpected intervention of the Star Lords. I have, I confess, sometimes been overwhelmed by the lustof battle, not often, and have little time for those who prate of that red curtain that falls before their eyes and to whose existence they point as an excuse for actions of the most barbarous and savage kind. Oh, yes, the scarlet curtain before the eyes exists, but it is capable of manipulation by those whose humanity has not been destroyed. You who listen to these tapes spinning through their little cassettes will know how often I have succumbed, to my shame, to that red-roaring tide of exultant conflict. So it was that as I sat up on that hard-packed ground the blood-lust of battle had cleared from my mind. But the fever of instant action still gripped my body. As I sat up, then, expecting I knew not what, a vast odiferous mass of squelchy straw laid me flat down on my back again. Dung and straw smothered me. Spitting out a mouthful of vile-tasting straw I sat up, blinking, trying to see, vaguely making out a barn door black in the light as the blueness faded, and — smack down again I went as another heaping forkful of straw-laced manure slapped me across the face. I spat. I blinked. I cursed. With a roar of fury generated as much by indignation and a sense of the ludicrous as much by anger I leaped to my feet.

This time I could dodge the flying forkful of dungy straw.

Thoroughly annoyed, I started for the barn door. As I expected, I was completely naked. The Star Lords had snatched me from Magdag; where they had deposited me I did not know — but I had urgent problems before finding out, problems to do with people who threw dungy straw into my face. A voice shouted something I didn’t recognize, but even in the midst of intending to deal with dung-hurlers I took comfort from the conviction that the language was not of Earth. It had that ring peculiar to the languages of Kregen, and I felt a surge of thanksgiving. A man stepped out of the barn door.

My vision cleared and I saw this man bathed in the mingled streaming light of the twin suns of Antares. Then, without doubt, I knew the Star Lords had not snatched me from Kregen altogether and hurled me contemptuously back to Earth. Contemptuously, for I knew that in some way I had failed them, that I had not accomplished what they had brought me to Kregen and sent me to Magdag to do. Staring at this man who stared back at me I was conscious only of a great and all-engulfing thankfulness. I was still on the same world as my Delia! I was not sundered from the only woman for me in two worlds by four hundred light-years of empty space. Somewhere in Vallia on this planet of Kregen my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond, lived and breathed and laughed and, I hoped and prayed, did not despair of me.

This man carried a pitchfork to which wisps of greasy straw still clung. He stood tall and lean, with the most infernal mocking smile taking in my nakedness and the dungy straw clinging to my skin and broomsticking my hair — and then he saw my face. He lost his smile and the pitchfork came up in quick automatic response. He possessed a mane of intensely black hair. His eyes twinkled brightly blue upon me. There was about him an air of recklessness and of action-before-thought-of-consequences, and I judged he had not been slave for very long.

My thought of Delia had halted me — in the glory of knowing I was still treading the same ground as my princess — so that this man was spared time enough to speak.

“Llahal!” he said, in the universal nonfamiliar greeting of Kregen. Had we been friends he would have said: “Lahal.” He went on without waiting for my reply or for the making of pappattu. “You look a sight, dom!” And then he laughed. It was a light laugh, all mockery of myself gone from it and filled only with a delight in the circumstances. Any man who cannot laugh at himself is truly dead. But, as I think you will know, I, Dray Prescot, do not, for others and out loud, laugh easily. I started for him again with the intention of wrapping the pitchfork around his neck and then deciding what to do with the tines.

He skipped aside, still laughing.

His laughter changed to puzzlement.

“You must be one of the new slaves, dom. I am Seg Segutorio. If you’ve been sent to help me you’d better get started before we’re both in trouble and tasting ol’ snake.”

The tines of the pitchfork looked exceedingly sharp. This man, this slave, handled the implement as a warrior handles a spear. Now he had recovered from the first shock of seeing that expression on my face that I have heard many men call the look of the devil; he balanced easily with the farmyard weapon covering me, confident in his own prowess. About to disabuse him of that idea, I checked. We stood in a farmyard, with low buildings surrounding this stable area, with the rustic odors of dung and straw, urine and dust, heavy on the air. Over all the glorious rays of the twin suns of Scorpio streamed down in an opaline mingling of colors. Only moments before I had been leading the slave phalanx of my old vosk-skulls into headlong conflict with the mailed overlords of Magdag. Now, once more, I heard the shouts of men in furious strife and the screams of wounded, the shrilling of sectrixes, and the clamorous clangor of sword on sword.

A dog ran whining across the farmyard, his tail tucked down in between his legs. Following him, a bedraggled band of slaves ran and fell and picked themselves up to stagger on. They were a mixed bunch of humans and half-humans, all wearing the gray slave breechclout, and their screams and crying panic made my hand reach out for a weapon. On Kregen a man without a ready weapon to hand is a man with a foot in the grave.

Flames shot up beyond the stable buildings and I guessed the great house itself would be burning. A rout of bloodied men-at-arms stumbled after the slaves, their mail coats ripped, their helmets dented and awry, some lost altogether. There were men and Rapas and Chuliks among the mercenary men-at-arms. Some had flung away their weapons in order to run faster.

“A raid!” Seg Segutorio hitched up the pitchfork. I didn’t like the look on his face. “Those Froyvil-forgotten rasts of sorzarts!”

Now I could see them pelting around the stable buildings, squat on scaled legs, bedecked with gaudy strings of clanking bronze and copper ornaments, befeathered, cockscombed of helmeted head, fierce and predatory and shrilling war cries that struck absolute horror into the fleeing people of the peaceful farm. They wielded cut-down long swords and throwing spears not unlike narrow assegais, and they presented a sight calculated to overawe peasant opposition in the twinkling of the first blade. The few mercenary guards maintained by the farm had been powerless to halt this raid. Although I had heard of these sorzarts, I had not previously encountered them. They inhabited a cluster of islands toward the northeastern end of the inner sea and were the subject of endless speculation among the other peoples of the Eye of the World as to who would instigate the great crusade against them and who would follow the Banners and when; but while the bitter enmity between the green north and the red south persisted the sorzarts were left unmolested. Their faces were vaguely lizard-like in their wide cheeks and virtual absence of forehead, but their eyes were quite unreptile-like, being dull and deeply set.

Everything, as is usual in moments of crisis, happened at breakneck speed and by the time Seg had leveled his pitchfork and broken into a run the sorzarts had mostly vanished beyond the opposite stable building. A woman clutching a child to her bosom ran into view, saw the last three sorzarts, swerved in her run, saw Seg Segutorio, and screamed at him. Her bared legs beneath the lavender gown covered the ground rapidly, but it was clear to us that the sorzarts would cut her off and catch her before she could reach us.

“Help me!” Even in her terror and despair the words cracked with the snap of habitual command. “Seg!

Help me!”

“The mistress.” Seg bounded forward afresh. “She bought me ten days ago and I have no love for her

— but — but she is a woman.”

That was an irrational thought in a culture possessed of many types of beast-humans and human-beasts encountered daily in ordinary social intercourse.

Now I knew why the Star Lords had condescended to keep me here on Kregen and why they had not flung me through the interstellar gulfs back to the Earth of my birth. They had found another task for my hands. As usual, they had dumped me down naked and defenseless in the midst of a situation of extreme peril. I knew that away in Magdag my slaves, wearing their old yellow-painted vosk-skulls and wielding the weapons I had created and taught them to use, were fighting with savage intent against the might of the overlords and, most probably now I had gone, losing. But I had been snatched from them and in return for not being banished to Earth had been presented with this crisis to resolve. I scooped up a heaping double-armful of odiferous manure-fouled straw and sprinted after Seg. I passed him with ease and then I was beyond the woman and her child and facing the three sorzarts. They looked mean and ferocious and they held their weapons with the skill of long experience. The nearest flicked his cut-down long sword at me and I angled my run so that he obscured the view of the second, who lifted his assegai in frustration, balked of his cast. I checked, lifted on my toes, and hurled my dung-straw full in the face of the first sorzart. He ducked lithely enough and avoided the straw. But his movement slowed him and then I was up to him. His back broke with a soggy snap and I had his sword and snatched it aloft to parry the assegai cast. The shaft rang against the blade. I lunged forward. The sword felt good in my fist. Longer than the short sword as used by my Clansmen, this brand balanced oddly; but it served its purpose and as I withdrew the blade befouled with the sorzart’s blood there was time to meet the challenge of the third. He hesitated.

“Hai!” I said.

He eyed me warily from those deep-set eyes. Abruptly, like a striking lizard, with a bunching of muscles and a jangling of bronze and copper disks, he hurled his assegai. I brushed it aside. Seg saved me the final thrust, for, as I waited for the sorzart to draw his sword, the pitchfork flew past my ear and buried its two center tines deeply into the scaly neck.

“Why did you hesitate?” demanded Seg, panting. “You know these sorzarts are the most treacherous of beasts.”

I wiped the blade on the sorzart’s brown apron.

“I have killed a man before he has drawn to defend himself,” I told Seg. “And, sink me, no doubt will do so again, Zair forgive me, if it is necessary. In this case it was not.”

He looked at me oddly. Reckless and wild, as I was to find him, his ideas of warfare were also extremely practical.

The unpleasant sounds of raiding half-men reached us from beyond the stable block and the wind drew coils of greasy smoke from the burning house about our faces. The woman caught her breath. I had looked at her once, and then gone about my business. There has been more than enough in my life of seeing screaming women clutching their infants to them — the tears soaking into their dresses, their faces distraught, running blindly from rapacious reavers of all kinds — for me ever to treat such scenes lightly. People prate of the values of human life, and of how nothing outside the context of human activity is of worth, and on Kregen, willy-nilly, the existence of half-human, half-beast peoples must figure into that context, and yet I wonder how often such academic postulators have been presented with situations in which their actions must match their words. Of course I was not insensitive to this woman’s naked bloody feet, the tears on her cheeks, the infant mess around her child’s mouth and nose, his inflamed eyes and his crying blubbering. But raiders of the stamp of the sorzarts know well the weakness of men unmanned by women’s sufferings.

I said: “We must leave here. Now. Come.”

Without bothering to await their reply I stripped a length of brown cloth from a dead sorzart — the cleanest length — and wrapped it around my waist, pulled the end through between my legs, and tucked it in to form a breechclout. I balanced all three of the cut-down long swords and selected the one I felt the best. The belt and scabbard were neatly stitched from the skins of the little green and brown lizards called Tikos and as Seg picked up a sword and an assegai I thrust the sword I had chosen into the scabbard, took the third up together with the three assegais remaining. I ignored the helmets. This took but little time and during it the woman stood first on one leg and then on the other, hoisting her child up on her hip and shushing it, and staring at me with an uncertainty I had no time to bother over just then. She would know well enough I was not one of her slaves.

We set off in a line directly away from the burning house.

I felt completely confident that this woman and her infant were the people I had been sent here by the Star Lords to succor. Just why I should be so sure I did not know. My natural instincts sometimes coalesce with a darker and rarer judgment. I had saved Gahan Gannius and Valima there on the edge of the Grand Canal when, for the third time, I had found myself on Kregen. They had given me no thanks but had taken themselves off. Now I assumed they must play some part in the complicated games with destiny played over the years by the Star Lords — with assistance and interference from the Savanti. That these thoughts were true and just how the world of Kregen was influenced by my own interference, you shall hear.

We spoke little. I was concerned to find a riding mount for the woman. The stables were empty — the men out on an expedition and leaving the estate vulnerable to just this kind of sudden raid — and the quicker we found a sectrix, one of the six-legged riding animals of the inner sea littoral, or a calsany, or even an ass, the better. When Seg asked my name I had no hesitation in choosing my own among the plethora of names I already possessed — a quantity of nomenclature I found, to be honest, more amusing than otherwise.

“I am Dray Prescot,” I said. And then: “Of Strombor.”

The name meant nothing to them.

It was unlikely that they would know of Strombor as a place, for until I had resurrected that enclave in Zenicce with the gift of Great Aunt Shusha — who was not my great aunt, I must remember — the name of Strombor had been obscured for a hundred and fifty years by the house Esztercari. But since they had not heard the name of Pur Dray, Lord of Strombor, Krozair of Zy, renowned corsair upon the Eye of the World, it surely indicated the cut-off nature of their life. I had convinced myself that I must still be within the sphere of occupation around the inner sea, as witness the sorzarts, and so I was not unduly alarmed. Had I been so minded I might have chuckled at the haughty reception such ignorance of their noble names and deeds would have received from some of the swifter captains and Krozairs and Brethren of my acquaintance.

“This is the Lady Pulvia na Upalion,” said Seg Segutorio, and despite the situation and his clear detestation of his slave status, some respect was evident in his words. I looked at the woman. Nothing about her impressed me so much as the way her head came erect and her eyes widened to meet my regard. She was in no sense beautiful, rather she was a sturdy, strong-limbed woman habitually in command, conscious of her position, and no doubt in normal times somewhat in despair over the hint of a moustache beginning to darken her upper lip. I reached out my hands.

“Give me the child.”

Instinctively she clasped the infant closer to her breast where tears and mucus stained the lavender material. She wore a gold and ruby trinket upon a slender gold chain. I gestured impatiently to her naked feet. She looked into my face and I saw her eyes darken in shock. Then, silently, she let me take the boy from her. He was no great weight. In a little group we left the stables and at once were among the standing crops, tall green-stemmed bloin loaded with golden fruit in which we were hidden as though by a million tongueless cathedral bells.

From the rear, black and oily smoke rose and spread to cast dark shadows from the mingled light of the twin suns of Scorpio.

Any thoughts I may have had that my task for the Star Lords was thus easily accomplished were speedily dispelled. With the three spare assegais tucked under my left arm which cradled the child, the second sword naked in my right fist, I brought up the rear, with Seg in the van. The sorzarts must have landed from their raiding ships — for they habitually disliked voyaging with only a single ship — and marched inland to fall on this estate of Upalion, which I had already seen enough to know was composed of broad acres and rich land, heavy with crops. Upalion, some distance from the sea, had considered itself secure, as the weak mercenary force of men-at-arms testified. Now the sorzarts burst into the wealth of golden bloin fruits, seeking our blood.

“You go on, Seg,” I said, and handed him the child, pushing past the woman unceremoniously. “I will hold them.”

“The mistress can take the child,” said Seg. His eagerness to stand to die with me was surprising.

“Sink me!” I exclaimed, not angrily but exasperatedly amused. I can find amusement in strange situations. “She can barely walk, let alone run with the child. You must get her away, Seg, for the sweet sake of Zim-Zair. Do not argue!”

“By the veiled Froyvil—” began Seg, his black mane of hair wild among the golden fruits. I cut him off, with a rolling Makki-Grodno oath.

“Go on!”

I own, then, that a deal of that unpleasant rasp must have sharpened my tones, a dominating, domineering almost, way of talking I assumed in automatic response to opposition and that came from many years walking the quarterdecks of King’s Ships, of handling my Clansmen as Zorcander and Vovedeer, of reaving as a Krozair captain of a Sanurkazz swifter. Seg took a look at my face. He took the child.

“There are ruins of the sunset folk about a dwabur south,” he said. That was all. I felt I could get to know this volatile yet practical man.

Seg and the Lady Pulvia vanished among the golden bells.

