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 1843193566

Swordships of Scorpio

Dray Prescot #4

Alan Burt Akers

Mushroom eBooks

A Note On The Tapes From Rio De Janeiro

I had assumed, along with thousands of readers who I am sure shared the same genuine sorrow, that the saga of Prescot of Antares must come to an end with the final transcriptions of the tapes from Africa. The editing of the tapes that chronicle the incredible story of Dray Prescot on Kregen beneath the Suns of Scorpio, a task which by a fortunate chance had fallen to me, had been so arranged that each volume might be read as an individual story in its own right.

But this meant that there were but few pages left to see publication after the first three volumes. After that — nothing. I had hoped that Dray Prescot might in some way have been able to see a volume of his saga and perhaps be moved to contact me. So far this hope has proved vain. But the ways of the Star Lords, no less than the Savanti, are passing strange and beyond the comprehension of mere mortal men.

I had just written the words, “. . . and then I yelled,” and pushed back in my chair in my old book-lined study, feeling as though I had screwed down the coffin-lid on the face of an old friend, all glory fled from two worlds, when the telephone rang and it was Geoffrey Dean, long-distance from Washington. The coincidence affected me profoundly for it had been Geoffrey, an old friend and now connected with the State Department, who had given me the tapes from Africa. He had received them from Dan Fraser, a young field worker, who had provided Dray Prescot with the cassette tape recorder in that epidemic-stricken village of West Africa where Prescot had saved the situation. Geoffrey was wildly excited.

His first words were: “I have more tapes from Dray Prescot, Alan!”

By the time we both had calmed down, I had arranged to fly out to see him at once. A mysterious box had that moment arrived, and he had opened it, all unknowing; but he began to suspect as he saw the packed cassettes, played the first one for a few seconds only — and then had phoned me. There was a letter he was having translated. The box had been all over the world, it appeared, but had been mailed from Rio de Janeiro. Geoffrey met me at the airport and I drove with him to his Washington hotel in an impatience I could barely control. As soon as we entered his room I saw them. The box had been left as he had opened it. The manila-wrapped cardboard box, carelessly slit open, rested on a chair, and paper and string hung down. From the box a whole heaping pile of tape cassettes lay tumbled — and I knew that they contained a great wonderful El Dorado of exotic adventures on Kregen beneath Antares, that fierce and beautiful, mystic and awe-inspiring planet four hundred light-years from our Earth. Geoffrey was waving a letter in my face.

“Read this first, Alan!”

The letter in translation was curt to mystification.

Dear Mr. Fraser:

I have been asked by Mr. Dray Prescot to forward to you these cassettes. Mr. Prescot was instrumental in foiling a skyjack attempt upon a jet liner in which I was a passenger. The bandits were after ransom without political aims in their act. We crashed in the jungle. None of the passengers would be alive today if Mr. Prescot had not guided us all to safety and taken care of us along the way. We would have done anything for him. All he required was the use of my tape recorder - and a large number of cassettes. And a promise to send them to you. With great pleasure this I now do. I regret I have been unable to listen to any of them as my English is imperfect. Mr. Prescot has now left Rio de Janeiro. If you see him please convey my deepest regard and warmest admiration.

(signed) Francisco Rodriguez.

“And a hotel address in Rio,” I said.

Geoffrey sighed. “No trace of Rodriguez, I’m afraid.”

I looked at the heaping pile of cassettes and my hands shook as I placed that marked One in the machine. The opening was garbled; but then a voice sounded out clearly. I knew that deep, powerful voice; I would know it anywhere. I cannot vouch for the truth of his story, but that calm sure voice inspires confidence — more, it demands belief.

The precious box had been sent by sea mail to Dan Fraser’s address in Africa, had been shipped back to Washington by the agency and, because Dan had been tragically killed in an auto accident and had no relatives, had found its way to Geoffrey Dean, Dan’s boss. Geoffrey had made inquiries about this skyjacking, but had discovered nothing at the various embassies he approached. “Whatever happened down there in South America we may never know. No one is talking.”

But, beside this wonderful cache of undreamed-of treasure, I did not care. Now the world could once more share the adventures of Dray Prescot on Kregen under the Suns of Scorpio and revel in the barbaric color and headlong action of his life.

As described by Dan Fraser, Dray Prescot is above middle height, with straight brown hair and intelligent brown eyes that are level and oddly dominating, compelling. His shoulders made Dan’s eyes pop. Dan sensed an abrasive honesty and a fearless courage about him. He moves, Dan said, like a great hunting cat, quiet and deadly.

Born in 1775, Dray Prescot had clawed his way up through the hawsehole to become a ship’s officer; but thereafter had little success in this world. I believe it is clear that, even then, he perceived with an inner conviction that he was destined for some vast and unimaginable fate. When he was whirled away to Kregen he positively reveled in the perils set to test him, and through his immersion in the sacred pool of baptism in the River Zelph of Aphrasöe he is assured of a thousand years of life, as is his beloved, Delia of the Blue Mountains. Banished to Earth he was recalled by the Star Lords — of whom he tells us nothing — as a kind of interstellar troubleshooter, and he quickly rose to become Zorcander of his clansmen, and then Lord of Strombor, an enclave house of the city of Zenicce on the west coast of the continent of Segesthes. Hurled through the void once more he suffered the horrors of the overlords of Magdag and was instrumental in raising his army of slaves and workers in an attempt to overthrow them. In the midst of his final onslaught he was whisked to another part of Kregen’s inner sea, and plunged once again into the Star Lords’ schemes. He had become a member of the famous Krozairs of Zy, entitled to be called Pur Dray, dedicated to the red-sun deity Zair. Determined to reach Vallia, and Delia, he set off toward the east. But Delia had set her emperor father’s air service in motion to find him, and had come herself to the inner sea in search of her lost love. Delia and Dray Prescot flew through The Stratemsk, as Prescot describes them a truly horrific range of mountains walling off the inner sea from the land to the east, the Hostile Territories. With two companions, Seg and Thelda, they crash and go through adventure after adventure until, at last, with the death of the beast-man Umgar Stro at Prescot’s hands and the rescue of Delia, they make a dash for it astride Umgar Stro’s own impiter — a gigantic coal-black flying beast. Seg and Thelda, so Prescot relates with great sadness, had been ridden down by a host of half-men. A Vallian Air Service airboat picks them up; but there is treachery aboard this flier, Lorenztone, for Prescot awakes beneath a thorn-ivy bush. He has been drugged. He finds weapons and food tossed down to color the impression that he has fled because he is frightened to face Delia’s father, the emperor. This is the work, he believes, of the Vallian Racter party, who do not wish the Princess Majestrix of Vallia to wed him, a man not of their choice.

At this point Dray Prescot picks himself up and says: “On my own two feet, then!”

At this point the present volume, Swordships of Scorpio, takes up the narrative. At the junction where the tapes from Africa end and the tapes from Rio begin, I have made a note. They do not run consecutively on; there is a gap. From study of the cassettes I am sure there are other gaps to come in the story we have. I repeat, we are superlatively lucky even to have what we do of the fascinating and pulse-stirring saga of Prescot of Antares.