The swords I now held had once been regular long swords. Now they had been cut down and sharpened with wedge-shaped points into a blade-length of some twenty-four inches. For a tiny nostalgic moment I thought of those superlative Savanti swords with which we had so lightheartedly gone from Aphrasöe the Swinging City clad in our Savanti hunting leathers in bloodless pursuit of the graint. Maybe these sorzarts knew more of swordsmanship than I guessed, more, even, than the Krozairs of Zy, although in my pride that seemed so remotely possible as to be unthinkable. Well, I would soon find out. Harsh cries rose into the air and the golden bells of the bloin hanging from stems curving in such subtle beauty from their straight green stalks waved and twisted over our back path as agile scaled bodies thrust their way through.

A fighting-man’s life is stitched together with vivid scarlet incidents patching the gray drabness of days and my experience had taught me that on Kregen the scarlet outweighed the gray. I thought of my Delia of the Blue Mountains, and prayed she would not despair of me away in her awe-inspiring Vallia. Then, with weapons in my hands, I turned to face the dangers that had ensured my continuance on Kregen beneath Antares. It would need many swords to force me to flee from all that kept me on Kregen under the suns of Scorpio.

Chapter Two

Seg Segutorio

This was what life on Kregen was all about, this continuous challenge that set the blood pulsing through my veins, that brought all my alertness alive, that made me aware of myself as a man. Only moments before I had been fighting in the dust and sweat of my slave phalanx against the overlords of Magdag and then, because I had in some way unfathomable to me failed the Star Lords, I had been thrown into this new situation. Well — I thrust the second sword carefully down through the lizard-skin belt and hefted an assegai — well, the Star Lords or Savanti or scaled-skin sorzarts, all would meet my defiance distributed with an impartiality that held fast to one ideal only — I would win my way back to my Delia of the Blue Mountains. At that time the simplicity of this concept could hold no irony for me whatsoever. The golden fruits waved and parted and the first lizard-man stepped through. I waited.

He was followed by another and then a third. Still I waited. They had not seen me yet, concealed by the dark-green stems of the bloin, and I did not move. The first was very near now, so near I could see the way his scales grew smaller and smaller as they reached his neck and spread over his face in a kind of pseudo-skin in which his snout-nose and mouth protruded beneath those deep-set eyes. The mingled red and green light fell across the bronze and copper ornaments slung about him and sheened golden from the tall helmet with its arrogant bronze cock’s comb. He held his assegai slanting over his shoulder in the ready-to-cast position.

I saved that one for my sword.

His three companions went down, shrilling, each with an assegai through him, sprawling kicking among the brittle hard stems of the golden bloin.

The first sorzart’s cast assegai sprang for my chest. My sword flicked free from the belt and knocked aside the flung assegai with a vibrating twang in that swift wrist-roll we Krozairs of Zy so often practiced against arrows. Then I was on him. This time my scruples about killing a man or half-man before he had time to draw could be put aside, with whatever of morality remained in this situation. Other sorzarts were following fast; three or four assegais whickered past. I lunged, withdrew, leaped back to avoid the next clump of assegais.

So far I had made no mistakes. I had not spoken; the full-scented odors of the golden bloin bells and the smell of blood and dust among the brittle green stems seemed to render out sounds, so that the dusty crackling of the stems as sorzarts sought my life came as through a golden afternoon haze. I did not know how many there were, but I did not intend to be chopped by their swords or struck by their assegais. I had no time, given what the Star Lords had brought me here to accomplish and that which I meant to accomplish for myself, to stay. In an instant I vanished from the lizard-men’s sight among the silent golden bells of the bloin.

It would be useless just to scamper after Seg Segutorio and the Lady Pulvia. He would be hampered by her and the child and the sorzarts would catch up with them with results the Star Lords would disapprove of. So it was that those bold raiders of the inner sea were set on and bedeviled in their pursuit through the golden bloin and then — with more difficulty for myself — through orchards of gnarly-trunked samphron trees, whose juicy fruits with their glossy purple skins would soon be picked to be crushed into fragrant oil.

The second sword broke off short during one fierce interchange, but I came away with a replacement and with two more assegais that were almost immediately targeted off to good effect. The blood that smothered my right arm was not mine. The two swords, I found, formed an interesting combination, rather like an overbalanced pair, a too-short long sword or broadsword for the right hand and a too-long main-gauche. The sorzarts probably shortened captured long swords because of the half-men’s somewhat short stature, but they were nonetheless swift and sturdy fighters for all that. Swords, of course, are objects of worth and price and not easily come by in a culture without an extensive metallurgy, either of bronze or iron. The sorzarts’ assegais — not the true assegai of Africa, I hasten to add, but an altogether slighter and narrower-bladed weapon — were their own natural weapon. Not all the lizard-men by any means possessed swords. Many of those swords I saw were easily identifiable as to previous ownership by their armory marks; weapons from Gantz and Zulfiria, from Sanurkazz and far Magdag.

The twin suns of Scorpio moved across the heavens and the streaming light settled more regretfully across the land. Soon darkness would fall with the temperate-zone twilight of not overlong duration. Somewhat to my astonishment the sorzarts kept up their pursuit. I no longer count the men or beast-men I have slain and so I do not know how many they lost in that long and agonized pursuit. Only when the twin suns at last sank beyond a distant ridge of mountains that ran down from the interior into the inner sea could I discern any reluctance on their part to continue.

Sharp trilling cries rose from one and then another. The last one I dispatched — without regret, for he had nicked me with his flung assegai and would have killed me without compunction had I allowed him to finish his sword-blow — fell headfirst into a little brook that meandered from the borders of the last orchard and trended away through open meadowland toward the sea. Purple shadows gathered and the water glimmered like cold steel. Thoughtfully, I wiped my blade on the sorzart’s breechclout, picked up all his weapons, and walked on south. Soon the darkness was complete and I could gaze upward at the Kregen night sky and see those strange yet blessedly familiar constellations wheel above my head. A comfort could be taken from the distant chips of light that fancifully formed animals and people and monsters, pinpricks of light that could form meaningful patterns only in a man’s mind, his own rationality plucking form from an inchoate star-spattered infinity. I saw the stellar images, and I stumbled over a thorn bush and I cursed, and thereafter kept my eyes fixed on my path with only the occasional navigating glance aloft.

All the warmth of combat had passed from me. I did not shiver, for the night was mild, but inwardly I felt once again the essential futility of blind killing. How often — I remember musing as I trod southward to fulfill whatever of destiny the Star Lords would allow me — I had seen men who appeared actually to enjoy inflicting pain on others. These were the uniformed men of the bludgeon and thewhip, who recruited their own warped desires into the punishment of the unfortunate. Did I enjoy the sensation as I cut a man down? Did I thrill to the jolt as my sword pierced a man’s guts? God forgive me if I did — but I did not then and do not now. Perhaps my punishment is that in a situation in which it is kill or be killed I choose the easier path and kill to save my life and the lives of my loved ones. Thus musing in a somber frame of mind — for I missed my Delia of the Blue Mountains beyond the mortal capacity to endure, or so I thought — I came to a rearing mass of toppled stone, twisted columns, broken arches, and collapsed domes all shining pinkly in the first of Kregen’s nightly procession of moons.

The little stream broadened here and washed the worn steps of a landing jetty. Shadows jungle-hostile hung between truncated columns. I caught strange glimpses of pagan sculpture, serpentine forms that twined upon the surfaces of the blocks, hints of a demonology older than any current civilization thriving on this continent of Turismond.

The men of the sunrise had built their cities along the shores of the inner sea. Today, the shores lie mostly barren and untended except where the vicinity of a strong castle or fortified town or city affords some protection from corsair raids. I had raided the north shore myself, that shore of the green-sun deity Grodno; I had heard horrific tales of similar raids upon the red southern shore, dedicated to the sun Zim’s deity, Zair. And the sorzarts raided both north and south and the eastern shore of Proconia — where I must now be — with the impartiality of the true unbeliever. I touched the hilt of one of my swords — for I remembered with affection the impressive armory of Hap Loder and my Clansmen of Felschraung —

and went on.

“Stand and declare yourself — or you are a dead man!”

The voice sounded hard and confident and reckless. It was the voice of Seg Segutorio. I could not see him.

Undoubtedly, then, he was a warrior of skill.

“Dray Prescot,” I said, and did not stop.

Seg and the Lady Pulvia waited beside the stone lip of a wide and shallow basin, shell-shaped, into which an arm of the stream poured continually, pinkly silver in the moons’ light. Above them a chipped and defaced statue of a woman whose marble wings hung splintered from narrow shoulders cast a peaked shadow.

“You are safe, Dray?”

“Safe, Seg.”

We had fallen into names thus easily, then.

“Thank the veiled Froyvil for that, then!”

“And you — the Lady Pulvia?”

She lifted her head from above her child as I asked, and gave me a blank, unseeing stare that told me that we would have to support her on whatever further voyage we must undertake. She bent her head and crooned softly to the child, who lay, his soft mouth stoppered by a plump thumb, fast asleep. For a moment I could not recall when I had last slept. In all my bones that laxity of alert feeling told me that I was tired, deadly tired, but a sea officer of a King’s Ship comes early to learn the knack of using his strength against long periods of wakefulness. I could go on for a space yet, but I considered the situation, knowing that sleep now would set store of strength by for later emergencies. A movement in the purple shadows beneath the statue’s splintered wings brought my sword out instantly, but Seg laughed and said: “Easy, Dray, you wild leem! That is Caphlander. A stylor, one of my lady’s servants.”

The man stepped into the moonlight. Tall, he walked with a stoop, and his sparse hair glinted in that wash of pink light. He wore a white robe bordered with a checkered design of red and green — a sight I must admit bewildered me for a moment with all the fierce clash of red and green still echoing in my skull

— and his face reminded me somewhat of the ugly bird-head of a Rapa. There were significant differences, however, and his humanity seemed to me more pronounced than the remnant left to a Rapa. He was a Relt. Numbers of these usually gentle people when made slave pined near to death; others found reasons for living in serving their masters as librarians, stylors, accountants. His bright bird-like eyes studied us from a face held to one side, so that I knew his sight was affected in one of those eyes.

“Llahal!” he said, and then waited, stooping, subservient.

Brusquely, Seg said: “And?”

Caphlander the Relt wilted. “All burned,” he said. “All dead. Such sights—”

“There’s no going back, then. The Lord of Upalion having gone on his expedition will return to dust and ashes and corpses.”

The impression I gained then, briefly and fleetingly, was that Seg was not overly dismayed at this catastrophe to his master, the man who owned him as slave. And — no wonder.

“Is there no safe place for this woman, Seg?”

He looked at her and sucked in his lower lip.

“The city — that is the only safe place. And we would never reach it on foot now. The sorzarts must be out in force.”

“The day of our doom is here.” Caphlander spoke with complete subjection and acceptance of his fate.

“I do not believe that my day of doom is to be brought by a bunch of lizard-faced scaled beast-men. There are other ways to cities than by walking,” I told Caphlander and Seg.

“All the sectrixes were taken—”

I lifted my head and sniffed. On the night air, whose lush odors of nocturnal plant life told of many of those immense moon-drinking flowers twining among the ruins, the tangier smell I knew so well infiltrated like liquor at a funeral.

“The sea is not far. This city—”

“Happapat,” said Seg.

“This Happapat — is it a port?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

We reached the coast. Seg carried the child and I carried his mother. She lay in my arms, a soft flaccid sexless bundle, a human being for whom my only concern had been dictated by the Star Lords —

whoever they might be. We rested in a rock cave halfway up the cliff as the night passed. With the gaining light, and refreshed by a few burs’ sleep, we could plan again. I think, even then, Seg Segutorio had realized something other than mere concern over the safety of his mistress impelled me, for his people may be wild and reckless and filled with song, but they also possess that hard streak of practicality that has maintained their independence.

As the first sheening light of Zim spread in scarlet and golden radiance across the calm waters of the inner sea we looked out and down onto the ships of the sorzarts.

“Eleven of them.” Seg spat. I did not waste good saliva. “They have to voyage in company, for they cannot face a Pattelonian swifter in fair fight.”

On the curved beach the ships had been drawn up stern first. Ladders were lowered with the dawn and the anchor watch began their preparations to welcome back their comrades with loot and gold and prisoners. My hand tightened on the hilt of one of the swords. We could wait here until the sorzarts sailed away. . .

Call me a fool. Call me a windbag full of braggadocio.Call me prideful. I do not care. All I know is that while my Delia sought me from her island home of Vallia by rider and flier and I yearned above all things to hold her dear form in my arms once more, I could not thus tamely crouch hiding in a cave. On the hilt of the sword were marked letters in the Kregish script: G.G.M. That meant that a mercenary warrior employed by Gahan Gannius had died some time in the past and his sword had been taken as battle booty by the sorzarts. I wondered what had happened to Gahan Gannius, whom I had rescued on my last return to Kregen, and if his manners and those of the girl Valima had improved. The plan must be nicely made and as nicely decided. Those eleven ships down there on the beach beyond the nearest crumbling wall of the Pattelonian fishing village were not swifters nor were they broad ships. They were dromvilers. They had chosen to land directly at the fishing village — which are rare enough on the inner sea’s coastline, Zair knows — to secure safe berthings. The coast here fell sheer into the sea. The people of the village, sentinels against just such raids, had been outwitted on this occasion, for a huddle of their fishing boats, the familiar muldavy with her dipping lugsail of the inner sea, were still drawn up on the beach by the wall. No one, then, had escaped.

But those ships of the sorzarts . . . I had heard of them, of course, during my seasons as a Krozair raider on the Eye of the World. But I had never before penetrated this far east. The dromvilers were, to phrase it loosely, a compromise between a galley and a sailing ship, although they were not galleasses. They were more like those classical ships sometimes remarked on by ancient writers, or the oared merchantmen of the Middle Ages used considerably in the trade to the Holy Land, shipping pilgrims. Broader than a swifter, narrower than a broad ship, they carried single banks of twenty oars each crewed probably by three or four oarsmen, and two masts. I felt reasonably certain that the masts could carry topsails, and a grudging respect grew in me for the sorzarts’ sailing skills, for from topsails can emerge all the panoply of sails, skysails and stunsails and all.

A further sobering thought occurred to me. With that number of oarsmen — something between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and sixty, plus essential reserves — the sorzarts could not be using slaves as oarsmen. A large war swifter can carry a thousand slave oarsmen, and feed and water and clean them after a fashion, by extraordinarily careful management. But a merchantman exists to transport goods. There would be no room aboard the sorzarts’ ships for slaves. The oarsmen, then, were free —

that is, they were sorzarts capable of standing and fighting along with the soldiers of the crew. Maybe the sorzarts were not the savage barbarians the men of Grodno and Zair believed them.

“I am thirsty,” said the Lady Pulvia, breaking the silence. “And my son is thirsty. Also, we are hungry.”

I said: “So am I. I will bring you food and water as soon as it is possible.”

“And when will that be?” said Caphlander. He held his hands together, the long thin fingers intertwined. The veins stood out with a greenish-blue tinge.

I ignored him.

Why should I destroy these sorzarts? A peculiar feeling toward them of respect had been growing in me. They were small men — half-men — yet they fought well. They had adopted topsails. They employed themselves as free men as oarsmen. But I saw the fallacy of this materialistic argument. The Vikings had been free men employed as oarsmen — yet I would have had no hesitation, given this situation, in utterly destroying every Viking longship I could. The child gave a whimpering cry, which swelled until against all his mother’s shushings it broke into a torrent of sobs. The child was hungry and thirsty and he reacted as nature ordained he should.

Often I have been faced with a problem and reacted as I did because that was the way of my nature. That scorpion, that frog, they were impelled by forces stronger than themselves. Well, I have boasted that I can control my impulses, but I think that boast is on occasion an empty one. I stood up.

“Caphlander. You will remain here. Do what you can for the Lady Pulvia and her son. Seg, please come with me.”

Without giving any of them a chance to reply or argue I went out of the rock cave and began to climb to the cliff top.

Chapter Three

I dive back into the Eye of the World

Seg Segutorio looked at the bow in his hand and his mobile lips drew down in a lopsided grimace. The bow spanned about twelve Earthly inches. He had made it with swift expertise from a branch of the thin willowy tuffa trees in whose shade we stood. The string he had as rapidly fashioned from plaited strips torn from the living bark. I looked down over the edge of the cliff, squinting a little against glare striking back off the sea from the twin suns of Antares.

Our preparations were complete. It only remained to kindle fire.

Any distaste as a sailorman I felt for the task I had set myself had to be quashed. Seg let loose a great sigh and lifted the bow to me. He shook his head. “Had I my own great bow I’d guarantee to pick off those sorzart rasts so fast they’d be pincushions before the first one hit the deck.”

He surprised me. You must realize, you who listen to my story as these tapes rustle through your little machine, that despite Seg’s black hair I had taken him to be a Proconian, who are, as I have said, mostly fair-headed. The remarks about his people I have made refer, of course, to his own true people; but they are remarks made from hindsight, a crime you must forgive a man who has lived as long as I have. “Great bow?” I said.

He laughed. “Surely, even you — who are a stranger of strangers — must have heard of the longbows of Loh?”

“You are of Loh?”

Again he laughed. “Yes — and no!” That ancient look of blood pride suffused his face, an arrogant, proud expression so familiar in those who trace their ancestry back and back into the dawn of their culture. I can understand it; but in many ways I am glad I do not share it, for that kind of pride so often leads to the chinless wonders who have so blighted life on our own Earth. But, with Seg Segutorio, as you shall hear, pride in race and ancestry burned with a steadier and truer flame.

“I am an Erthyr, of Erthyrdrin. . .”

Of Erthyrdrin, that convulsed mass of mountains and valleys forming the long northern promontory of Loh, I had indeed heard. I had used longbowmen from Loh as a special sniper force in my slave army when we went against the overlords of Magdag, and some of them had had red hair, and some had not, and all had been superlative archers; but none had come from Erthyrdrin, although they had spoken of the place with some awe, some respect, and not a little bile.

Although tempted to contest a little in words with Seg over the relative values of my Clansmen’s horn and steel compound reflex bows, I desisted. The wind was just right. The trees selected and bent and staked. The grasses gathered.

Now only the flame remained to be kindled.

“Go down to the Lady Pulvia, Seg. Prepare them. You know the boat. If I am delayed — do not wait for me.”

“But—”

“Go, now—”

He handed me the bow, his face glowering. “I see that at a more suitable opportunity, Dray Prescot, I shall have to teach you some respect for a warrior of Erthyrdrin.”

“Willingly, my friend. I trust the good Zair will grant it—”

“Pagan gods!” he said, with a flash of cutting temper. “The mountaintops whereon the veiled Froyvil sends out his divine music from his golden and ivory harp would soon teach you the true values, my sad and unhappy friend.”

“As to that,” I said, taking the bow and squatting down to work, “I make no claims for Zair beyond those his followers make. And,” I added, looking up suddenly, “they have been known to claim by the edge of the sword.”

He made some kind of exasperated snort and hurried off down to the rock cave. I shook my head over Seg Segutorio. From what I had heard of Erthyrdrin, that mountainous promontory of the continent of Loh thrusting up into the Cyphren Sea between eastern Turismond and Vallia, he was a good representative of his race. They were reputed reckless and wild, forever screeching crazy songs and thrumming on their harps; yet I knew of the strong streak of realism stabilizing their characters and lending always the calculated risk to the actions that other men called foolhardy. So Seg was a longbowman. That could prove interesting.

The little bow whizzed rapidly back and forth twirling the drill of harder sturm-wood against its sturm-wood hole wherein chippings and dry grasses awaited the first ember. Gently and then with greater boldness I blew on the glow. You, who are so accustomed to flicking your finger for heat or light or a naked flame must remember that I had known flint and steel from childhood; perhaps I was a little quicker and defter at thus creating fire than a modern civilized man would be. It is of little consequence. By the time I had a twisted torch well alight, the flames pale and writhing in the twin suns’ rays, I figured that Seg must have reached the rock cave and gathered up our companions. He should be creeping cautiously down toward the beach now and, as I had judged him aright, taking every opportunity for cover the way provided. I walked across to the first bundle of grasses, wrapped and wadded around a flighting stone, where it lay poised on the forked-branch end of a sapling bent over and staked into the ground. Seg had sighted these rude catapults, and I had let him do that and had then merely checked them. He seemed to me to have done an excellent job. My ballistic knowledge had been gained at the breeches of twelve pounders and then all the way down to four pounders and up to thirty-two pounders, with one stint I looked back on with a grimace on the clumsy old forty-two pounders. In addition I had handled varters aboard swifters from Sanurkazz, and added to all this a natural eye for estimating distance and elevation and trajectory, and I knew myself, with all the necessary modesty required, to be a first-class shot. As I sliced through the first retaining fiber and released the first weighted bundle of flame I knew Seg Segutorio, also, to be a great marksman.

That first flaming missile arced into the suns-lit air, some smoke trailed from it, then it was a roaring mass of consuming flame arcing high and over and down onto the deck of a sorzart vessel. I ran along the line of staked-down tuffa trees, their supple stems bent into graceful arches, and I seemed somehow to sense all their necessary springing effort as they flung themselves erect once more. It seemed to me all of their essential nature was pent up in those supple stems. One after another the spouting missiles of destruction plunged down onto the decks of the sorzarts’ dromvilers. A pure pang of relief pierced me that the lizard-men would have no slaves chained to their dromvilers’ benches. Already flames were licking malevolently at masts and rigging, shooting from oar ports; already the most dreaded foe of the seaman was consuming the wooden vessels and I knew, not without another pang, that nothing could be done now until the dromvilers burned down to the waterline — and their sterns were drawn up on the beach. . .

This was a sight I need not stop to watch; this was a sight I did not care to stay to watch. It sickened me.

The necessity of the act alone could make me burn a ship. Halfway down toward the rock cave I halted and looked over the drop toward the beach. All eleven ships were blazing, although the one farthest away, which we had had to reach with a smaller incendiary missile, showed signs of resisting. Gangs of sorzarts were running like crazy people with buckets of seawater; others manned the pumps and streams of water jetted. I doubted they would hold back the flames. Once fire gets a hold aboard a wooden ship with her paint and tar and canvas and wood dried internally, there is practically no hope of extinguishing it.

At the cave I paused again, just to make sure they had gone. They had. On again and so down out of sight of the beach and around the last corner over the bluff above the fisher-folk’s jetty wall. Down there three figures struggled toward the boat we had chosen. The Lady Pulvia fell and Seg thrust the child at Caphlander and snatched up his mistress, slung her over his shoulder as he must have slung the bags of feed oats on her farm. They would reach the boat safely — and then I saw the group of sorzarts running from the heat and the smoke of their burning fleet. I looked down.

It was a long way — a hundred and fifty feet in Terrestrial measurement. The sea looked blue and calm and serene. Shadows flitted across that surface as smoke clouds wafted by. The twin suns shone in all their resplendent glory. And, away in distant Vallia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains waited for me. . . You have probably read of experiments carried out to test from what distance a man can safely fall without a parachute. There are remarkable cases on record. Impact velocities of the order of a hundred feet per second have resulted in the survival of the person — in what state depending very much on the angle of impact or entry into the water. I knew nothing of that, then. All I knew was that I had to get down to the beach rather quickly. There were things to be done down there which if left undone would bring the wrath of the Star Lords down on my mortal head.

Without stopping further to cogitate I put my arms out and dived.

Even now I can remember the sensations.

Free-fall diving from aircraft is a modern sport.

I have practiced it and enjoyed it.

Then, when I dived off the cliff in Proconia above a Pattelonian fishing village, with the sorzarts running with naked swords, I just dived and let what fates held me in their hands take control. Mind you, I did assume a diving position, and I entered the water straight. Confused images of that immense waterfall in the sacred River Aph billowed and echoed in my mind, and my whole body felt as though I had been compressed in some giant vise. Then I was cleaving through the water, down and down, seeing the daylight fade, feeling the growing resistance in the water, curving up, rising and rising until my head popped out and I could shake my hair and look back at the beach. That first gulp of air tasted very sweet.

The Lady Pulvia, Caphlander, and the child were in the boat. Seg had just hurled an assegai and brought down the leader of the band of vengeful sorzarts. I started to swim. When I scrambled out Seg accounted for four more and was crossing swords with the sixth. I must admit I had been extraordinarily lucky since neither the Star Lords nor the Savanti had taken a hand to preserve a life they might consider of use to them. Certainly the risk had been entirely of entry. The almost vertical cliffs of this coast had told me the water would be steep-to right up to the rock, deep and commodious enough for me to avoid knocking my brains out on the bottom. The overhang of the bluff assisted also. I had merely to swim around the tiny spit of land to reach the beach and Seg and the others.

“Hai Jikai!” I yelled. I drew my sword and slogged into the lizard-men. Seg circled a sword, thrust, recovered, shouted: “What kept you?”

A joke, a reprimand, mere bravado — I do not know. I never asked. But I felt a warm glow of elation at the presence of this black-haired and reckless man from Erthyrdrin. There was no time for nicety in that fight. We had to dispose of this band of sorzarts — there were about eight left — very rapidly before their comrades left off hurling ineffectual buckets of water over their burning ships and hastened to their assistance. No niceties — that meant hard, fierce, dirty fighting. Tricks I had learned boarding enemy ships of the line in the battle-smoke of Earth, tricks I had picked up with my Clansmen, even a few passes from those days as a bravo-fighter in Zenicce came in useful. All the miraculous-seeking swordplay given me by the disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy, of course, enabled me to stay ahead of my opponent, but some of the stunts I pulled would have turned a young college boy fencer of this Earth green.

Seg and I — we very quickly cleared the sorzarts away.

“The three boats on your side, Seg!” I yelled.

Without a word he did as I directed, and together we stove in the bottoms of the boats lying in this huddle. One boat, the largest, a fifty-footer, lay some distance off, toward where the bonfires of the dromvilers spouted flame and smoke.

I started for it, waving Seg back to the boat we had selected.

The Lady Pulvia na Upalion stood up in the bows of the boat. Very erect, she stood.

“Leave that boat!” she shouted. “They are coming! Look! Hurry back and push this boat into the sea!

Hurry!”

A further group following the non-reappearance of those sent to investigate, no doubt, was indeed running from the burning ships along the beach toward us. Suns-light glinted on their bronze and copper ornaments, from their tall golden helmets, and winked back from their naked weapons. I turned to the Lady Pulvia.

“Get out and help Seg and Caphlander push the boat out! Move yourself! Hurry!”

Then, before she could give vent to her outraged anger and surprise, I yelled at Seg: “Get the boat off, Seg! Make her help — and the Relt. I will swim out to you.” Then I hared off toward the remaining boat and the swiftly advancing party of sorzarts. When they saw me they shrilled their horrid war cries — but mere yelling has not so far harmed me at that distance.

Reaching the fifty-footer I stove the bottom in with four quick blows — not without once more that pang of displeasure at myself for this destruction of property that gave livelihood to the poor fisher-folk — and glared out to sea to get the best line for my swim.

The boat had not moved. The Lady Pulvia still stood in the bows, gesticulating to the two — Seg and Caphlander — who were vainly attempting to thrust the boat’s keel into the water. I kept down the immediate icy welling of rage. That, if I so chose, would come later. The boat felt thick and hard beneath my hands as I reached it. At any moment the sorzarts would be within assegai-casting range.

“All together!”

We heaved. The boat lurched, the keel screeched, it stuck — we all bent and thrust with desperate effort — and then the boat jerked and slid free into the water. I took Caphlander around the waist and fairly flung him up into the boat. Seg went in over the other side and I, after a last fierce thrust that sent the craft surging out into the tiny waves, leaped in after him.

At once I seized the oars Seg had readied and fell to. I rowed with a long swing and now all those horrific days of labor when I was an oar slave aboard the swifters of Magdag paid handsome dividends. The boat clove the water. Spray danced inboard. I bent and pulled, bent and pulled, and only incidentally was aware of Seg snatching an assegai from where it had plunged into the transom and, standing and balancing awkwardly, flinging it back into the throat of a sorzart prancing in fury on the beach. A few more assegais plunged in alongside and then they were hissing into the water astern of us. I steadied the rhythm of my stroke and glared with a most uncharitable wrath upon my Lady Pulvia na Upalion.

She saw that look, and her chin came up; then a deep flush spread over her cheeks and she lowered her eyes. She breathed unsteadily.

“The next time I give an order,” I told her, knowing that infernal rasp was back in my voice, “you will obey instantly, do you understand?”

She made no reply.

“Do you understand, Lady Pulvia?” I repeated.

Caphlander started to burble something about being respectful to the mistress, but Seg shut him up. At last she raised her eyes. She had evidently made up her mind to be cutting, authoritative, contemptuous. But she saw my face and her resolution and no doubt her set speech faltered. She opened her mouth.

“Obey — understand,” I said, not ceasing from rowing.

“Yes.”

“Very well.”

I rowed then in a simple long rhythm that sent the little boat out across the suns-lit waters of the Eye of the World.

Chapter Four

Rashoons command our course

I took no pleasure — on the contrary I experience no little shame — in thus browbeating a woman rightfully concerned over her child and attempting to uphold her own dignity and not give way to the fears that must have been clamoring to turn her into a sobbing ball of defenseless weakness. But there can be, as I know to my cost, only one captain aboard ship.

And — she was a slave-holder, and a representative of that class of authority most distasteful to me after my experiences in far-off Zenicce, and more lately in Magdag.

We sailed the muldavy with her dipping lug rig safely to the town, the port and arsenal and fortress of Happapat, and delivered the Lady Pulvia na Upalion into the hands of relations who cooed over her and the child and whisked her off to their palace.

When their guards — fair-haired Proconians clad in the iron ring mail of warriors all around the coasts of the inner sea, and armed with long swords that were not cut down — marched Seg and me off to the local barracoon, I felt no surprise whatsoever.

This kind of attitude on the part of slave-holders seemed inseparable from their nature, as abhorrent to Seg as to myself.

We wasted no time in breaking out, whooping, cracking a few skulls in the process, and with a couple of wineskins and a vosk thigh tastefully cooked and browned, we helter-skeltered off to the harbor. The fishing muldavy we had stolen in order to rescue the Lady Pulvia and her child and Caphlander lay still tied up where we had left her. In her, I knew, there was a full breaker of water. We tossed our meager belongings in and cut the painter — a gesture of defiance, that — and rowed out. We had the lugsail up and were foaming off into the suns-set long before the guards had pulled their scattered wits about them.

“And so, Dray Prescot,” said Seg Segutorio, “what now?”

I stared with a glad affection at this volatile man with the lean tanned face and those shrewd yet reckless eyes. He was a good sword-companion, and for a moment I remembered with a choked nostalgia all those other good companions I had known. I am essentially a lonely man, a loner, one who stands or falls on his own merits and I take ill to being beholden to anyone. This is a fault in me. I thought of Nath and Zolta, my two oar comrades, those two rascals who could not keep away from wine and women. And I remembered how Nath would lean back and quaff a full tankard, and wipe his forearm across his shining lips, and belch, and say: “Mother Zinzu the Blessed! I needed that!” and how Zolta would already have the prettiest girl in the inn perched laughing on his knee.