Kregen under the Suns of Scorpio is a real world, savage and beautiful, marvelous and terrible. Dray Prescot is there now, I feel sure, carving out fresh adventures by the side of his Delia of Delphond, his Delia of the Blue Mountains.

Alan Burt Akers.

CHAPTER ONE

I march toward Vallia

On my own two feet, then, I would march all the way across the Hostile Territories and take ship at whatever port I came across and sail to Vallia, and there I would march into the palace of the dread emperor of that proud empire and in sight of all claim from him my beloved, my Delia, my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains.

I would!

The deadly Krozair long sword felt good in my fist.

My head still ached from the effects of the poison and my insides felt as though an insane vintner of Zond were trying to stamp a premier vintage from my guts. But I went on. There was no stopping me now —

or so I thought then, wrapped about in rage and frustration and the unhealthy desire to smash a few skulls. . .

The plain continued on in gentle undulations to the low hills ringing the horizon. Long pale green grasses blew in the wind sweeping past. Over all the scene that streaming mingled light of the twin suns of Antares scorched down. The water bottle was half-full. Evidently, whoever had poisoned me and thrown me into the hole beneath the thorn-ivy bush had tossed down the scarlet silk wrapped about weapons and food to fool those aboard the airboat. The food and water had not been meant to keep me alive; I had a shrewd idea that the poisoner thought me dead.

If I, Dray Prescot, with weapons at my disposal could not live off this land, then I did not deserve to survive.

As you will know I was no soft innocent from a big city who always walked on stone sidewalks, who took automobiles everywhere riding on concrete pavements, who pressed buttons for light and warmth, who ate pre-packaged food. Although I am a civilized man from Earth, I was then and have remained when circumstances require as much a savage barbarian as any of the primordial reavers ravaging out from the bleak northlands.

The first river I came to I swam across and the devil take what monsters might be lurking beneath the water.

Along the banks were mounds of bare earth. These I skirted respectfully. Ahead the tall grasses gave way to a lower variety, and the ground lay bare and dusty in patches here and there. The long black and red-glinting column I did not wish to see advanced obliquely from my right. I had no hesitation whatsoever in turning in my eastward tramp and heading off to the northeast. From a low hillock — a natural hillock — I could see the seemingly endless stream of ants. I give them their Earthly name, for the Kregen names for the varieties of ants would fill a book. These were shining black, active, prowling restlessly toward some destiny of their own. The twin suns sank slowly behind me and the land ahead filled with the flooding opaline radiance from Zim and Genodras. The first screams ripped from the gathering shadows.

Now I knew where the stream of ants was headed.

Soldier ants, large fierce fellows, their mandibles perfectly capable of shearing through ordinary leather, kept watch on the flanks of the columns of workers. The soldier ants, I judged, were all of six nails in length. Six nails make a knuckle. A knuckle in Kregen mensuration is about four-point-two inches, say one hundred and eighty millimeters.

These were big fellows.

The screams continued.

I hurried on, parallel to the column, seeing the sinking suns-light glancing off armored bodies, glinting red from joint and mandible.

Ahead the column spread out. It seemed to me like some blasphemous inkblot, spreading and pooling, ever-fed by new streams.

The man had been staked out.

His wrists and ankles were bound with rawhide to four thick stakes, their tops bruised and battered from the blows of hammers. He twisted and writhed; but the tide of black horrors swarmed over him, a living carpet eating him to the bone.

There was only one way to get him out of it.

My Krozair long sword had been in action against mighty foes before; now it would have to go up against tiny killers four inches long.

Four quick slashes released the thongs. I bent and hoisted the man, holding him in my left hand, swatting with the sword. Already the horrors were scuttling up my legs, over my back, along my arms. Agonizing pains stabbed my flesh. I danced and jumped and ran and shed crushed black bodies like a mincer. The man was clearly dying. I had merely saved him from the kind of death the people — or things —

had planned for him.

By the time I had got rid of the last ant, and had rubbed my skin and felt the slick blood greasy there, and had placed the man down gently against a grassy bank, I knew he had mere moments to live. Most of his lower abdomen and legs had been eaten away, his chest cavity was partially exposed, only his head — with the exception of the eyes — remained to appear as a reasonable facsimile of a man. He was trying to speak, now, croaking sounds from his throat, gargling, his useless arms attempting to lift toward me.

“Rest easy, my friend,” I said in the universal Kregish. “You will sleep soon, and have no more pain.”

“So—,” he said. “Sos—” He choked the words out. “Sosie!”

“Rest easy, dom.” I uncorked my water bottle, filled it at the river, and poured water over his face and between his lips. His tongue licked greedily. Some of the blood washed away.

“Save my Sosie!”

“Yes.”

He knew he was dying, I think, and his voice strengthened.

“I am Mangar na Arkasson. Sosie! She — the devils of Cherwangtung took her — they took her —

they — the ants! The ants!”

I moistened his lips again. “Easy, dom, easy.”

His black skin shone now with a sweat-sheen in the pink radiance from She of the Veils, the fourth moon of Kregen. He had been a proud and imposing man. His face, despite the contortions his agony wrought in his countenance, still showed hauteur and pride. His features were not the hawk like ones of Xoltemb, the caravan-master I had met on the plains of Segesthes, who came from the island of Xuntal. This man, this Mangar na Arkasson, had features more Negroid in their fashioning, hard and firm with a generous and mobile mouth.

“Swear!” Mangar na Arkasson whispered. “Swear you will save my Sosie from those devils of Cherwangtung. Swear!”

He was dying. He was a fellow human being.

I said, “I will do all I can to save your Sosie, Mangar na Arkasson. You have the word of Dray Prescot, Krozair, the Lord of Strombor.”

“Good — good—”

His mind was wandering now and although I knew he did not have the slightest notion what a Krozair was, and had never heard of Strombor, yet I believe that he took with him into the grave the conviction

— and I hope the comforting one — that I was a man who would do as I had sworn. When he died, after a few mumbled and almost incoherent blasphemies and pleas, cries of strange gods, and, at my questioning, the statement that Cherwangtung stood at the confluence of two rivers, by a mountain, away to the northeast, I buried him. There was no way of judging what marker or memorial he would want, so I contented myself with manhandling a great stone over his grave. That would hold the plains lurfings at bay, for a time at least.

Few lurfings would attack a single man, even, unless there were a round dozen of them. Low-bellied, lean-flanked, gray-furred scavengers are lurfings, equipped with probing snout-like faces well-suited to the tasks nature has set them.

I stood up.

Four moons wheeled across the sky now, and their combined radiance lit up the night-land of Kregen, here on the eastern plains of Central Turismond. Far away to the east lay the coast. On the coast stood port cities, of Vallia, of Pandahem, of Murn-Chem, of a number of trading countries from overseas. I had to reach one, take ship, sail to Vallia. . .

But, first, I had given my word to a dying man.

I do not believe you, who listen to these tapes cut in this stricken famine-area of your own Earth, can condemn me for what I had sworn to do. I knew my Delia was safe. She was even now aboard the Vallian Air Service airboat Lorenztone securely on her way back to Vallia and her father the emperor. I need no longer suffer the cruel tortures for her safety I had recently gone through, when I believed her dead, then the captive of Umgar Stro whom I had slain, and so released her. No. With a clear conscience I could do what I had sworn.