Sitting resting on the oars and looking at Seg Segutorio with an awakening awareness — I cannot dwell on that, as you will come to understand — I remembered Zorg of Felteraz, my other oar brother, and I thought of Prince Varden Wanek, and of Gloag, and of Hap Loder — and — and remember I was still young at the time as age is measured on Kregen — I wondered how it was that Seg Segutorio could sit on the opposite thwart and look back at me so cheerfully and say so matter-of-factly: “Well, Dray Prescot, and what now?”

These memories of my comrades affected me, and I admit to a tired, dejected, defeated feeling creeping over me then. You would be forgiven if, from all I have so far said, you jump to the conclusion that Kregen is essentially a man’s world. Despite the Princess Natema Cydones, and the Princess Susheeng, and other highborn ladies of enormous power, including among their number the Lady Pulvia na Upalion whom we had just rescued and delivered safely to her kinfolk, you might well think that Kregen is dominated by the male principle where brawn and muscle and fighting ability count for everything. You would, of course, be wrong.

Through this sudden gloom on my part for my old comrades I never for a single instant forgot my twin destiny on Kregen beneath the suns of Scorpio.

Whatever plans the Star Lords had mapped out for me as a troubleshooter, I held to my own purposes. First, I would find my beloved Delia of the Blue Mountains. And, when that had been accomplished, I would travel this world of Kregen to find my way back to Aphrasöe, the City of the Savanti, the Swinging City, for there I believed paradise awaited me. In all these simple and primitive emotions and ambitions I could still find joy that I did not seek vengeance.

We sailed out into the waters of the inner sea, and Seg appeared perfectly satisfied to allow me the conn and to run the muldavy. As he said, with a laugh: “We Erthyr are a mountain people. The sea is not a second home to us.”

The night breathed gently about us. The sea ran with a calmness that cradled the little boat. The stars glittered above our heads. The wind blew a mere zephyr.

I looked at the stars. I knew them well. I had studied them night after night from the deck of my swifter as we sailed in unexpected nocturnal raids against the overlords of Magdag, or any of the green cities of the northern shore. I had often shocked my crew by this nighttime sailing; their ideas were those of daytime sailing only and a safe beach at night.

I steered to the west.

It was necessary that I return to Magdag as soon as possible. From thence, before the rebellion, I had sent the Vallian Vomanus back to his home island with a message for Delia. He would return — that I knew with fair certainty — and if he landed at Magdag now, his life would be snuffed out in an instant as a friend of the arch-criminal Pur Dray of Strombor, Krozair, arch-fiend and deadly foe to Magdag. We steadied on our course west and the wind gusted up suddenly and heeled the muldavy so that water creamed in over the lee gunwale until I let her pay off a trifle. I frowned. The wind veered and strengthened. Now the stars were being blotted out in great clumps at a time as clouds gathered. A brilliant zigzag of fire split the heavens. The thunder, when it reached us, rolled and reverberated around our ears. Rain started to slice into the sea in an abrupt and deafening uproar. In moments we were soaked, our hair tangled about our ears. Seg started to bale. The wind blew directly from the west. I knew.

This storm not only confirmed my fears that the Star Lords would not allow me to return to Magdag, it also strengthened my suspicion that after my summary ejection from the fight as my slave phalanx in their old yellow-painted vosk-helmets raged on to tear the mailed overlords of Magdag to pieces the battle had swung against us. Perhaps I had overstepped my authority when I had really and truly organized the slaves and workers of the warrens so that they could actually win the fight against the overlords? Perhaps the Star Lords did not want the overlords of Magdag crushed and banished? It could be their plans called for whatever I had done to slumber a while, to gather subterranean strength, to smolder until at some time in the Star Lords’ plans for Kregen that spirit I had kindled with the help of the Prophet could burst out in renewed fury. I did not know.

What I did know was that I could not reach Magdag.

Very well, then. Gradually a kind of structure of devices for coping with the Star Lords — if this was truly their work and not the mortal but nonetheless superhuman work of the Savanti — was being wrought out in my mind. I had successfully appealed and been granted reprieve the last time, in that I had been permitted to stay on Kregen, in a dissimilar fashion to the way in which I had been reprieved at Akhram. The idea began to grow that provided I did not actively contest the dictates of the Star Lords

— The Everoinye — I might go about my own business on Kregen beneath Antares. Yes — very well, then. I put the steering oar up and we surged away on the starboard tack. I would go to Pattelonia. Vomanus would be there if I was lucky, and I could stop him from going on to Magdag. Then — then we would take over the Hostile Territories to Port Tavetus from whence we could sail direct for Vallia.

And then — Delia!

Immediately our bows swung to the eastward with the necessary touch of southerly in the heading for Pattelonia, the wind eased off and the rain ceased. Amid a last grumbling of thunder I heard the harsh croaking shriek as of a giant bird. I looked up. In the darkness I could not see the Gdoinye — but I knew without shadow of a doubt that the gorgeous scarlet and golden raptor of the Star Lords had swung over us in its wide hunting circles.

“In the name of the veiled Froyvil himself!” said Seg. He looked about. “What was that?”

“A seabird,” I said, “caught in the gale. It seems, friend Seg, we must sail to Pattelonia — rather the chief city on the eastern coast of Proconia than any other, yes? — and we will reach it safely, never fear. You asked me what now — this is your answer. What do you say?”

“Pattelonia.” Seg spat the name. “That may be the chief city, but the fighting-men disgust me.”

“Oh?”

He swagged up a wineskin and stoppered his mouth to the spout very expertly, as the boat surged along, considering he considered himself no sailor. When he had gulped and wiped his mouth and said,

“By Blessed Mother Zinzu, that fires up the cockles of my heart!” — and what a pang of Nath there was in that for me! — he went on to say: “I hired out as mercenary to Pattelonia in one of their infernal wars, you know?”

I nodded. “I know.”

His story was commonplace, ugly, and painful. Men of Loh could usually find employment as mercenaries without trouble, for their prowess as archers was renowned throughout the known lands of Kregen. Seg had entered the inner sea by the western end, through the Grand Canal past the Dam of Days. I reflected that he had seen that colossal construction; I had not. I forbore to mention that to him; it would arouse too many questions. His fighting career had been of the normal routine and monotonous kind associated with mercenary fighting; when the Pattelonians had been defeated by a combined force of a number of the Proconian cities assisted by Magdag, he had been captured and sold as slave.

“So Pattelonia fell,” I said.

“Mayhap. I did hear that Sanurkazz was coming to our assistance, but I tripped into that damned thorn-hole and was scooped up by a diabolical overlord before it did me any good.”

I made suitable sympathetic noises.

“There are friends in Pattelonia, Seg, although I have never been there. We will be returning to Vallia.”

This was a lie. I could never return to Vallia for I had never been there in the first place; but as I had told Kov Tharu of Vindelka, I thought of Vallia for all its frightening reputation as home simply because my Delia lived there.

“Vallia?” Seg drank more wine, his shape a dark expressive blot beneath the starlight. “I took passage aboard a ship of Pandahem. The Vallian was too dear. But I know Vallia — they maintain a great fortress depot on the northernmost tip of Erthyrdrin. Many times have my people gone down against them.”

“You don’t like Vallians?”

He laughed. “That was in the past. Since Walfarg broke apart like a rotten samphron the Vallians have been markedly more friendly toward us, and now we tolerate their fortress depot and it has grown into a sizable city, and we do business with them, for they are essentially a nation of traders.”

Walfarg was a name I had heard here and there, a mighty empire of the past which had broken apart. It had originated in Walfarg itself, a country of Loh, and some of the stories of Loh hung about its faded glories. There are many countries in the continents and islands of Kregen; only Vallia, as far as I know, boasts that it is a single land mass under one government.

And that boast was to cost it dear, as you shall hear.

“So you are for Pattelonia, then?”

“A pity, Dray Prescot, your friends could not await you at a point nearer the Dam of Days. From Pattelonia we have — oh, I am not sure of the distance, five hundred dwaburs, is it? — to cover before we even reach the outer ocean. Then we must sail south past skeleton coasts to Donengil and thus swing around up the Zim-Stream and so to the Cyphren Sea — and there, before us, lies Erthyrdrin!”

For the moment I was content to let Seg believe this.

He said, with a sharpness to his voice, “You are not a Vallian?”

Vallians, I knew from the example of the glorious hair of my Delia, were often brown-haired, as I am. I had successfully passed as Kov Drak in Magdag, acting the part of a Vallian duke. But I did not wish to lie unnecessarily to Seg Segutorio.

“I am Dray Prescot of Strombor,” I said.

“So you have told me. But — Strombor. Where might that be?”

Of course — what was now the enclave of Strombor would have been Esztercari for all Seg’s life. A fierce joy welled up in me as I thought of my Clansmen riding across the Great Plains of Segesthes, of the way with good friends’ help we had taken what was to become my enclave fortress of Strombor within the city of Zenicce.

“Strombor, Seg, is in Zenicce—”

“Ah! A Segesthan — well, even that I wonder about, for I call you a stranger of strangers, and I know what I know.”

“What do you know, Seg?”

But he would not answer. That fey quality associated with mountain folk must have alerted his senses; but I was doubtful that he could guess I came from a planet distant from Kregen by four hundred light-years.

He swung away from that as the muldavy creamed through the night sea and the stars once more reappeared above. The twin second moons of Kregen, the two that revolve one about the other as they orbit the planet, sailed above the horizon and in their wash of pinkish light, strengthened by the presence of two more of Kregen’s seven moons, I saw Seg watching me with an enclosed and contained look on his lean face. He brushed a hand through his black hair.

“Very well, Dray Prescot, of Strombor, I will go with you to Pattelonia.” He chuckled. “For all that the army in which I served lost the fight, the Proconians still owe me my fair hire, and they shall pay me.”

“Good, Seg,” was all I considered necessary to say.

“And I refuse by all the shattered targes in Mount Hlabro to return to slavery.”

We slept on and off during the night and when the twin suns rose to burn away a few patches of mist, there, broad on our larboard beam, lay one of the many islands that dot the inner sea. I steered to pass it with plenty of sea room, for islands are notorious as the lair of pirates and corsairs — I had used them enough times myself — when Seg noticed what I had seen and mentally filed as part of the habitual stock-taking of a sea officer the moment he reaches the deck.

He pointed aft where a low black and purple cloud like a massive bruise against the gleaming sky whirled onward.

“A rashoon!”

At the moment I was more concerned with the identity of the swifter shooting out from the lee of the island. She was large, that I could tell — and then as flags broke from her mast and flagpoles I saw their color. My lips compressed.

Every flag was green!

“A Magdag swifter,” I said to Seg. “Hold on — we are going into some fancy evolutions now—”

And then the rashoon enveloped us and we fought the lug down until I could control the muldavy in the screeching wind. The seas piled and knotted about us. We went sweeping on, and the swifter was left floundering. Even then I noted the seamanlike way in which her skipper brought her around and scuttled back with all his double-banks of oars stamping the sea in neat parallel lines, back into the shelter of the island. We were sent weltering past and out to sea. When the rashoon had blown itself out and we could get back to an even keel and rehoist the lugsail and take stock, I found Seg with an expression on his face which, allied to the green tinge around his jaws, gave me an odd feeling of compassion and unholy glee.

I offered him a thick juicy slice from the vosk thigh.

He refused.

It pains me now, in recollection, to think how badly I treated Seg Segutorio then as we hauled up for Pattelonia across the Eye of the World.

We called in at various islands on the way to water and to acquire fresh provisions, mostly fruit and vegetables, for we avoided the habitations of men and half-men. Seg told me much of his home in Erthyrdrin — which I shall relate when it becomes necessary — but one fact he told me made me think on.

“Arrow heads?” he said one day as we burbled across the sea with the limpid sky above. “You won’t find an Erthyr archer using steel in an arrow head. By Froyvil, Dray! Steel is hard to come by in my country.”

“So what do you use, bronze?”

He laughed. “Not a chance. It’s a pretty metal, is bronze, and I have an affection for it. But we use flint, Dray, good honest Erthyrin flint. Why, we kids could flint-knap as pretty a point as you could wish to see when we were three years old! And, mark you, flint will pierce solid lenk better than almost anything. Perhaps your steel is better, but not bronze, certainly not copper, or bone or horn, or even iron.”

I stored that away in my mind, thinking of the sleeting rain of arrows my Clansmen could put down. But then, the city of Zenicce controlled what was in effect a vast metallurgical industry, with immense iron deposits nearby with woodlands to furnish charcoal. The same was true of both Magdag and Sanurkazz here on the inner sea.

In talking into this little cassette tape recorder in these heartrending surroundings of famine and despair I have sometimes found it difficult to give a coherent account of Kregen. The planet is real, it is a living, breathing, fully-functioning world of real living people, both men and women and beast-men and beast-women besides all the monsters you could desire. Things happen there as they do on Earth, because necessity impels men to invent and to go on developing these inventions. There could be no long crisp loaves of Kregan bread without cornfields opening to the twin suns, with back-breaking labor to plow and plant and hoe and harvest, with mills to grind and bakers to bake. No man who values life can take anything that life offers for granted — even the air he breathes must be tended and cared for, otherwise the pollution that so worries you here on Earth will poison the uncaring hosts. So Seg and I talked as we sailed toward Pattelonia, the chief city of Proconia, and the city to which I had been posted as a swifter captain of the forces of Sanurkazz before I had taken off in that abortive journey to Vallia that had terminated back in Magdag, hereditary foe of Sanurkazz. Whoever ruled now in Pattelonia ruled by right of sword, whether red or green or Proconian. Navigation was simple; the suns and the stars kept me on course over seas I have never traversed before, and soon I calculated we must be approaching waters in which more traffic must be expected.

By this time Seg could take a trick at the steering oar and he it was who was conning the muldavy when another of those inconsiderate rashoons whirled down upon us in a whining torrent of wind and a lumping roaring sea.

At once I leaped to the dipping lug and rattled the yard down, leaving a mere peak to give us steerage way. White water began to sluice inboard and I took up the baler and started in on flinging it back from whence it had come. We steadied up and I could look back at Seg Segutorio. He clung onto the steering oar with a most ferocious expression on his face. He fought the waves with the same elemental force as he would expend in hunting among his beloved mountains of Erthyrdrin. He fought a new element with a courage and a high heart that warmed me.

Smiling and laughing do not come easily to me, except in some ludicrous or dangerous situations, as you know; but now I looked on Seg Segutorio and my lips widened in a mocking smile, an ironic grimace to which he responded with a savage wrench on the steering oar and a rolling string of blasphemies that burst about my head as the rashoon was bursting.

We rolled and rocked and I baled, and Seg hung onto his oar and kept our head up and steered us through. Again I look back in sorrow at the way I treated poor Seg Segutorio. He was a man to delight the heart.

When we came through it, Seg heaved in a tremendous breath, blew it out, glared at me, and then ignored me altogether. I did not laugh; now I am sorry I did not, for he expected it. Following the wild moments of the tempest in the inner sea — the rashoons varied as to name and nature

— we glided on over a sea that fell calm with only a long heaving swell. The broad ship lay low in the water, wrecked by the rashoon, her masts gone by the board and her people running about her decks in panic. Then we saw the cause of that alarm. Circling in toward the broad ship — a merchantman Seg told me by her devices as being from Pattelonia

— the long narrow wicked shape of a swifter cleft the water in absolute and arrogant knowledge of her own power. As we watched, the swifter broke her colors. All her flags were green. A swifter from Magdag! Attacking a broad ship from Pattelonia. From that I deduced that Sanurkazz had succeeded in retaking the city, and I felt a bound of delight.