My Delia, Delia of the Blue Mountains, would understand.

At that time I had, of course, had no experience of motive power for shipping other than the wind and the oar. The swifters of the inland sea with their massed banks of oars could sail independently of the wind — but I had gained the strong impression that I should judge the Vallian Air Service more from my own experience as a naval officer of a King’s Ship of my own planet rather than from the wild times I had spent as a swifter oar slave and captain on the Eye of the World. I had in the nature of my profession heard of Claude Francois, Marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans, who in 1783 had invented a paddle-boat and sailed her on the Seine at Paris, thus being, as far as I knew, the man to sail the world’s first successful steam vessel. The first practical steamer had been built by the Scotsman, William Symington, whose Charlotte Dundas in 1801 proved herself by towing exercises. Robert Fulton, an American who would work for whoever paid him, had designed a paddle-steamer, Demologos, with the paddles between two hulls and armed with twenty-four thirty-two pounders. I wondered, then, as I strode across the pink-lit night-lands of eastern Turismond, just what this independence of the wind would mean in a vessel, in these sky ships built in far Havilfar.

All of which meant that I had no idea how long it would be before Delia reached her home in Vallia. If the plans of the man who had poisoned me and dumped me under the thorn-ivy bush went as he envisaged, would Delia believe I had run off? Could she think I had quailed from meeting her formidable father, the emperor?

If she did so think — then I refused to contemplate that

If she did not think so she would very well do as she had done before and send a fleet of airboats scouring the world for me. That, I confess, was a comforting thought. The men of Cherwangtung, having staked out Mangar na Arkasson for the soldier ants, had merely removed themselves from that immediate vicinity before they got up to their devil’s tricks with Sosie na Arkasson.

She was not screaming and so the first sounds I heard were the stamp of naked feet on hard earth, the throbbing of drums, the chanting and leem-keening of the men of Cherwangtung as they danced around the central stake.

This was a scene I did not relish.

Bound to that stake the lissome form of Sosie gleamed in the torchlight, her black skin in startling contrast to the fish-belly white of the men who danced about her shaking axes and spears, their ankles festooned with bells and bones and feathers. They danced two forward, one back, stamp, stamp, slide, stamp, stamp, slide, and they shook their weapons and in the torchlight their faces showed corpse-white and lascivious and incredibly evil.

Sosie held her head up proudly. They had stripped her garments from her. Her hair, done in the fashion we know on this Earth as Afro, bristled. Dust and grass stems covered it, and there were long scratches on her thighs. I could not see her back, lashed to the stake; but I guessed that, too, was lacerated in like fashion as these men had dragged her here for sacrifice.

What the sacrifice was about, what they were going to do, what blasphemous gods they worshiped —

of all that I knew nothing. It could be I was interfering in a ritual demanded by law and custom. Both Mangar and Sosie na Arkasson could have been criminals, meeting a just end. But no civilized man binds a young naked girl to a post and dances around her in the torch glare, his every intention obvious. I felt sure that I was not committing a gross error as I took the bow contemptuously tossed down from Lorenztone into my hand. This was not a great longbow of Loh. I shut my mind to thoughts of Seg Segutorio, who was of Erthyrdrin, and who was a master bowman, and who was now — I had seen him fall beneath the nactrix hooves — dead and gone and best forgotten. How could anyone forget Seg Segutorio?

I lifted the bow. I must put thoughts of Seg from my mind. There were twenty of them out there, and after perhaps the fourth or fifth shaft the rest would flee into the pink-lit shadows. They would not escape by running; but I would have to be quick.

If only Seg were at my side now!

Angrily — furious that thoughts of my comrade Seg, who was gone, smashed into my mind — I loosed the shafts as fast as I could snatch up the arrows, draw back the string, and let loose. One, two, three, four — the four went down, coughing, with shafts feathered into them. The chanting and drum-throbbing ceased.

One of the men yelled and I put a shaft through his mouth.

Others were shouting, and running, their naked white rumps gleaming in the pink moons-light. I pinned three more and then they were gone, in every direction. From now on I would be the hunted, not they.

Speed. . .

Sosie regarded me as though I had appeared through the screen of a shadow play, in the round, flesh and blood, miraculously taking the place of a phantom.

“Sosie,” I said. I spoke harshly. “I have come to take you away from these evil men. Mangar has sent me—” All the time I spoke I slashed her bonds free. As the ropes released, she buckled and fell. The agony of her returning circulation meant I must carry her. She was no Delia, who had been running fleetly at my side, wielding a sword, moments after I had cut her loose.

“Mangar, my father,” she moaned. “I saw — I saw what they did! The ants! The ants! ”

“Zair has him in his keeping now,” I said.

Then, for a shocked instant, I wondered if these people of Arkasson worshiped Grodno, the false green-sun deity of the green sun Genodras. But Sosie gave no sign that she understood. I ran. Out from the torchlight and into the pink-shrouded darkness where that darkness was illusory, where the moons in Kregen’s night sky cast down enough light so that one might read the small print of a directory, I ran —

and then I stopped running. Sosie was bundled down by a small bush — not a thorn-ivy but, blessedly, a paline bush. Immediately she began to stuff the appetizing yellow palines into her mouth, drawing sustenance, refreshment, and surcease from them.

I scanned the horizon, lying down and looking up. One of the torturers showed against the skyline and he went down with an arrow in his guts.

His scream attracted two more, who ran, like fools, over to him, to be slain in their turn. How many more were there? Another ten, I estimated, at least.

This crouching down was no way of fighting for me.

“Sosie.” I spoke with an urgency that was not altogether feigned. I had to drive through to her mind.

“Sosie! I am Dray Prescot. Your father made me swear to save you. Now, you lie hidden in this paline bush. Do not move. I will return for you.”

She understood enough of that in her dazed condition for me to think it safe to leave her. Then I went a-hunting men who tied girls to stakes, all black and naked, and tortured them. They went down, one by one, until in the end five of them clumped together, brandishing their axes and spears, and charged me as I shafted one of their number who attempted to cast his spear into my belly. Now was the moment I had hungered for, to my shame.

The bow went into the grass. The Krozair long sword ripped from my belt — that belt given me aboard the airboat by Delia — sliding against the fold of scarlet cloth on my thigh. I gripped the hilt in both fists, spreading them, the left against the pommel, the right hard up against the guard. That way the two-handed sword wielded by one cunning in its use could strike past and through the spears and axes of these white-skinned barbarians. They rushed against me, whooping, charged with anger, probably unable to comprehend just where I had come from or who I was — a man like themselves and no half-beast half-man of Kregen.

Like any man of Kregen who carries weapons they were skilled. But they could not match the swordsmanship of a Krozair. There is no boast in this; I merely state a fact. By the time they had realized this, it was too late, and as I chopped the last of them — a wild and reckless stroke that took his head clean away from his shoulders — I was aware of the ostentatiousness of my behavior. They were men and not half-men; but they had been behaving like subhumans. That, I submit, is the only excuse I can offer for my savage conduct.

When I reached Sosie she was crying. Her slender body shook with her sobs. As tenderly as I could I lifted her.

“Where lies Arkasson, Sosie?”

“Over there.”

She pointed due north.

I grunted. North in the compass bearing had bedeviled my progress through the Hostile Territories. So, bearing a naked black girl in my arms, I set off to take her home.

CHAPTER TWO

Of the black feathers and gemmed quiver of Sosie na Arkasson

“You cannot just go walking off across the Owlarh Waste, Dray Prescot!”

Sosie na Arkasson glared at me in a positive fury, her hands on her hips, her eyes bright; but her full lower lip quivered betrayingly.

“I have to, Sosie, and I must.”

“But, Dray! There are leems, and stilangs, and graint, and even risslaca, besides those devils of Cherwangtung. You just can’t go!”

I have never been a man who laughs easily — except in moments of stress or passion — and I could not force a laugh now. Had I done so, it is doubtful if it would have soothed Sosie’s real fears. Arkasson had proved to be an interesting town, built against a sheer cliff of stone in which giant gems twinkled in the mingled light of Scorpio. The architecture ran to much convoluted tracery and scrollwork carved in stone, and massive drum towers capped with round pointed roofs built from the heavy slates from local quarries. There were open spaces in which greenery grew; but, still, echoing the inflexible rules of all towns and cities to the west within the Hostile Territories, no handy perching places had been overlooked. The defense against aerial attackers was not carried out with quite the same fanatical attention to every detail in Arkasson, and the walls cincturing the town were battlemented against ground troops as their first priority; but a force of aerial chivalry would stumble attempting to alight in Arkasson. Mangar, who had died so cruelly, had been a leading man of the town; and although I met a number of the notables and was treated with universal kindness by them, I itched to press on to the east, to Vallia, and to Delia.

My pale skin, tanned by the Suns of Scorpio though it was, aroused intense interest in the black-skinned people of Arkasson. Sosie, indeed, had had to speak with rapidity and with lucidity to prevent a spear degutting me on that first arrival.

The people of Cherwangtung roamed the land all about during the nights, the land that hereabouts was called the Owlarh Waste, and retired to caves and hidey-holes during the day. From Arkasson they were regarded with loathing as beasts who made life difficult and dangerous. The farms ringing the town were all heavily defended by wall and moat; but the fiends from Cherwangtung would creep through by night and raid and burn and kill. Sosie’s farm lay in ruins, blackened by the flames, her mother dead and now her father dead, also. The white-skinned savages had done that.

I still retain a vivid mental picture of that torture stake with the slim black form of Sosie bound naked to it, and the torchlight flickering wildly on the gyrating bodies of the white savages in their bells and feathers as they circled her screeching their menace, shaking their weapons, lusting for her blood.

“If you go, Dray Prescot — I shall never see you alive again.”

“Oh, come now, Sosie! I can protect myself.”

This was, in truth, a strange conversation.

When, at last, Sosie and her friends and the relatives with whom she was staying in Arkasson — until she had found a man and married and so ventured forth to rebuild her farm — understood that I fully intended to walk on toward the east, they insisted on loading me with presents. Any town must have food brought into it, and manufactures to sustain it, and Arkasson was no exception. The farms were the lifeblood of the town, and the white savages of Cherwangtung were attempting to bleed that lifeline dry. Similar situations must exist all over the Hostile Territories; this one was none of my business. I had fulfilled my oath to Mangar na Arkasson; now I must be on my way.

From Sosie I accepted only food and drink, and a finely built Lohvian longbow. Memories of Seg ghosted up, to be firmly repressed. The longbow was all of six feet six inches in height, and the pull I judged to better a hundred pounds. It was a bow with which I would acquit myself well; had I not been trained by Seg Segutorio, the master bowman of Erthyrdrin?

Sosie smiled as she handed me the quiver fully stocked with shafts. There was in her eyes the look of a woman who bedecks a corpse for its final journey to the Ice Floes of Sicce. Out of politeness I examined the quiver, and noticed the exquisite bead-embroidery covering it, animals and flowers and border motifs, all stitched in brilliant colors. The beads glinted in the suns-light — and at that I frowned.

“These gems were gathered by myself from the cliffs, Dray. I have spent many years stitching this quiver. It—” She stopped, and her black face shone upon me and her everted lips trembled and she lowered her eyelids with their long curling black lashes. I thought, then, that I understood. Her aunt confirmed my suspicions.

“A maiden of Arkasson, on marriage, is expected to hand to her bridegroom an embroidered quiver, and tunic, and shoes of buckskin, stitched with gems she has gathered from the cliffs with her own hand, and polished to perfection, and drilled without a flaw or chip. You are a strange man, Dray Prescot. But for the color of your skin you would be a worthy member of the noblest of Arkasson.”

“And will no young man take her to wife if she cannot provide him with these trinkets?”

The aunt — one Slopa, with a lined face and graying hair, which meant she must be well over a hundred and fifty — looked affronted. “No.”

“Sink me!” I burst out. “I can’t take the quiver from Sosie! It’s taken her years to make. If no gallant will have her without it, then she’ll wait years and years more, gathering gems, polishing them, drilling them, stitching them to a new quiver. And what of her farm? Aunt Slopa — I can’t take it!”

“You will hurt her cruelly if you do not.”

“I know, by Zim-Zair, I know!”

Aunt Slopa pursed her full lips. “Sosie would not have done this just because you saved her life. There is more to this business than that.”

“Can you bring me an undecorated quiver?”

“I can. But that—”

“Just bring it, please, Aunt Slopa.”

When I had transferred all the shafts from the brilliant embroidered quiver into the plain one and had time to mark the perfection of the feather-setting — every feather was jet black — I took up the quiver that was the gift of Sosie na Arkasson and sought her out where she sat on a bench in a courtyard, the anti-flier wire stretching above her Afro hairstyle. She was reading a book — it was The Quest of Kyr Nath ,[1]a rollicking tale of mythical adventure at least two thousand years old and known all over Kregen — and as I approached she put one slim black finger between the leaves to mark her place and looked up at me with a smile.

“Nath,” I said. “I know a man called Nath, a dear comrade, and I intend to go drinking and carousing with him and Zolta again one of these fine days.”

She looked at the quiver.

“I would like to live, Sosie, and yet you put me in mortal peril.”

“I! Put you in peril, Dray Prescot! Why, how can you think it?”

“See how these marvelous gems and this incredibly lovely stitching gleam and wink and glitter in the light of Zim and Genodras!”

She reached out her free hand and stroked down the embroidery and the gemstones. Her face showed satisfaction and pride, as was right and proper for a young girl who knows she has stitched well.

“Indeed, they do look fine. Over your back they will proclaim to the world that the quiver was made for you by a girl who—” She stopped. Again her soft everted lips trembled. She did not go on. I said, in something of that foul and harshly-dominating tone I so much deplore in myself, “The quiver is beautiful, Sosie. I am a rough adventurer, who must travel in wild and perilous lands. It could be the death of me. It would show the world where I was; it would show the world that I carried a fortune on my back. I would have no peace.” She started to say something, quickly, hotly, but I shushed her and went on. “This should hang in the house of the man you marry, Sosie, the man you will love. For him, it will be a source of unceasing joy and pleasure. For me, it could bring death.”

“But — Dray—” She was confused.