Now if I have not made it clear that Seg Segutorio was reckless to the extreme, despite that streak of practicality, then I have not drawn the man aright. He stared at the green-bedecked swifter and his nostrils tightened up. He turned the steering oar so that our head bore on the two vessels.

“What, Seg, and you’re going to attack a Magdaggian swifter on your own?”

He looked at me as if he had not heard.

“She’s a big one, Seg. A hundred-and-fiftyswifter. I’d judge, by her lines, she’s a seven-six-six.”

The faint zephyr of wind bore us on.

“We don’t even have a knife, let alone a sword, Seg.”

Our prow rustled through the water.

Oh, how I regret baiting Seg Segutorio!

Perhaps, just perhaps, then, when I was young, I had not forgotten that forkful of dungy straw smacking me full in the face.

“They’re from Magdag,” Seg said. “They made me slave.”

We bore on over the sea and now the sound of shrieks and screams reached us, the ugly sound of metal on metal. I was a Krozair of Zy, dedicated to combating the false green Grodno — no other course occurred to me.

Chapter Five

The fight aboard the swifter

“It’s the oldest, hoariest trick there is, Seg,” I said as we slid through the calm water toward the Pattelonian broad ship and the Magdag swifter. “But it’s all we have to work with. It’s worked in the past and no doubt it will work again, in the future. All we’re concerned with now is that it works for us this time.”

“How many men, Dray?” was all Seg Segutorio said.

“The swifter’s a seven-six-six, one hundred and fifty. That means she has three banks of oars each side, twenty-five oars a bank. The upper deck oars are crewed by seven men each, the two lower banks by six men to an oar. That’s about a thousand men or more, given spare oarsmen carried below.”

“And all slave?”

“All slave.”

“You seem to know about these things, Dray.”

“I know.”

“And the warriors?”

“That varies. Depends on the purpose for which the swifter has been put into commission. I’d guess, again, that there won’t be less than a couple of hundred. If they’re on a big one, there will be a lot more.”

I thought of my days as a slave aboard swifters from Magdag. “They crowd the men, Seg. They keep them chained to the oars and they feed them water and onions and slop and cheese and they douse them out with seawater twice a day and they fling them overboard when they’re exhausted and all the strength has gone from them and they’re lashed to death.”

“We’re approaching nicely,” said Segutorio. He laughed. “All I regret is — I do not have my own longbow with me, my bow I made myself from the sacred Yerthyr tree that grew up on Kak Kakutorio’s land. He near caught me, the day I cut my stave. I was twelve, then. I built that bow for use when I’d gained my full stature — and when I did she balanced out just right. Kak’s tree was almost black, so dark and secret green it was. He near caught me—”

Seg checked himself. I saw the way his shoulders hunched. That streak of practical common sense had thrust hard at his reckless spirit and he could apprehend clearly just what we were getting into. He was driven by hatred for the green deity worshipers and by a habitual recklessness. I was impelled by my vows, my own dark memories — and because I was a Krozair of Zy.

Being privileged to be a member of the Order of Krozairs of Zy means a very great deal to me. That they are a small group of dedicated men tucked away in an inland sea on a planet four hundred light-years away, bound up with their fanatical adherence to a mythical red deity and in absolute opposition to an equally mythical green deity, has no bearing on their inner strengths, their gallantry, their selflessness, their mysticism — which contains profundities beyond profundities — their remarkable disciplines of the sword, their essential courageous integrity. These are qualities found only in a debased coinage on the Earth you inhabit today, it sometimes seems.

Seg Segutorio hated slavery and slave-holders — as did I. Yet only when I had been the captain of a Sanurkazzian swifter and a Krozair had I, too, employed slaves. They had rowed for me in conditions little better than those of my own misery when I had pulled for Magdag. This surely must mark the power of the Order of Krozairs of Zy over me. When I had attempted to free my slaves and had adopted free oarsmen I and my crew had been so close to a horrific and murderous end as to cause nightmares.[2]

So, thus thinking, I waited as the muldavy closed the final gap between us and the swifter’s stern. Everyone aboard had their attention occupied by the dying moments of the struggle to take possession of the broad ship. I had thought she was sinking; no doubt the swifter captain considered he could plunder her and take her people prisoners before she sank. Now the high upflung curve of the stern rose from the water before us.

The swell slopped us up and down. I stood up in the bows. The swifter was large and her apostis, the rectangular rowing frame, extended well out from the smooth curves of her hull. Her oarsmen, arranged alla scaloccio, still held to their looms as the blades were all, every one, in perfect alignment. Every now and again the drum-deldar would give a signal double-beat of his bass and tenor drums and precisely together all the oars of either the larboard or starboard banks would dip and give a short jabbing thrust to keep the swifter lined up against the broad ship, beak extended and jutting over her beam. I looked up the arrogantly upflung stern and put aside instinctive thoughts of equally arrogantly upflung tails of scorpions.

Among the elaborate scrollwork and what we would call gingerbread I found easy handholds. As my bare feet gripped and heaved me up so Seg followed. We were both unarmed. I wore simply the same strip of brown cloth taken from the sorzart, and Seg wore his gray slave breechclout. Carefully, now, I put a hand on the deck below the rail. One of the steering oars extended past my back. I lifted myself gently. I looked.

The steering-deldar lay on his oar, ready with curling movements to keep the head of the swifter against the broadship in time with his companion on the other side and the occasional thrusts from the oars. The drum-deldar would be sitting with his drumsticks poised, and the oar-master would be sitting in his little tabernacle below the break of the quarterdeck. An officer — very resplendent in green silk and gold lace

— strode about looking pleased with himself. I cursed his black Magdaggian heart. As carefully I lowered myself.

Seg was looking at me. His face was wrinkled up, his whole expression one of absolute distaste.

“They stink,” he said.

“Yes.”

Swifters are built on lines laid down by naval architects of varying talents. I recognized the lines of this example and I knew my way about her as slave or captain. We made an entry into the aft lower cabin —

what would on an Earthly seventy-four be called the gun room — and found the space deserted of life. Beyond the doors opening onto the lower or thalamite bank of oars lay the manpower I needed. This galley was of the cataphract variety so that her upper thranite banks of rowers were protected by a fenced bulwark. At the time I was still undecided, as I was undecided between the long keel and the short keel theories, whether the open un-bulwarked style, the aphract with its free passage of air, was better than the cataphract which did at least offer some protection from arrows. However that might be, that extra protection afforded us an extra level of concealment as we went about our work. First out of the double-folding doors I saw the nearest whip-deldar and before he could so much as turn I held him in a grip from which he slumped lifeless to the gangway.

The slaves stared up with lackluster eyes. Their heads were bushy mops, clear indication that the swifter had been at sea for some time, for the heads of oar slaves when they clear the mole at Magdag are shaved as smooth as a shot trimmed for a twenty-four pounder bowchaser. Seg started for the other whip-deldar at a dead run.

Down here in the odors and the confinement the whip-deldars took turns at duty, or received thalamite duty as a punishment.

The fellow I had dropped carried a knife. It took me only a few moments to pick the lock of the great chain to which all the other chains were attached.

The nearest slave looked at me in a puzzled fashion. His back carried the marks of his trade. The one next to him also looked up, his jaw slack and mumbling over broken, decaying teeth behind thick slobbering lips. I experienced a moment of despair.

These slaves were completely broken. Would they rise, as they must rise, if we were to succeed?

There would be no question here of an immediate flinging off of the great chain, a gathering of their own chains into vengeful fists, and an immediate abandonment of the habits of slavery. They must see what could be done. But — the lower deck held the recalcitrants as a rule, the troublemakers, the extra-tough. Had I disastrously miscalculated?

Then from that twin channel of upturned faces, bearded, filthy, a man clambered up dragging his chains. He stared at me.

“Pur Dray!”

I did not recognize him. But he knew me. I sensed the change, then. I heard the word “Krozair!” and I hurriedly raised my hands.

“Be silent! Free yourselves now the great chain is loosed. Keep the oars at the level — you know. We will free our comrades above — and then — silence!”

Of course, they could not keep silent Once the traumatic bludgeon of release had shocked them, once they suddenly realized that they need not be slaves again, there was no holding them. Whip-marked naked bodies began to spill out into the central gangway with its slits of sky above and the long rows of naked legs of the oarsmen of the upper two banks. A whip-deldar looked over his narrow split-deck and yelled. I hurled the knife as I had hurled the woman’s weapon of my Clansmen, the terchick, and he toppled over spouting blood from his mouth. I put my foot on his body and drew the knife from his throat. I rather cared for that economical use of a weapon. The slaves were clambering up the supporting timbers of the upper banks, hauling themselves up over the inboard ends of the oar looms where they rested in the level position within the patterned rowing-frames. They were screeching and yelling and waving their chains. I knew few of them would think to release their comrades; their minds were now shocked into one desire only — to kill the overlords of Magdag. Mind you — that was a desire I then considered eminently worthy — Zair forgive me.

Like some grundal of the rocks I went up hand over hand, the bloody knife between my teeth. That, I admit, is one time when I grin.

The twisted and pulped body of a whip-deldar crunched underfoot as I leaped for the locks of the zygites’ great chain. The knife point probed, there was a click clearly audible above the uproar, and then the zygites, prepared by the astonishing appearance of their fellows from below, were roaring and raging with chains in their fists.

A few arrows fleeted down and a slave shrieked and toppled back with a shaft through him. The crew had reacted swiftly.

I had not expected otherwise.

Only the overwhelming manpower of the slaves could win the swifter for us. It is difficult to conceive of the uproar and violence of those moments. In an exceedingly long and narrow space, a mere slot walled in by timbers and chains, naked hairy men howled and struggled to reach the light. Up we went and with us went Seg Segutorio, brandishing a whip with which he took the ankles from under a whip-deldar and so brought him screeching down into the merciless talons of the slaves. On the upper deck with its central gangway and gratings to either side over the lower banks the slaves were raging like a sea breaking against cliffs. The task of reaching the locks of the thranites’ great chain would be difficult. Already soldiers of Magdag in their iron-linked hauberks were running back from the bows. Arrows were flickering through the air. I took off in a long run toward the oar-master and his tabernacle. The drum-deldar let out a single long scream and went scuttling aft. Up there the officer I had seen drew his long sword.

I wanted that sword.

Still — the locks must come first. Then Seg was with me. His whip flicked the oar-master into a gibbering panic. I bent to the first lock and an arrow feathered into the deck at my side. The officer ran toward us, leaned over, shouting. His face, browned by wind and sun, looked in the last stages of apoplectic fury.

I clicked the lock, stood up, let fly the knife.

The officer gurgled, slumped, toppled down.

I caught the long sword as it spun through the air, taking its bone grip — which I dislike — leanly into my fist. It would have been a fine catch at first slip.

“Forward!” shouted Seg. “The rasts are waiting for us!”

Indeed, the battle to take the broad ship was over. Now the swifters crew and soldiers were turning about to face the frenzied slaves. We had begun with the lowest bank so as to avoid detection. Now that all the slaves were free nothing stopped us from hurling ourselves into the fight.

“Grab a sword first, Seg!” I yelled.

“Had I my bow—” he yelled back.

I sprinted forward along the gangway, hurdling various bodies, until I could thrust through the back of the press. Hundreds of slaves were crowding forward, waving their chains, humming them about their heads in deadly arcs. But many were going down as the swifter archers shot with flat trajectories, rapidly and professionally.

The struggle for me to reach the front ranks was severe; but in a few moments I pushed aside the body of a slave who, swinging his chains, had been thrust through the belly, by a long sword. I stepped out, the long sword held in the fighting grip of the Krozairs of Zy.

Blades crossed. An arrow brushed through my hair. I kept on the move. The long sword was a fine weapon despite its bone grip and I felt it slog crushingly into the rib cage of the first Magdaggian, biting through the mesh. He fell away. There was another, whose face above the ventail I smashed in. More arrows were fleeting past — then I realized some were going the other way. An overlord before me abruptly threw his hands in the air, dropping his sword. An arrow stood out from his right eye. Seg Segutorio had found himself a weapon he knew how to use and was in action. Now the sheer mass of slaves told. Perhaps there were as many as three hundred men of Magdag aboard: overlords, overlords of the second class, soldiers, and crew. Of them all the captain of the swifter seemed alone to be alive as I reached the entrance ramp onto the lower beak. The scene was fantastic. The whole upperworks of the swifter were crowded with the naked bodies of slaves, all howling and screeching like — no, not like, they were — demented souls. I knew what emotions they were experiencing.

The long extended beak of the swifter hung over the water-slopping deck of the merchantman. She had had two masts, their stumps now jagged tangles among the raffle of wreckage, so she was a fair-sized craft. Her forecastle — it was that, proper, and not a fo’c’sle — had been badly battered by the swifter’s varters. These were mounted somewhat higher in the bows of the galley than I considered proper, and had been rigged to hurl stones, as was fit in the circumstances. The merchantman’s sterncastle, an imposing edifice of two decks, was cluttered by the raffle fallen from the mainmast. Bodies lay everywhere.

The swifter captain glared up at me. He was a big man, his mail bulging, his long sword a weapon of exceptional size. Around him among the circle of slain slaves lay sprawled other men in mail and half-mail, mercenary marines carried by the merchantman.

“Hail!” he called up.

He waved his sword in a gesture that plainly said: “Come down here where I can chop you.”

He knew that against all those enraged slaves he had no chance of survival. He was of Magdag — yet he was a brave man. Even then, when I was young and bore a hatred for the green burning in my breast, I recognized a man’s courage.

I leaped down to him.

With only a breechclout to cover my nakedness I fought at a disadvantage against his mail. But also, against his knowledge that he was doomed and his desperate determination to make a fight of it and die well, I could put my skill and my own determination, the red against the green. Our blades crossed once, and I felt the strength in his arm.

The broad ship lurched beneath our feet as water gushed in.

“You will die, slave, and join your fellows here!”

I did not answer. Again the blades crossed and I swung on the disengage, but be was quick even on that cumbered deck and avoided my blow. He bore down on me, anxious to kill me and take as many as he could with him to the ice floes of Sicce.

A slave shouted from the deck, high and exultant.

“Jikai! Chop him, Pur Dray, my Lord of Strombor, Krozair!”

The swifter captain’s blade faltered. He drew back. On his face grew such a look of fury and despair as sickened me to see.

“You—” he choked. “You are the Lord of Strombor — Krozair!”

Without bothering to reply — for I felt the broad ship’s sluggish wallowing movements and knew she would go down any instant — I leaped forward. And now our blades clanged and rang with that ferocious screech of steel blade on steel blade. He was good and he was strong but I was in a hurry now and in a quick passage of murderous blows he fell.

Someone shouted: “The ship’s going!”

And amid the tumultuous shouts of the freed slaves as they saw the hated Magdag overlord dead at their feet I leaped nimbly up onto the swifter’s beak. A florid but sea-bitten man rushed forward, his slashed blue finery proclaiming him the captain of the merchantman.

Seg was there and with the help of slaves who seemed to carry some authority among their fellows a space was cleared. The merchant skipper grasped my left hand, babbling his thanks. His ship had gone, but his life was safe. Overside now the broad ship wallowed deeper, and thrashing around her and waiting for their grisly harvest the chanks with their twin stiff upright fins, the sharks of the inner sea, patrolled hungrily.