“You do see, Sosie. I appreciate—”

As I spoke, as I held out the scintillating quiver to her, she leaped to her feet with a choked cry. Kyr Nath went flying. Her arms went about me and she kissed me with a full fierce passion that held in it only an innocence and a sweetness.

That hot wet pressure on my lips shot through me with a spike of agony. Then Sosie released me and fled into the house.

I sighed. Bending, I retrieved the book.

Kyr Nath. Well. I read at random: “And in this wise did Kyr Nath astride his coal-black impiter smite the legions of Sicce, so that they recoiled from him in thunder and lightning, and Kyr Nath smote them from beyond the sunrise to the day of judgment, so that they fell to the ground and crawled into the caves beneath the Mountains of Pearl and Gold from whence issueth their fiery breath even to this day.”

I put the book down. Sunrise. It said sunrise. I was still, as an Earthman, bothered over saying

“suns-rise” instead of sunrise. Those ancient people of the Eye of the World who had lived and laughed along the coasts, who had built the Grand Canal and the Dam of Days, they were called the people of the sunrise or the people of the sunset. There were mysteries here that I had no way at all of unraveling. Perhaps Maspero, in distant, unknown Aphrasöe, could have explained. Also, and significantly, this copy of the book had Kyr Nath flying an impiter. Those coal-black flying animals with their huge wingspread were well known here, in the Hostile Territories, and I had alternately cursed and blessed them, as I had fought Ullars screeching wildly on their backs, and flown with my Delia astride Umgar Stro’s great impiter away to find safety with the airboat Lorenztone from Vallia. In Sanurkazz the story would have had Kyr Nath riding a sectrix. Certainly, the story as I had first heard it, declaimed among the wagon circle of my Clansmen of Felschraung, had Kyr Nath riding a vove. The culture of a whole planet is an intricately-woven tapestry — and, I can remember now, that I turned with that duly solemn thought to find Aunt Slopa regarding me mournfully.

“Sosie asks me to say to you that she quite understands.”

Although I had faced many wild beasts, as you have heard, I felt the strongest disinclination to probe into the details of the scene that had preceded that announcement. What had been said between Slopa and Sosie was nothing to do with me. It was to do with me, really; but it could not be allowed to become of me.

The subject of conversation being turned, Aunt Slopa said in answer to my question: “When a man dies, his embroidered quiver and tunic and buckskins are laid up with him in the Glittering Caves.”

“The Glittering Caves?”

She nodded to the overbearing cliff face dominating Arkasson. “The cliff is riddled with the caves. The gems within the rock glow and glitter.”

Further comment from me did not seem required; but I did think that a fortune beyond calculation lay within that cliff, embedded in the rock and lying beside the dead bodies of generations of men in the Glittering Caves.

Before I left Sosie appeared. She had dried her tears and made herself look presentable, which, in reality, meant that she looked dazzlingly beautiful with her black skin gleaming and her Afro hairdo a puffed-up nimbus. She wore a simple dress of a dark orange color, heavily spattered with sewn gems, and her feet were clad in yellow slippers. I remember those yellow slippers. I started to say, “You will forgive me, Sosie—”

She hushed me at once, for which I was grateful. I make it a rule never to apologize; sometimes — not often — that rule of life becomes tricky.

“So you are determined to travel the Owlarh Waste, Dray Prescot! I know, now, I cannot prevent that. I thank you for your kindness to me—”

“Now, Sosie, it is you who are kind!”

“But not kind enough.”

That was spoken tartly enough. She was no weeping willow, was this Sosie na Arkasson.

“I wish you all the luck in the world, Sosie — all the luck in Kregen. May you find the man of your heart, and marry, and the farm prosper. May you be happy. Zair go with you.”

As before, she did not question my use of the name Zair. They were tolerant, in Arkasson, of any man’s religion, unlike the primitives of Cherwangtung.

“And with you, Dray Prescot”

Before me lay what Sosie called the Owlarh Waste. I took a few steps away from the frowning stone walls, out of their shadow and into the streaming light of the Suns of Scorpio, and I turned.

“Remberee, Sosie!”

She lifted her arm in farewell. “Remberee Dray Prescot. Remberee!”

With deliberate purpose I did not look back until the town of Arkasson had sunk into a blending gray against the lowering cliff upthrust beyond its walls.

During the midday break when I ate and drank sparingly was the time to take stock of myself. Around my waist I wore the scarlet silk formed into a breechclout. Sosie had, without my knowledge, stitched up for me a scabbard and baldric from plain supple leather of lesten hide and the deadly Krozair long sword now snugged safely against my thigh. She had made some remarkably raucous comments on that sword which, to her eyes accustomed to the slender blades of the Hostile Territories, was so monstrous a brand. The broad belt Delia had given me aboard the airboat buckled up firmly about my waist, the silver buckle deliberately left tarnished, and kept the silken loincloth in place, for silk has this exasperating tendency to slip. The rapier hung at my left side. It did not hang parallel to the long sword but thrust out at a divergent angle. The main-gauche was scabbarded to my right side. You may smile at this plethora of weapons, and consider me a walking arsenal — remember Hap Loder! — but I was accustomed to be so accoutered and could manage athletic evolutions without the slightest inconvenience.

The quiver that had caused so much heart-searching I slung over my back, the black-feathered shafts protruding up past my right shoulder. This was for convenience in carrying. For rapid shooting the quiver would be carried slung low and angled forward on the left hip. The bow itself, all six feet six inches of it, I carried unstrung. In a waxed-leather pouch I had a dozen spare strings. Also there were the food bag and the water bottle.

So, thus I found myself, Dray Prescot, walking on my bare feet toward the eastern coast of Turismond. If I fail to mention the broad-bladed hunting knife sheathed onto the belt behind my right hip it is merely because a knife in that position has been my constant companion from the time I first stepped aboard a seventy-four.

In my long life I have handled many weapons and grown skilled in the use of weapons wholly strange to an Earthman. Armor in its right and proper place has also been of importance to me. Yet, however much I grow used to any one sword or rapier in particular, one special bow, I have never chained myself and my fortunes to just one single weapon. Many weapons have been presented to me, I have bought large numbers, and taken quantities from dead foemen; if I were to lose all this gaudy arsenal I would feel annoyance — an annoyance not, for instance, that I had lost this one particular Krozair long sword presented to me by Pur Zenkiren, but annoyance over the loss of any weapon in the midst of dangers. The man who wishes to be an adventuring fighting-man had best not lock his fortune to one brand alone. Fate is all too often ready to snatch it from him, and seldom ready to offer it back — as I had snatched back my sword from Umgar Stro after I had snapped his backbone.

And with this goes the corollary that the true fighting-man can fight with whatever weapons come into his hands.

The twin suns of Antares passed across the sky, the smaller green Genodras now leading the giant red Zim, so that at the second sunset the land took on the tincture of rusted iron, a broad wash of orange and brown and crimson with the last few streaks and streamers of green pulsing through that ruby sky. Ahead the Owlarh Waste stretched in dust and thorn-ivy and prickly scrub. Finding safe anchorage for the night was not overly difficult and by the time Genodras reappeared ahead of me with its filaments of lacy green patterning the sky ahead and painting out the last stars I was well on my first leg of the day’s journey. There had been a noticeable lack of interference from the people of Cherwangtung and this could be explained in a number of ways, perhaps the best of these being Sosie’s comment when I had left that the wild white men tended to lay up during the day and roam only at night. I was not naïve enough to believe they had spotted me and, remembering what I had done to their war party, were afraid to approach me. They might well have been; but that way lies arrogance, psychosis, self-delusion, and eventual destruction.