“May Ta’temsk shine upon you, my Lord of Strombor!” He let my hand go as I began to strip away the bloodied brown rag from my loins. “We fought as well as we could, but the rashoon dismasted us. My crew fought like demons, as you can see — even my passengers fought — ah, how they fought—”

“Passengers?” I had found a length of red cloth wound about the body of a dead man — evidently one of the passengers the merchant skipper was speaking of — and I wrapped it around my waist and drew the end up between my legs and tucked it in. The brave scarlet color cheered me. “Yes — a strange lot. The men fought like men possessed. Look, Pur Dray — there is one now, dying, and yet still he thinks he fights.”

Hauled out of the way beneath a varter a man lay dying. What the skipper said was true, for he kept opening his arms wide and closing them again in the rapier and main-gauche drill known as the “flower”

although his right hand was empty. He wore long black boots and a snug-waisted brown coat which flared wide over his hips and up to his shoulders. He wore no hat, but I could guess what sort of hat he would own. In his left hand he carried a bejeweled main-gauche with which he kept up his laborious flow of passages at arms.

I knelt by his side.

“You were with Vomanus?” I said. I spoke as gently as I might, but my words cracked harsh and impatiently for all that.

“Vallians,” said the merchant skipper. “A strange lot.”

“Sterncastle,” gasped the dying man. Blood dribbled from his mouth. I looked up at the broadship’s captain.

“Alas, my Lord of Strombor. The men of Vallia were insistent that every care should be taken of the passengers and so on my orders they were shut up in the Sterncastle, for safekeeping. But the fall of the mainmast, and the ferocity of the attack — we could not get them out. I fear they are doomed.” I was puzzled. Granted that Vomanus had shipped aboard this vessel now sinking into a chank-infested sea, I couldn’t understand my not seeing him. He would never be shut up in a safe place when there was a fight brewing. The Vallian was young, handsome, with a long brown moustache and neatly trimmed beard. He tried to speak, spat blood, tried again, managed to blurt out: “They must be saved!”

“There is no saving them now,” said the captain, with a grim nod at the decks of his ship about to submerge beneath the water and the twin fins of the chanks circling nearer. “My old ship is taking them to their grave, may Ta’temsk smile on them.”

The dying Vallian opened his eyes and there was reason in them. He had stopped his ghastly phantom swordplay. I took the dagger from him, gently, respectfully. Blood gushed from his mouth as he burst into an impassioned and mortal shout.

“You must save her! She is trapped, drowning, doomed — you must! The Princess Majestrix of Vallia!

Princess—”

The blood choked him. I felt — I thought — I —

Delia! My Delia! Delia!

Chapter Six

Delia of Delphond and I swim together

I have no memory until I stood before the doors to the broad ship’s aftercastle with its hideous tangle of wreckage blocking them off, tearing at them with my bare hands, the dagger naked in my clenched teeth. It was all a long time ago and four hundred light-years distant, a drama played out on a distant sea beneath the lurid fires of the twin suns of Antares; and yet — and yet!

Water slopped about my thighs, pouring in an ever-thickening flood over the gunwales. I heaved timber aside, used the keen dagger edge to slash through water-soaked ropes. I reached the door and now I became aware of the yells and shouts from the swifter.

“It is too late!” “Come back!” “You will be drowned!” and — “My Lord — the chanks!”

I ignored the jabbering.

A stubborn balk impeded me and I put my shoulders to it — those shoulders that had been the despair of my ever-sewing mother — and heaved up until the blood seemed to compress all my brains and threatened to burst from my eyes and nostrils. My muscles rippled and bunched and I heaved — how I heaved!

With an abrupt screech the balk slid aside and I lurched forward into the doors. I used that lurch —

there was no time to draw back — and smashed solidly into them. I heard metal snap. Water roiled around my waist now and I felt the ship wallowing and lurching like a drunk staggering from The Fleeced Ponsho in Sanurkazz.

I kicked the doors in and a frenzied woman was in my arms, all dark hair about my face like damp laundry, and softness against my naked chest, and a screaming mouth and fiercely clawing fingers. A voice yelled in my ear.

“Pass her back!”

“Here, Seg.”

I knew it was him, and there was no time for my gratitude. He was no seaman, he could probably swim with a dog-crawl; he was risking more than I here, on the deck of this sinking ship. I plunged into the cabin.

The whole ship shuddered and the ominous roar of thousands of gallons of water suddenly victorious pouring into her told me she was gone. Water smashed me forward and I swirled around in the sudden green gloom.

With the dagger between my teeth again I held my breath.

And then—

Delia! My Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond was once more in my arms and I held her dear form to me in that water-choked cabin of a sinking ship. I felt her waist as lissome and as lithe as I remembered, and I swung around and struck out for the door. Timber and cordage and canvas floated like octopuses with groping tendrils, seeking to ensnare us and drag us back. But we pushed through the door and the gloom decreased. Light struck down from above. I kicked with a savage exultant fierceness and we rose upward.

I could see the whole extent of the deck of the broad ship with only a few bubbles bursting from her shattered hatches and all the miserable aftermath of the battle. And, among those twisted shapes of corpses, hunting like ghouls, the long sinuous shapes of the chanks nosed in from all sides. We broke surface.

The swifter’s proembolion had nudged off the sinking merchantman. She moved now some distance away. Nearer to us swam the little muldavy in which Seg and I had escaped from Happapat. We had to reach that before the chanks reached us.

I looked down.

Too late. . . The chank was already here, was nosing up with that characteristic shark-like belly roll to expose all his corpse-white underbelly. I thrust Delia away from me, took the dagger into my right hand.

“Swim for the boat, Delia! Swim! ”

The breath I drew in scorched my lungs. I dived. The chank saw me coming and half rolled. I went with him. I would not grasp his pseudo-scaled skin for those scales would lacerate my own human flesh like rasps.

As he rolled so I rolled with him and nicked aside so that his gape-jawed attack sliced water. As he went past I thrust the dagger in as hard and as fast as I could. Blood poured out to roil in a thick cloud-like mass in the water. He went on and slowly began to roll, his tail seesawing. A quick look around showed me no more ominous shapes immediately in my vicinity and I kicked hard after Delia. The water was limpid clear, with the surface, the exotic silver sky, all rippled and chiaroscuro-shot with color.

I caught Delia around the waist and heaved her up into the muldavy. I had to be sure.

I ducked down and, sure enough, another chank was circling in. He would razor off my legs before I could scramble into the boat. As I went under again I headed straight for him. He moved aside, those immense jaws gaping, then straightened and headed for me, trying to roll sideways at me. Chanks only need to roll over to seize their prey when it is above them on the surface. Otherwise they are quite capable of gulping a man down from any position.

I went with him, then scissored my legs in a frantic explosion of energy, scythed around his thrusting snout, and buried the dagger six times into his belly. Blood streamed out like a wake. He went on, turning slowly, and I glared up against the radiance. The curved wedge-shape of the muldavy’s bottom showed like a balloon against that silver sky, water-rippled. I shot up stiff-legged, burst from the water, hooked an arm over the gunwale, and hauled. I could feel the expected snap of gigantic chank jaws and expected to pull a legless torso aboard.

When my feet hit the bottom boards the jolt came as a reassuring bolt. I was light-headed, for I would not have attempted to leave the water had I anticipated the chank could return to the attack before I could clear the surface.

The muldavy bounced.

The chank — or another — had returned and was trying to overset us. I saw Delia standing up, lithe and lovely in a blue short skirt and tunic, hefting the water breaker up over her head. She tensed and then, whoosh — down went the water breaker over the side to bash the chank on the snout. With a flick of his tail he took himself off.

She stood there above me, gazing down, her water-soaked garments shining and clinging, and she smiled — she smiled!

“Dray!”

We were in each other’s arms, then, and if the muldavy had rolled over spilling us into the chank-swarming sea I do not believe we would have noticed.

When we returned to a semblance of sanity a hail reached us and I saw the swifter turning and moving gently down on us, twenty or thirty oars clumsily splashing. Seg shouted again.

“You are all right?”

I waved and shouted something.

“Thank the veiled Froyvil for that, then!”

“Thelda!” Delia said suddenly, her sweet face changing expression to one of concerned alarm.

“If that is the buxom hell-cat who near scratched my eyes out back there in the cabin,” I said, “friend Seg took her off me. Thank the Black Chunkrah,” I added, lapsing into a blasphemy of my Clansmen.

“I am glad,” Delia said. “For Thelda means well.” And she laughed in that old thrilling spine-tingling way. How incomparable a woman is my Delia of the Blue Mountains!

The muldavy was hoisted aboard the swifter. Thelda rushed to Delia and gathered her in her arms, cooing and sighing and sobbing. Thelda’s hair, already drying in the suns-light, was a darker, deeper brown than Delia’s without those glorious auburn highlights. She tended to plumpness — I would not go so far as to say fatness — and she bubbled with eagerness. She was all over Delia. Her ripe red lips smiled easily. I saw Seg giving her his undivided attention, and sighed, for I foresaw only problems for him there. In that, as you will hear, I sadly underestimated the whole truth. Somewhat on the stocky side was Thelda, but she was built magnificently, with thick ankles somewhat detracting from her attempts at languorous beauty when she remembered to forget her eagerness. I cannot be too cruel to Thelda, for Delia clearly suffered her with a good heart. The first order was obtained. With so many men aboard unchained I had thoughts of mass rape; but the knowledge that I was Pur Dray, the Lord of Strombor, a famed and feared Krozair of Zy, corsair of the Eye of the World, had impressed the ex-slaves. Very willingly they agreed to return to their oar benches, this time as free men, and pull for Sanurkazz. I took hands with many of them, and was not surprised to feel that secret sign of the Krozair from many of them. Also there were men of The Red Brethren of Lizz, and others from the Krozairs of Zamu — famous fighting Orders of Chivalry dedicated to Zair. But none, as I had known even before I was one, as strict, as famous, as notorious where it mattered as the Krozairs of Zy.

One of the ex-slaves who had given me the secret sign, a man of superlative musculature, as must any man possess if he is to survive at the oar, a massive black beard and a head of that curly black Sanurkazzian hair, gripped my hand and said: “You do not recognize me, Pur Dray?”

I studied him closely. Seg was taking care of the girls as I sorted out the swifter. I shook my head, then halted that instinctive negative.

“By Zim-Zair! Pur Mazak! Pur Mazak, Lord of Frentozz!”

We clasped hands again.

“We shared a raid against Goforeng, you and I, Pur Dray. You with your Zorg and I with my Heart of Zair. You recall?”

“Can I forget! We took — what was it? — twelve broadships and dispatched three large swifters into the bargain! Great days, Pur Mazak.”

“Aye, great days.”

“Well. They will come again for you.” I had made a decision. We must pull for Sanurkazz. Now I had Delia with me again we might spend a little time on the inner sea, for there were things still to be done there.

But as soon as we settled down on our course, south with a heading of west in it, that damnable gale got up, the sea rose, lightnings and thunders raged and roared. I shouted to the helm-deldars — men from the slave benches who had been rudder-deldars before their capture — to ease off and head east. As miraculously as it had arisen, the gale, which was not a rashoon, died away.

“Pattelonia,” I said to Delia, and I saw her face light up.

Arrangements were speedily made.

Clearly, the Star Lords wanted me out of the inner sea. Well, that suited me well enough. I felt sincere regret that I would not again see — for how long I knew not — my two oar comrades and rascals, Nath and Zolta, or Pur Zenkiren, or dear Mayfwy — I had wanted muchly for Delia and Mayfwy to meet, for I could not express adequately the thanks I owed Mayfwy, widow of my oar comrade and friend Pur Zorg.

As for Delia, she had loyally agreed to accompany me to Sanurkazz, but there was no denying her joy that we were to go directly to Pattelonia and from thence to Vallia. There was no problem over who would command the swifter we had captured — her name was Sword of Genodras — and I clasped hands again with Pur Mazak and entrusted him with the ship.

“She is a fine vessel, even if the apostis is a trifle bulky for my taste,” I said. “I would be inclined to pack a few more benches in along the upper deck — but that is of another time.” Mazak looked at me with the calm firm gaze of a true brother in Zy, and I knew the prize was in good hands. I gave him instructions that should the king, Zo, allow, Sword of Genodras should be bought into the service under the aegis of Felteraz, for I owed Mayfwy much. “At any rate,” I said. “My shares go to the Lady Mayfwy of Felteraz. You will speak with my agent, Shallan, who is as honest a rogue as any agent can ever be. And now, Zair go with you, Pur Mazak.”

“Remberee!” The shouts came across the water as the swifter gathered way. Delia, Thelda, Seg, and I watched from the muldavy which had been hoisted over the side and fully provisioned and watered.

“Remberee!” and “Remberee!”

From the mass of booty and other materials in the aft cabins I had selected a number of fine Sanurkazzian long swords. Also I had fine silks from Pandahem, and leather of Sanurkazz, cloaks woven from the finest curly ponsho wool from Wloclef and, to prove how villainous a character I am, there was also a strong leather purse bulging with silver and golden oars of Magdag, as well as the varied currency of the southern shore. Seg had also helped himself, and in particular had taken a full score of the small bows. He grumbled about them, their puniness, with which I fully agreed. Nonetheless, I felt safer — if I may admit to such a feeling, for Delia was now in my safekeeping — with the archer from Erthyrdrin aboard.

As we hoisted the dipping lug and set sail for Pattelonia, I was able to hear Delia’s story. Characteristically, she remained silent about the parts I could guess had given her the most problems. Vomanus, whom I had sent with a reassuring message to Vallia, had told his princess and then had been sent off on some errand or other by Delia’s father, the emperor. Instead of Vomanus returning with an airboat for me, he was traveling in the opposite direction, toward Segesthes, and nothing was done about me. I fully understood about that, for I knew a little of the fierce opposition aroused in Vallian political circles by the Princess Majestrix’s decision to marry an unknown near-barbarian Clansman, for all he styled himself the Lord of Strombor. So — Delia had immediately set about flying herself. With a few trusted companions of her personal guard, and with her lady companion, Thelda, she took off. There had been no trouble at Pattelonia after the long flight across the fearsome mountain ranges collectively entitled The Stratemsk that walled off the inner sea from eastern Turismond. The broad ship had been sailing, and Delia had taken passage, intending to transfer subsequently and so find her way to Magdag. I shuddered to think what would have happened had she arrived at that wicked city and fallen into the hands of the Princess Susheeng, or those of her evil brother, Glycas; for I was growing more and more convinced as I pondered the matter that the Star Lords had ensured my old vosk-skulls would not overcome in their revolt.

A keen sorrow for her slain guards made Delia need the comfort I could give her in my rough way.

“But, Dray — you are safe! I sometimes feel what a monster I am when I consider that I really cannot regret anyone’s death if it helps you — my poor lads died in vain, but you are alive!”

She was no monster. I knew without a trace of remorse that I would wade through seas of blood if necessary so that not one hair of my Delia’s head should be harmed. Kregen is a world of violence and ugliness as well as a wonderful world of vivid life and beauty and love. Condemn me as you will. I know where my loyalties lie.

Thelda made a great fuss of me. She fussed and fussed, until I felt stultified, and poor Seg, who was getting absolutely nowhere with the buxom girl, glowered and took himself off to the foresheets to fiddle with his little bows.