The land here in the Owlarh Waste was poor and getting worse as I tramped eastward. Arkasson was a town muchly cut off from the world, tending its own circle of farms and minding its own business. The problem facing me soon would be water. Dust kicked up at the unwary tread, behooving me to walk carefully. Leem prowled here, so Sosie had said, raiding into the farms if the fences were left unrepaired, at other times subsisting on the rabbit-like animals burrowing into the plain — animals on which I, too, must depend for food.

I had less concern that I might meet risslaca — of which there are innumerable varieties. The overlords of Magdag placed a bronze risslaca beneath the beaks of their swifters where the wales met. They more often than not took the fancy of using a mythical risslaca, a great lizard-dragon with fangs and forked tongue. Those that I had previously encountered during my runs ashore when I was fighting my way up as a swifter commander on the inner sea, the Eye of the World, had been impressive enough, saurian monsters, cold-blooded, fanged and clawed, armored with plate and scale, chilly of eye. Nath, Zolta, and I had fought our quota in defending Sanurkazz’s southern boundaries. That all seemed a long time ago to me, now.[2]

As you may well imagine, having encountered dinosaurs in the flesh on Kregen, I have, whenever the opportunity offered, studied the dinosaurs of our Earth. They form a subject for study that fascinates everyone, from the school child to the paleontologist. Just why this is so can be explained glibly — or with much psychological insight. I had the idea of trying to trace any comparisons, any parallels, between the long-gone saurian kings of the Earth and the very present flesh and blood risslaca of Kregen. There were, of course, many points of similarity. Equally, risslaca existed — had chased me and been slain — that were unlike anything that we know stalked the Earth at the end of the mid Mesozoic Era, the Jurassic Period, all of one hundred and forty million years ago.

Many were quite dumb. Many emitted shrieks like bursting boilers. Many hunted by eye. Many hunted by scent.

It was a trio of the latter who picked me up toward the middle of the afternoon, when I had entered an area where the ground, although still poor, offered perfect conditions for fern growth. A river had wandered athwart my path and I had crossed it and carried on. The ferns grew in lush profusion. I felt the hunter’s itch between my shoulder blades. The light from the twin suns burned down, orange and jade, shafts of sunlight striking down between the great ferns. The foliage curved over me. The unending stalks towered above. I walked very lightly, turning and twisting my head, and I had strung my bow with that practiced ease that Seg Segutorio exemplified best. I carried the longbow in my hand, an arrow nocked. Walking thus lightly and alertly through the green and golden glory of the ferns with the jade and orange light falling all about me I came to a swampy area that I must bypass. Here and there the water gleamed like bronze. A wall moved before me. That wall rippled with scaled muscle. Blotches of color — amber, jade, jet — camouflaged the risslaca against the crowding ferns. I saw a narrow head greedily gulping ferns and the drooping leaves of the bristle-topped sickly trees that grew palm-like around the fringes of the water. A serpentine neck curled around. The head lifted from the ferns and cocked so that one eye could regard — not me! The eye looked coldly back down the twisted trail up which I had walked. The three killers were there. They padded up on their three-toed feet — and I saw the first toe of each hind foot carried the long scythe-bladed claw, razor-sharp, that distinguished our Earthly deinonychus. The light from the twin suns of Antares fell luridly across their arrogantly gold and ebony-banded scales. Ten feet long, were the killers; seventy feet at least the camarasaurus-like herbivore. And I stood between them.

The rudder-like tails of the deinonychus risslacas extended stiffly backward. Those long-curved scythe-claws caught the gleam of suns-light and glittered with deadly power. With explosive, incredible ferocity, the three killers sprang.

CHAPTER THREE

Into the Klackadrin

With reflexive action so fast the movement was completed before I saw the first risslaca’s hind legs leave the ground the black feathers drew back to my ear, the last extra urge of muscle snapped out as the bow bent, my fingers released the arrow, and the shaft loosed.

So fast had I reacted, my aim exact, that thereby I was nearly killed. For I had not expected the incredible jumping power of the reptile. It sailed up into the air, its tail rigidly extended backward, its body straightening into the upright position that would enable those slashing blades on its feet to slice me to the backbone. I have seen kangaroos in Australia, larger than these risslacas, leap fantastic distances. The dinosaurs were no sluggish, lethargic movers; they were agile, rapid, deadly — and these were killers.

The risslaca leaped above my point of aim. The arrow skewered past its belly and struck deeply into the junction of tail and body.

Sosie had given me a selection of arrows, so that I had the alternatives of the thin armor-piercing bodkin, the body punching pile, the broad meat-cleaving barb, or the utility arrowheaded point. Against what I had fancied would be after me for supper I had chosen the great barbed meat-slicing head. This slashed its way through the scale and flesh of the risslaca, gouging deeply. Chance had driven that arrow with deadly precision.

For deinonychus of the type on Kregen has the thick bunched tendons and muscles around the root of the tail so that the tail may be extended rigidly and thus give the animal the balance necessary for it to spring and use its lethal scythe-claw.

The arrow slashed all those staying tendons and muscles apart. The tail flopped. The risslaca, hissing, somersaulted, all balance and control gone.

In the same instant I darted into the shadows of the giant ferns. The two following risslacas hurdled their screeching companion. They sprang again. High and viciously they curved into the air. I heard the shrieking snorting roar of the giant camarasaurus as they landed on its back, one high against the junction of neck and shoulders, the other lower down, so that its curved claws sank bloodily into the belly of the herbivore.

At that instant, simply by stepping forward and loosing twice, I could have slain both killers. But I do not kill unnecessarily. I regret that sometimes in my long life I have been forced to kill. Certainly, I own to the weakness of being willing to slay first the man or beast attempting to slay me. It is a defect of character, no doubt. Here, though, nature was merely being followed. Since long before I had arrived so unexpectedly on Kregen and, without a doubt, long after I am gone, the risslacas hunt and kill as do all carnivores. It is in the nature of these fascinating creatures — just as it was in the nature of the scorpion to sting my father to death.

Judging by the noise and the thrashing among the giant curving ferns the killers were not having it all their own way.

Circumspectly, then, I left that scene that might have been wrenched from the scarlet pages of Earth’s Jurassic and walked delicately on around the swamp.

Perhaps, by taking out one of the hunting party of carnivores, I had given the herbivore the better chance, at that.

You may be sure I walked long into the night, constantly alert, until I was well away from the swamps and ferns of the meandering river and once again treading the poor, dry and dusty ground. I camped that night without a fire and merely dozed. Three days and nights later and with the land still as unfriendly and with only a mouthful of water left in my canteen, I had to revert still further to our barbaric ancestors. My shaft drove skillfully, and slew me a darting rat-like creature — not a Kregen rast, although no doubt a species allied to those unpleasant creatures — and I drank its blood to slake my thirst. I strode on, having recovered my arrow and cleaned it on the animal’s gray and dusty fur, ever vigilant for predatory enemies. More to the point, I was also constantly on the lookout for food. So, I suppose, as is the way with men or the half-men of Kregen, I was the greater predator crossing that dismal and hostile wilderness.

Toward evening of the fifth day I ran across one of the broad high-banked roads left by the conquerors of the Empire of Walfarg who had driven through here from the eastern seaboard in the old days and taken their suzerainty of all the Hostile Territories.

The debate I carried out did not last long. Of a certainty I could travel far faster along the road with its squared slabs than across the arid plain. Those stones were still in remarkable condition, squared, their edges only slightly crumbled and the greenery that attempted to struggle through the interstices could subsist only on drifted soil, for the old engineers of Loh had built well. But on the road I would be marked.

So, keeping the road generally in sight, I traveled more safely if more slowly parallel to it, heading east. On the eighth day I began to discern a jagged appearance to the eastern horizon. The skyline there did not bear the kind of outline I associated with a mountain range, and I hoped there was going to be nothing like The Stratemsk ahead of me. I did not relish that thought. We had flown through The Stratemsk, Delia and Seg and Thelda and I. That mountain chain lofted so high, extended so sprawlingly vast, that it defied all rational comprehension. It walled off with chilling finality the western end of the Hostile Territories from the eastern end of the lands on the eastern border of the inner sea. What happened there, in the Eye of the World, might have been happening back on my Earth for all that the people of the Hostile Territories knew. And, now, I began to entertain the deepest suspicions that another and equally hostile barrier existed between the Hostile Territories and the eastern seaboard of this continent of Turismond.

If it did, I would have to pass through, somehow, so as to reach the coast, take ship to Vallia, and reach my Delia of the Blue Mountains.

The terrain continued unpleasant, much cut up with dry gulches and razor-backed outcroppings of naked rock. Here — although I knew I must have trended well north of the parallel of latitude on which stood Pattelonia, the city of the eastern seaboard of the Eye of the World from which we had set out — the weather continued hot with the brazen Suns of Scorpio burning down. I had now to hunt my food and drink in earnest.

The jagged impression of the skyline before me continued when I was able to observe it from a higher-than-usual eminence, although the difficulty of the ground with its bare-bones, desiccated look meant I was more often than not confined between rocky walls. My back kept up an infernal itch and my head swiveled from side to side, constantly observing my back trail, like — if you will pardon the anachronistic image — the rear turret of a Lancaster. The only life that scraped a subsistence here larger than the insects and lizards and other burrowing animals seemed, from all that I observed, to be a kind of six-legged opossum and the wheeling birds, both of which fed on the life lower down the food-chain. You may easily understand how relieved I was that from day to day the birds that followed me were no larger in size than an Earthly vulture or kite. Why they were following me was obvious; but I had to reach my Delia of Delphond, and was in no mood to provide a meal for these scavengers of the air. Harsh vegetation grew scrawnily along shadowed cracks in the uptilted rock faces. There were ants here, too, and I avoided their dwellings with great circumspection. So it was that a quick and furtive movement beyond a boulder at the far end of a draw sent me at once to cover.

I waited.

Patience is not merely the virtue of the hunter — it is his life. Presently a Chulik stepped out into the center of the draw.

I drew my breath in a gasp of amazement.

The Chuliks I had seen on Kregen before were full-fleshed men, with two arms and two legs, with a healthy, oily yellow skin. They habitually shaved their skulls with the exception of a long rope of hair that might grow to reach their waists. From the corners of their lips protruded two upward thrusting tusks a full three inches in length and, although they were human-seeming, they knew little of humanity. Normally they were highly prized as mercenaries and guards commanding higher prices than the Ochs or the Rapas, beast-men who performed similar functions. Some I had seen as slaves, not many. This Chulik’s hair grew matted and coarse and filthy. One of his tusks was broken jaggedly. He wore a scrap of black cloth about his middle, much covered with dust and dung and his yellow skin was likewise befouled. In one hand he carried a long pole fabricated from a number of spliced lengths cut from the twisted and scrawny bushes that were all that grew hereabouts, and the end of the pole carried a yoke-like fork. A basket woven of dry stems enclosed four of the little opossum creatures. The Chulik was busy about the task of catching a fifth, poking and prying down into a shallow hole beneath a boulder, moving with an alacrity pathetic in comparison with the lithe and vigorous movements of the Chuliks I had known.

I waited.

Moments later another figure joined the first.

Again I felt astonishment.

This was a Fristle, a half-man with a face as much like a cat’s as anything else, furred, whiskered, slit-eyed, and fang-mouthed. Although I still had no love for Fristles — for Fristles had carried my Delia off to captivity in Zenicce so soon after I had been taken to Kregen for the second time — much of my dislike had been mitigated by the gallant actions of Sheemiff, the female Fristle, she who had called me her Jikai and had so proudly worn the yellow-painted vosk-skull helmet when my rabble army of slaves and workers revolted in Magdag.

This Fristle wore a black breechclout, was as filthy and downcast as the Chulik. He carried the curved scimitar that is the racial weapon of the Fristles, but its hangings and lockets were tarnished and broken. What had brought these two representatives of proud and haughty races so low?

The impression grew in me strongly that I had nothing to fear from them. The strangeness of that feeling must be apparent to you who have listened to my story so far. I stepped out and lifted my hand.

“Llahal!” I called, using the double-L prefix, after the Welsh fashion, to the word of greeting, as was right when encountering strangers.

They looked up sluggishly.

After a time the Fristle said: “Llahal.”

The Chulik said: “Why do you not work?”

“I am going to the coast.”

For a moment they did not understand. Then the Fristle cackled. I know, now, that laughter for him and the others here occurred so infrequently that it might never have been invented; it came almost as seldom to them as it does to me.

“I have marched from the Hostile Territories, through the Owlarh Waste, and I have not come here to be laughed at — by a Fristle least of all.”

In response the Fristle merely blinked. His hand did not even fall to his scimitar hilt. The Chulik cowered back, but he did not lift the forked pole against me. I rolled out a vile Makki-Grodno oath.

What had happened to these men? What power had so ferociously tamed them into pitiful wrecks of their former selves?

Also, the thought occurred to me, it is said there is hereditary enmity between Chulik and Fristle, except when they are engaged by the same employer.

Knowing that, I was profoundly impressed when the Fristle helped the Chulik hoist the cage containing the four opossum creatures onto his back. I caught a glimmering, then, that whatever horrific experiences these men had gone through had brought them closer together and by stripping away the artificialities of race and species had displayed them to each other in adversity as creatures together beneath Zair and Grodno.

“The grint has gone, now,” said the Chulik. He spoke in the whine habitual to the slave. “Four will not be enough, but that is all the Phokaym will get.”[3]

At this name, this name of Phokaym, both Chulik and Fristle gave an involuntary shudder. Before I could say another word they hunched around and slouched off, quickly vanishing into the tangle of boulders at the end of the draw.

I ran fleetingly enough after them; but when I entered the rock-strewn area I saw quickly that they had taken themselves off and lost me, traveling by secret paths and passages they would know well. Pushing on through this country grew more difficult in the following few burs and so, at last, I chanced striding out along the old road of empire.