Delia laughed and joyed in my discomfort, whereat I longed to take her in my arms and show her just who it was I required attentions from. As it was, we made a somewhat strange little party sailing across the eastern end of the Eye of the World to the Proconian shore and the city of Pattelonia. We reached the island city without incident and I felt a great leap of joy as I saw the multitudes of red flags floating above the ramparts and the towers and the long seawalls. So Sanurkazz still held the city —

we sailed in feeling in very much of a holiday mood.

Chapter Seven

Thelda cuts hair and Seg cuts a bow-stave

Thelda it was who insisted on trimming my shaggy mop of hair, my long fierce moustache and my beard before we entered harbor. My hair was normally worn quite straight and almost to my shoulders. My moustache is of that kind that juts most arrogantly upward — sometimes I despair of its unruly nature —

and my beard of that trimmed and pointed kind associated with cavaliers, lace, and rapiers. As a sea officer of wooden ships on Earth in the last days of the eighteenth century I had of course been clean-shaven; very often I reverted to shaving, but I had vowed never to return to wearing the queue. The custom of growing a great long mass of hair so that it may be twisted up and worn as padding and protection beneath a helmet is a survival of primitive times in the evolution of ever-more sophisticated armor. I prefer a properly padded helmet — or basinet, sallet or, perhaps a favorite with me, a burgonet

— and neatly trimmed hair.

All the time Thelda whickered the long dagger about my head and clumps of my brown hair tumbled onto the bottom boards, Seg sat glowering on a thwart. Fighting-men require haircuts as do other people. Merely to rely on a band around the head can be fatal in battle when a shrewd stroke can split the band to release a mop of thick uncut hair to shroud the face and obscure vision; you may wake up in some celestial barbershop in the sky with the blood still oozing from the wound your foeman’s steel snickered in when you were brushing the hair from your eyes.

Delia caught my eye. She was lolling back with the steering oar tucked neatly into its notch and held in her small capable hands. She was laughing at me without moving a muscle of her gorgeous face! She was thoroughly enjoying my discomfiture as I sat shifting on the thwart, muttering and mumbling, wincing as the dagger sliced perilously close past my ear. I glared back at her and made a face whereat she burst into a peal of laughter that would have turned them all out of heaven to listen.

“It was sweet of Thelda to think of your hair, was it not, Dray Prescot?”

“Huh,” I said, and then added, quickly: “Of course. Yes. Thank you, Thelda.”

She lowered her eyes and a flush stained her cheeks.

I had to finish this somehow.

“And now it is Seg’s turn—”

But Seg said: “I am happy as I am, shaggy as a thyrrix.”

Delia chuckled with delight. She had seen me before when I myself was as disreputable as any mountain thyrrix, that grundal-nimble animal of the mountains of Seg’s home, and I knew so long as I was all in one piece that was enough; she would take me as I was.

“For the man who wants to marry the Princess Majestrix,” said Thelda, her habitual pushing eagerness evident, “you must take more pride in your appearance, Dray Prescot.”

The mole drew closer as we approached and I could see the usual waterfront activity. The pharos here stood a good hundred feet less in height than the one at Sanurkazz. Nonetheless the smoke that curled from its summit by day and the light by night could be seen well out to sea. Whoever was in command here then, whether Proconian or Sanurkazzian, must feel confident. The overlords of Magdag must have been pushed back, they and their Proconian allies defeated, at least temporarily. Interference in an internecine war is never pleasant; and in the usual way Sanurkazz left Proconia strictly alone in the interminable feuds they waged; but once the green of Genodras had made its loathsome appearance the red of Zair must reply.

When we touched the jetty I was first out of the boat.

This was habitual; this was a mistake — I heard Thelda gasp and then I had turned and leaning down seized Delia under the armpits and swung her high into the air before setting her feet on the stones.

“There!” I said, to cover my lapse. “I may not look the part as the future consort to the Princess Majestrix of Vallia, but I do know how to help a lady from a boat.”

Delia knew, of course, and she laughed back at me, and leaned close so that all her intoxicating scent wafted into my nostrils, dizzying me, and whispered close to my ear: “Poor Thelda — you mustn’t mind her, dear heart — she means well.”

We made the necessary calls on the port authorities, and were cleared for entry, for the peoples of the inner sea are more than somewhat lax over quarantine regulations. And the ideas of customs and excise which they employ are either barbaric — if you are on the paying end — or remarkably mild — if you are trying to build the seawalls of your city. We were rapidly able to walk up to the hostelry from which Delia, Thelda, and her young men had started off. Everywhere mixed up with the Pattelonian soldiery were the armed and armored men of Sanurkazz, fraternizing with them, laughing, arms draped over shoulders, engaging in friendly drinking bouts at the taverns, chasing wenches in the customary tactful way of the men from the southern shore. Evidently, a battle had recently been successfully fought and won. A messenger arrived at the hostelry as I was downing a blackjack of Chremson wine — a vintage I had found as much to my taste as the superlative Zond wine so favored by Nath. The messenger brought news that came as a staggering surprise and a most joyful reunion. Four sectrixes had been provided, richly harnessed, and the messenger led us up through the terraced avenues of the city, wending past palace and villa, workshop and store, until we reached the lofty eminence of the governor’s palace. Away on a neighboring hill, distinct in the limpid air, the palace of the Pattelonian ruler showed a multitude of Proconian flags. Where we stood the air seemed filled with the red banners of Zair.

From this height we could see around the curve of the island to the mainland side and there harsh black scars in the blocks of white houses showed where the city had burned. The struggle to take and retake Pattelonia had been severe, I could see easily enough. Also from here we could see the naval harbor with its placid waters disturbed by the passage of swifters, in and out. The long galleys lay ranked alongside the jetties and the columns of men carrying stores out to them wended like armies of warrior ants from the African jungles.

I recognized some of the swifters down there. But I could not wait now to count them and to check their condition and to remember. I heard a firm tread on the flagstones, and swung around, my hand outstretched in greeting.

“Lahal, Pur Dray!”

“Lahal, Pur Zenkiren!”

Our hands met and clasped in the firm grip of friendship and brotherhood in Zy. He looked just the same, Zenkiren of Sanurkazz, tall and limber, with that bronzed fearless face, that fiercely up-brushed black moustache below his carved beak of a nose, that shining mass of curled black hair. On his white tunic above the apron the coruscating device of the hubless spoked wheel within the circle, embroidered in silks of blue and orange and yellow, blazed into my eyes. He smiled with warm affection upon me and I leaped in my heart to see him again, and although I did not smile the pressure of my hand told him of my joy in seeing him. He knew me — or that me who had fought as a Krozair and a swifter captain on the Eye of the World — did Pur Zenkiren, Krozair of Zy, admiral in the king’s fleet, Grand Archbold elect of the Krozairs of Zy.

Introductions were made, and I noticed the courtly way in which Zenkiren treated my Delia. He did not miss our own heightened emotions, so that when I asked him of Mayfwy he replied she was well, that her son and daughter prospered, that she remained still a widow, not remarried, and that she missed seeing me. Nath and Zolta I heard, to my disappointment, had gone a-roving aboard a swifter into the western end of the inner sea. I would not achieve this joyful reunion with those two rogues here, then. Seg, who I felt with an uncomfortable start of guilt, must have been feeling a little left out in all this handshaking and greetings, said: “Mayhap you will see them on your way through the Grand Canal and past the Dam of Days.”

I looked at him, bemused for a moment. Then Delia nudged me and I managed to reply something and went on to tell Zenkiren of all that had happened to me since we had said “Remberee” in Sanurkazz. We went into the palace and were served wine and we helped ourselves to a heaping pile of palines from a silver dish. Time passed most pleasantly. I urged Zenkiren that now was the time to strike at Magdag. He agreed, and immediately sent off messages to the king, Zo, in Sanurkazz.

“My duty lies here, Dray, to help our Pattelonian allies against their foes and the devils from Magdag. I urge you, Pur Dray, now you have found your Delia of the Blue Mountains, to remain here. There is much to be done. We are pushing them back. Our army has gained success after success. Soon the call we all long for will go out, and all the men of Zair will rise and go up against the evil of Grodno.”

“Greatly would I desire to do that, Zenkiren. But—”

The twin suns were slipping into the sea, far away across the western horizon. I persuaded Zenkiren to order a fleet liburna out. As we stood on the poop — she had no quarterdeck — and watched the single banks of oars, three men to an oar, pulling in that metronomic rhythm inseparable from the ideal of the swifter, I waited with apprehension.

That apprehension was for what I hoped would not occur.

But it did.

The wind roared, the sea got up, the thunders and the lightnings cracked and fizzled about us. We turned for the harbor and the gale dropped.

“I do not care to inquire too closely into these things,” said Zenkiren, with a gravity habitual to him in weighty affairs. “No doubt Pur Zazz could fathom the meaning. But I take your point. You are fated to travel east — away over The Stratemsk, over the Hostile Territories. I wish you well, Brother, for the way is difficult, Zair knows.”

“Pur Zazz has told me of many marvels and wonders in the Hostile Territories. I am happy to know the Grand Archbold still lives.”

“Zair has him in his keeping, Dray. I pray he will live until my work here is accomplished.”

I knew what he meant.

“When you are Grand Archbold, Zenkiren, and the call comes for all the Krozairs of Zy to answer — I will not fail.”

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. But he was a sad man that I could not go with him on this last expedition against the forces of Magdag arrayed against us in the eastern end of the Eye of the World. I believe that Delia took an opportunity to speak privately to Zenkiren, and can guess at some of the many questions she asked about my life on the inner sea, and that she asked about Mayfwy, too; I am glad that when we two spoke of these things together we could be absolutely frank with each other. Mayfwy, the widow of my friend Zorg of Felteraz, was a wonderful person and a glorious girl; but there can only ever be one woman in my life — my Delia, my Delia of Delphond!

Still and all, I gave Zenkiren the charge of making sure that my agent Shallan got the best price for the prize swifter Sword of Genodras and that all my shares should be paid to Mayfwy.

“After all, young Zorg will be growing up soon, and he must command the finest swifter that can be provided,” I said. My old oar comrade Zorg — I would not let his widow or his son or daughter suffer if any way lay open to me to prevent it. I knew my two rascals, Nath and Zolta, felt exactly the same way. During the short time we spent at Pattelonia, in a sense getting our wind for the next stage of our journey to Vallia, Seg kept much to himself. He was still trying his best to win some sign of recognition from Thelda, but she persisted in her fussing smothering of me, much to my annoyance and Delia’s hidden and mocking amusement.

Seg came in one day bearing a monstrous stave of wood of so dark a green as to appear black. He flicked it about, speaking slightingly of it, but he was pleased.

“This is not true Yerthyr wood,” he said. “The Yerthyr tree is deadly poisonous to the weak animals hereabouts, and the people do not like to grow it. In Erthyrdrin our nimble thyrrixes are able to digest the wood and bark and the leaves in their second stomach.”

“So?”

“This stave will make a passable bow-stave after I have dealt with it.” He ran his thumb along it, feeling.

“But had I my own longbow — ah, then, Dray Prescot, you would see!”

A commotion broke out at the door, for we had by Zenkiren’s kind invitation removed from the hostelry and quartered ourselves in commodious suites in the governor’s palace. A Sanurkazzian guard — a young lad in a new hauberk and with a shiny new long sword, a parting present from his father —

jumped back as a voluble, gesticulating, furiously angry Proconian popped in. Orange and green sunshine lay in slanting stripes on the patio outside the doors, and exotic blooms depended on vines from the white walls.

“Vandals! Pirates! Thieves!” the Proconian spluttered. He was plump, flabby, with ringed hands and a nose which wine had coarsened into a knob, and he wore no sword. His robes were twisted about him in the fury of his movements.

“I am sorry, Pur Dray,” said the guard. “He insisted — and short of cutting him down there was no way of stopping him. . .”

“It is all right, Fazmarl,” I said, turning away from Seg and his bow-stave. “Let the gentleman in.”

The gentleman shook a fist under my nose, saw Seg and let out a screech. “There he is, the plunderer, the reaver, the barbarian! He holds my property, Pur Dray — and he has destroyed the finest tree in the women’s quarters—”

“Oh-ho!” I said. I looked at Seg. He gripped the stave with the clutch of a man sliding over the side of an airboat.

“I did but cut the best stave suited to a bow.”

The little man danced and spluttered and shook his fist.

“Only! And ripped it out of the heart — the very heart — of the tree that gives shade to my favorite wife—”

The Proconians believed in the quaint habit of marrying three wives. They were a punishment-loving race.

“Is the tree mortally wounded, sir?”

“Mortally! It has suffered a wound from which nothing can save it. My tree — my favorite wife’s favorite tree!”

“Then, if nothing can be done to save the tree, I think it best to uproot it and plant another.”

He gobbled over that, and wiped his forehead, and found a chair and collapsed into it. I nodded at Seg and that reckless man had sense enough to fill to brimming a silver-chased goblet with noble Chremson wine and hurry it across. The Proconian wiped his lips and gulped the wine, and gasped and palpitated, a hand to his heart, and gulped some more.

“Very good,” he said, looking at the wine afresh. “Booty from Chremson, I take it?”

I inclined my head, but the word booty had inflamed him anew. “Plunderers, reavers — that is all you red-raiders from Sanurkazz are! You tear down my best tree, leave it in shattered fragments across my tessellated pavement so that my second wife barks her pretty shin and removes at least a palm of skin—”

“Come, sir,” I said, putting the merest fraction of that rasp into my voice. “You have not yet favored me with your name. I do not know it was your tree. You could be fabricating the entire story to gain my sympathy — and my wine!”

He staggered upright with the assistance of the chair back. He tried to speak and his fat lips popped and blew and his cheeks turned purple and his eyes stood out. Then: “By the fair hair of the Primate Proc himself! I am Uppippoo of Lower Pattelonia! I am respected in this city, with wide lands on the mainland beyond Perithia, owner of ten broad ships, and with three of the most delectable wives a man could boast — and now they have kicked me out because their shaded garden has been ruined!”

Seg couldn’t hold himself in and spilled wine trying to stop from bursting a gut laughing. I remained severe.

“Very well, Uppippoo of Lower Pattelonia. I would not wish a man to suffer, particularly from three wives. Rest assured, I shall make complete restitution.” A thought occurred to me. “Can another tree be procured?”

A kind of frenzy possessed Uppippoo. “You imbecile! Those trees take a hundred years to grow!”

That was half a lifetime or so on Kregen.

“In that case, my friend here, who comes from Erthyrdrin, will be returning to his country shortly. I know he will immediately take steps to have a fresh tree prepared and shipped out to you. There, sir, what can be fairer than that?”

Uppippoo merely goggled at us.

“In the meantime, if you would accept a little common gold, which is nowhere as romantic as a tree, you could purchase a length of colorfully-striped awning, and thus protect your charming wives from the suns.”

And I put down carefully onto a table a handful of gold scooped out of my waist-belt — for I had now, in the city, perforce to dress as a citizen with tunic, apron, and accouterments. Uppippoo looked at the gold.

“An — awning?”

“Why — yes.”

“An awning.” He considered. “But a tree is alive, it looks beautiful, it soughs in the wind and its leaves create the most delightful patterns of shade and light upon my pavements — and the tesselae are renowned in Pattelonia, Pur Dray, renowned.”

“Quite so. Take the gold. Buy an awning or buy a new tree of a different kind. But, Uppippoo, I would wish you to leave now. Do you understand me? The gold is fair payment, I think.”

Uppippoo for the first time took care to look at me, instead of raging and roaring and blow-harding and glaring at Seg and the offending dismembered limb of his wife’s tree. He saw my face. I was not conscious of any change in my countenance, but Uppippoo’s snorts and ragings and breathy threats halted as though he had been gripped by the throat.

He backed a step. He bent his back, stealthily, reaching forward to take the gold from the table. He backed away. His protruding eyes were fixed on my face; his tongue kept licking his fat lips.

“Fazmarl!” I called. “The gentleman is leaving now.”

The young guard showed the Proconian gentleman out.

He had not uttered a word since he’d had a fair sight of my ugly face. Seg collapsed moaning onto a chair.

“As for you, Seg Segutorio, you should be ashamed of yourself. Cutting a stick from a tree — that’s what kids do.”

“Aye!” he roared joyously. “Just as I did when I cut my stave from Kak Kakutorio’s tree! Hai — I could hurt myself laughing.”

I must admit that I felt like allowing myself a laugh, also.

The incident of Seg’s bow-stave and the shade tree of Uppippoo’s wives convinced me that I had no need to worry so much about Seg Segutorio. He was still in form despite his conspicuous lack of success with Thelda.

Delia was anxious to leave, and now that I could not serve a useful part in the campaign I had nothing to tie me here. I told Seg, somewhat brutally, I fear, that he would have no time to put his new bow-stave into pickle. He chuckled with a grim sardonic humor that made me stare at him.

“You have a poor opinion of the bowmen of Erthyrdrin if you believe they are unable to fashion a bow-stave anywhere on this earth — aye, and pickle it, too. Put me thigh-deep in the mire of the Marshes of Malar with a stave and I’ll fashion you a bow that can split the chunkrah’s eye.” He was as good as his word. He contrived a tall narrow tube of treated leather, well-stoppered, and into this with his precious stave he poured a concoction of his own — that stank to Zim itself — and shook it up and glared at me with a satisfied defiant stare on his face.

“By the time we are past the Dam of Days she’ll be pickled—”

Even then I couldn’t tell Seg just how we were traveling to Vallia, and there was no reason for this holding back. Delia knew exactly where the flier from Port Tavetus, on the eastern coast of Turismond beyond the Hostile Territories, had been hidden in the foothills which gloamed blue and orange and purple on the far mainland horizon. The people of Havilfar, where airboats are manufactured, did not care to have their products exposed on the inner sea. I gathered the airboats gave trouble, too, as I had before experienced. Thelda cooed over me and ignored Seg and so we passed the last days before we took off. Again it was time to say “Remberee” to Pur Zenkiren.

Everything that should be done was done. Our belongings were carefully packed into satchels and leather sacks, for Delia with a strict flier’s wisdom wanted no sharp-edged packing crates aboard, and were stowed aboard the calsanys that would take them down to the jetty. I detected a strange look of sadness on the face of young Fazmarl as I bid him good-bye. I clapped him on the back — a somewhat awesome experience for so young a would-be warrior of Sanurkazz from a swifter captain and a Krozair

— and felt I must be getting old and walked down with Zenkiren and Delia to the jetty. Thelda had gone with the baggage — riding a calsany — to superintend, although we all knew she didn’t care overmuch for walking. Seg marched behind with his revolting leather pipe of bow-stave-pickling over his shoulder. At the jetty we all climbed down into the boat and this time we were not using our old stolen muldavy which I had made arrangements to have, when possible, returned to its owners with a suitable sum in gold to compensate for those we had smashed. We were using the admiral’s barge, no less, and twenty stalwart wights pulled lustily at the oars. As we cleared the mole and the barge’s head swung toward the mainland, Seg looked back at me, sitting next to Delia. He was puzzled.

“I do not see our ship, Dray. And, why are we heading for the mainland?”

I realized he did not connect the storms that arose when we steered west with our very act of heading on that course, and I had not discussed that problem with him at all, as I had merely hinted at it with Zenkiren. The mysticism of the Krozairs of Zy armored Zenkiren against marvels of that kind. But now the time had surely come when I must be honest with Seg Segutorio and tell him of our means of travel. I told him.

He gaped for a moment at me as the barge pulled through the suns-lit water. Everyone was watching him.

“A flier,” he said, at last, surprising me. “As to them, I have seen them and I welcome the opportunity to fly in one. But—”

“But, Seg?”

“The Stratemsk! The Hostile Territories! Man — do you know what you’re doing? They’re murder.”

Delia said: “We are going home to Vallia, and you, Seg, to Erthyrdrin, if you wish. We would like you to be with us, but if you do not come we understand.” She added, mischievously: “Anyway, that’s the way Thelda and I got here. . .”

Chapter Eight

Through The Stratemsk

“Ossa they would pile upon Olympos; and upon Ossa, Pelion with its rustling forests, that the very heavens might be scaled.”

This ambition of the Aloadai, Otos and Ephialtes, had always seemed to me a laudable goal, seeing that I myself had scrambled my way up through the hawsehole from the lower deck to the quarterdeck, and, since my startling arrival on Kregen beneath Antares, had fought my way to various arrogant-sounding posts and positions. But I had always thought of the tall twins’ activities of ambition as rhetorical. The actual idea of mountains piled one atop another had always seemed to me figures of speech, devices of the imagination. I have seen the Himalaya — the other mountain ranges of the world are subsumed in the lofty and frightening grandeur of the Himalaya — and I had been suitably impressed and awed. But The Stratemsk — Kabru piled on Nanda Devi upon Kangchenjunga upon Annapurna upon Nanga Parbat — with Chimborazo from the Andes thrown in as foothills — with K2 and Everest lofting beyond reason above — Yes, The Stratemsk, although not the loftiest or most extensive range of mountains on Kregen under the suns of Scorpio, are quite out of this world with the awe-inspiring terror and beauty of outraged nature flaunting her powers. The Stratemsk are big and wide and tall. They shatter reason. Snow mantles their upper slopes and pinnacles in an eternal and unbroken whiteness. The clouds hover around their feet. Savage and voracious animals haunt their lower ranges and gigantic birds and flying animals forever circle their valleys and passes with cruel talons and fangs seeking prey. Above these mind-freezing precipices and crags and icy glaciers we flew, Delia, Seg, Thelda, and I, in our frail airboat through the cutting air.

We huddled close together warmly wrapped in flying silks and leathers, with immense furs wrapped about us.

The airboat was a mere shell of wood upon metal formers, shaped into the likeness of a petal and streamlined well enough with a windshield and leather thongs and wooden guard-rails. If it failed, as airboats notoriously failed, we were doomed. Below us lay certain death. That death might come from cold and exposure. It might come from starvation or madness. It might come in the ravening jaws of some semimystical monster of the higher slopes where the tree line thinned and the screes stretched for miles before the snow line was reached in ice and penetrating cold. Or — that death might come to us from the fangs and talons of any one of the many species of giant birds and animals who flew voraciously among the passes and valleys seeking what prey they might snatch. From their high aeries they could plummet down, their eyes sighted on a target so small at that distance only eyes superlatively endowed by nature could ever make out what manner of animal or beast it might be below them. We saw the ominous dots flying far off. I grasped my long sword hilt and determined that should anything or any monster attack us only my death would prevent me from protecting my Delia until none remained.

Coal-black impiters, corths, xi — the iridescent-scaled winged lizards of the humid jungle-valleys sunk in broad tracts within The Stratemsk — bisbis, zizils, the yellow eagles of Wyndhai, and many other monstrous flying beasts are to be found within the massive confines of The Stratemsk — or, to be practical about this matter, better not found.

For the first upward trending slopes before we rose high to seek the easiest of the passes opening out before us we flew over many crude encampments of the man-beasts who occupy the outer portions of The Stratemsk. There are many tribes, but they are referred to in general as crofermen, savage, untamed, cruel and suspicious, who delight in nothing so much as raiding down the outer slopes of The Stratemsk. It was their ponshos that the great winged beasts of the air would seize if given the chance. Life, indeed, was a hard and demanding existence within The Stratemsk.

So that with the sheer size and immensity of the mountains and the crofermen incessantly raiding and the monstrous winged beasts, The Stratemsk had provided a barrier between the Eye of the World and eastern Turismond that had endured for century after century.

And my Delia of the Blue Mountains had braved these terrors and these dangers in order once more to clasp me in her arms!

No wonder the sailors of the outer oceans would sail all the weary way around by the Cyphren Sea past Donengil and up the skeleton coasts to enter the inner sea via the Dam of Days. For besides the dangers of The Stratemsk there lay ahead of us the unknown perils of the Hostile Territories. We had safely negotiated the first passes and left the peaks on either hand and Delia had the control levers thrust full to maximum when she touched my arm and pointed.

“Look, Dray—”

The gorgeous scarlet and golden accipiter with those deadly talons extended flew above our heads, turning in lazy hunting circles. I knew it. Messenger or observer of the Star Lords, the Gdoinye croaked a harsh challenging call — either that, a challenge, or a farewell — and swung away. I did not think that any corth or zizil or other flying monster would seek to attack that blazing raptor of the Star Lords. We waited out the flying time, eating and drinking sparingly as the dwaburs unreeled below us. The air remained thin and cold, for Delia would not dip down into the shrouded valleys for warmth for the iridescent shapes of the xi circled there, seeking their prey in the humid jungles beneath. Gradually the high peaks passed away over our shoulders. Slowly the whole convulsed mass of The Stratemsk with its shining silver spears thrusting into dazzlement above dropped away behind us, but it would be days before those high peaks fell below the horizon. And slowly and gradually I came to thinking that we had successfully surmounted — or threaded our way through — the first great obstacle. And then the impiters struck.

They swooped in a wide-winged onslaught from a distant ledge, swirling about us in a monstrous beating of wings. They tried to pluck us from the sky. Massive talons extended like the claws of some Earthly power excavator. Raucous croakings of their fanged mouths from which the forked tongues emerged in a constant licking were designed to frighten us into frozen immobility. The airboat rocked. The impiters were wild and savage, but I protected Delia of Delphond and my wildness and savagery met and mastered theirs.

My long sword whirled, thick with blood. And Seg’s arrows flew as fast as he could draw back the string and loose. In truth, he dispatched far more than did I, although I was forced to tackle those posing the greater threat as they sought to impale us with their whip-barbed tails or rend us with their claws or snatch us up in their gape-jaws.

Massive they were, the impiters, giants of the air, and yet they cavorted in the empty levels with the speed and agility of an Earthly falcon. My sword arm bunched with muscle and I struck and struck and still they came. Now the airboat faltered, it dipped, dropped, fell away.

“She won’t respond!” shouted Delia.

Thelda was screaming away and impeding me in my work as she sought to throw herself into my arms. I knocked her back into the bottom of the airboat and yelled at Delia.

“Grab her, Delia! She’ll have her head taken off if she sticks it out here!”

Arrows spurted from Seg’s bow. My sword lopped and slashed. The impiters continued to attack as the airboat sank lower. There was no chance of my seeing where we were falling; every straining effort had to be bent on to picking the next flying beast, sensing his line of attack, guessing whether he would strike with his jaws or flick himself over to lash with that deadly barbed tail. I saw a tail strike into the wood of the rail, splintering it. The barbs did not hold; some muscular mechanism seemed to fold them in the instant the impiter knew it had missed its stroke. I hacked the tail off. How long that insane aerial battle went on I do not know. Now my chest was crisscrossed by red welts where the barbed tails had struck, and blood — my blood — slicked down my belly and thighs. But I battled on. I could stand up and brace myself against the movement of the airboat. My long sea training gave me at least that advantage. But Seg, too, stuck to his task, loosing arrows as though from some fabled machine-crossbow of the ancient men of the sunrise.

Trees abruptly swooshed past and a branch almost accomplished what the impiters had failed to do. I ducked and just managed to get the long sword’s swing to intersect neatly with an impiter’s jaw. He screeched and spun away and then — suddenly, miraculously, enormously — we were surrounded by a vindictively smothering swarm of tiny pink and yellow bodies. Tiny birds! Thousands of them. Tiny pink and yellow birds with shrill cheeping cries were hurling themselves at the massive impiters, were darting in to sink their long sharp beaks into tender spots, where wings met body, at the juncture of tail, into the glaring, bloodshot eyes. The impiters went mad. I threw the long sword down — it had served me well but all my arms-training could not prevent me from doing what I had to do the quickest way I knew. I seized Delia and thrust her hard under a heaping pile of silks and leathers. I shouted.

“Seg! Cover yourself up — grab that idiot Thelda! Hurry!”

We cowered there, the four of us beneath silks and furs, as we let a myriad tiny birds harass and torture the mighty impiters into ignoble retreat. We could hear the sounds of that strife clear across the broad valley into which we had descended. The screechings and the shriekings persisted for some time and then gradually faded and I was able to poke a cautious head out from our cover to see the last of the flying monsters circling aloft with heavy wingbeats as the tiny dots of the little pink and yellow birds clustered thickly about.

Thelda was shaking all over and sobbing hysterically.

That was a normal reaction and I thought nothing of it. Seg tried to comfort her, but she wiped her eyes and turned a shoulder on him. Across that smooth skin lay a vivid weal.

“Well,” said my Delia. “I shall always have a soft spot in my heart for those little birds. What were they, anyway?”

No one knew their name; none of us had ever heard of them. There is much to know of Kregen, and much that I tell you now I picked up later — but to spoil the effect of those thousands of little birds with their vindictive feud with the impiters is something I cannot do. We were shaken, bruised, cut — but alive.

After inspection, Delia pronounced the airboat as unusable.

Whether from a blow from the impiters or from an inherent failure we didn’t know. What we did know was that from here on in we must walk if we wished to reach Port Tavetus. All across the western skyline and extending out of sight to north and south stretched the colossal mass of The Stratemsk.

Before us lay a valley, and then open country with the glint of rivers and the clumping of trees amid the grasses.

“We walk,” I said.

Thelda had recovered and we had drunk and eaten. Now she made a face. “I never did like walking. It’s so unladylike.”

Our preparations at the beginning were ambitious.

Thelda insisted on our bringing with us a mass of equipment she said was, “Absolutely vital.”

I threw a handsome silver-mounted mirror into the grass.

“Sheer lumber, Thelda. If you want to preen — use a pool.”

She started to argue and Delia started to try to persuade her, but I just said, “If you want to bring all that junk you must carry it yourself.”

That settled that.

We took long swords, bows and arrows, daggers and knives. We took sleeping equipment. We took what food I thought we would need before we got into our stride and could hunt what would be necessary. We took water bottles, large canteens of Sanurkazz leather, which is the best tanned and treated of the inner sea although perhaps not as fine, in the manner of tooling, as that of Magdag — Zair rot them!

On Delia’s suggestion we buried all the treasures — the gold and jewels, the luxury trappings. If ever we passed this way again we might retrieve them, and if some unknown warrior stalking this way found the marker he would be suddenly rich, and good luck to him. As for footwear, we took every item we had, for although I prefer to walk barefooted, the others were mindful of the discomforts of the way — Seg must be used to hunting barefoot over his mountains of Erthyrdrin, and Delia, I knew from the time we had escaped from the roof-garden of the Princess Natema and had spent a wonderful time on the Plains of Segesthes, could cope adequately without shoes. No, it was a way of saying we thought Thelda would not keep up with us without shoes.

Poor Thelda!

Poor Seg!

He perfectly resigned himself to carrying her, if needs be.

I must admit that I had not a care in the world. We had landed safely. We had arms and food, we were fit, and we had a continent to explore. Vallia would be there when we got there. I was in no hurry to reach that mysterious, potent, terrible island empire and face the emperor-father of the girl I wanted to marry. The future would take care of itself; only the here and now mattered — for was not Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond, walking so lightly and freely at my side?