One vital fact was very clear. In this area lived some power of such strength that it could reduce arrogant beast-men to a cowering state lower than that of a whip-beaten slave. From the evidence of the Fristle’s scimitar I judged that they were not slaves. All resistance had been knocked out of them, and warriors who had strode victoriously over a score of battlefields had been reduced to a state of abject degradation. All this was proved to be true — as I found to my cost, as you shall hear. Occasionally I glimpsed over the twisted and fantastically jumbled landscape on either side of the road more of these subdued people, men and women, Ochs, Rapas, Fristles, and Chuliks, as well as Ullars and other half-beast, half-men I had not so far encountered closely enough to identify. They all scuttled at my approach, disappearing into crevices in the rock. None ventured onto the squared blocks of the road surface.

That night I camped uncomfortably in a rock crevice of my own close to the road and, apart from a few strips of dried meat hung on my belt, I went supperless to bed. I had the strongest conviction I should save as much food as possible for what the future held.

In the morning with that jade and ruby fire mingling and pulsing down I stood up and stretched and was at once alert and ready to face the terrors of the day. As I walked along that ancient road I saw that scummy water filled pools and hollows among the rocks, and that a weird and gnarled vegetation grew, all twisted and stunted, its roots curling like petrified serpents from the rocks into the fetid water. Indeed, the smells of indescribable foulness grew every yard I progressed. I began to feel a dizziness. I blinked and shook my head and pressed on. The road appeared to me to waver as does tar macadam at the brow of a hill in hot sunshine; a shimmering stream of interconnecting and vibrating images at once obscuring vision and lending it a fraudulent magnifying quality.

Now I walked all alone. No other living soul I could see stirred in that dismal expanse. Ahead of me lay the east coast, and a ship, and Vallia — and Delia. No fainting fit would hold me back. I staggered as I marched. I hauled up, the sweat starting out all over my body as I stared directly ahead along that ancient road, there on the continent of Turismond on the planet of Kregen beneath the Suns of Scorpio — and saw a three-decker of a hundred and twelve guns lift her scarlet-lidded gun ports and saw the thirty-two pounders and the twenty-four pounders and the eighteen pounders run out, grinning at me, and belch in silent flame and smoke!

That smashing broadside would pulverize me in an instant. The familiar yellow smoke engulfed me and I could not prevent the old prayer rising to my lips — but even as I said, “For what we are about to receive,” the three-decker vanished. In her place I saw a swifter of the inner sea, a lean deadly hundredswifter turning toward me so that her bronze rostrum aimed directly at the rib beneath my heart!

I yelled — and in that wavering mist and confusing smoke, the glint of the twin suns and the smothering feeling of madness rising in my mind I saw my friend Zorg — Zorg of Felteraz — smiling at me, his moustache curling. Zorg, dead, and gone and food for chanks in the inner sea!

His face was ripped away and next I saw Nath and Zolta, my oar comrades who with Zorg and I had labored at the oars as slaves. Nath and Zolta, chuckling, the one with a leather blackjack slopping wine, the other with a giggling wench on his knee.

I shouted.

I lurched forward — and now I saw Gloag, my good comrade from Zenicce who was not a full human being and yet who knew more of human kindness than — than Glycas, that cruel and cunning man of Magdag, and his sister, the beautiful and evil Princess Susheeng — and I saw Queen Lilah, the Queen of Pain of Hiclantung — and I saw Hap Loder and all of my clansmen in headlong cry astride their massive voves — I saw Prince Varden Wanek of the House of Eward. I saw many people, then, all replaying the roles they had played in my life.

I saw Seg Segutorio and Thelda — and I wept.

And then — then I saw my Delia, my Delia of Delphond, as she had walked with so lithe a swing down toward Great-Aunt Shusha and me. Delia I saw, wearing that flaunting scarlet breechclout and with the dazzlingly white ling furs I had given her aswing about her form, her long lissome legs very splendid in the suns-light.

Then I knew beyond a doubt that I dreamed.

I shook my head.

Knowledge of hallucinatory drugs is more widespread on this Earth than heretofore, and armed with modern knowledge I might have appreciated far more rapidly just what was happening to me. Opium and hashish were known to me, as was the more luscious and gentle if treacherous kaf used by the weak-willed on Kregen beneath Antares. Drug-taking for escape from life is generally the mark of a decadent or bored society — and on Kregen life was too vivid and headlong and demanding for those who sought life out for the taking of drugs to be more than a marginal nuisance. It has seemed to me that I have never had the time to investigate properly all this modern to-do over the drug habit and on Kregen I have always had far too much to do, even as slave, when my every thought has normally been set on escape.

So now I staggered and lurched along the old imperial road and the phantoms from my mind took on form and substance and came to leer and gibber at me, to mock, or to smile and hold out their hands in friendly Lahal.

That first time I attempted to cross this barrier to the eastern coast — the barrier was called the Klackadrin, as you shall hear — I entered on the task as a young and innocent. Those scummy pools fed minerals to the scrawny plants, which breathed out their miasmic bedevilment, betraying the wits of men and beasts. The Klackadrin sealed the eastern flanks of the Hostile Territories as effectively as The Stratemsk sealed the western.

Delia’s counterfeit image swung away and in her place pranced all the might of the cavalry aswirl about me at Waterloo. I brushed a hand across my eyes, and when I looked again I saw Umgar Stro, huge and ferocious, charging upon me with the ghostly replica of the sword I now carried!

Tendrils from the marshy pools set amid deep crevices of the rocks at the side of the road wriggled across the road at me. At first I thought them figments of my imagination, perhaps a reminder of those morfangs we had battled in that cave of the Hostile Territories. Then a thick and clutching tendril wrapped itself about my ankle. It hauled.

A single slash from my Krozair long sword severed the thing.

More of them crowded the road ahead, writhing, seeming obscenely beckoning arms, beseeching me to walk into their embrace. I would have to hack my way through.

A fresh sound obtruded. A hard, ringing clash of steel-like claws on the flagstones of the road. I swung about.

I really believe, even now, that I thought I was bewitched still, seeing phantoms, seeing things that never were.

That belief, sluggish and obstinate, held me in a stasis that came from the foolish belief that of all these hallucinations none could harm me and that only from the beckoning and writhing tendrils had I any physical danger to fear.

What I saw impacted with the sense of physical nausea and yet, with all my experience of Kregen and its beast-men to give me a guide, I realized that these beast-men were not half-men half-beasts; these were half-beast half-monster. They were the Phokaym.

They rode cousins to those risslacas I had previously met, huge lumbering dinosaurs that yet moved with a quickness that would tax a sectrix to match. The Phokaym themselves, quite clearly, were racial descendants of risslacas. They were cold-blooded, as I discovered, with the wide-fanged mouth of the carnivorous risslaca, the small front legs that had adapted into manipulative arms and clawed hands, and the powerful hind legs and tail of the carnivorous dinosaur. They were perhaps twelve feet tall. They carried their tails curled up and around behind the ornate saddles. Each one was armed with spear and sword. They wore barbaric ornaments, and their scales were painted and lacquered into geometric patterns of cold reptilian beauty. Were they real?

Intelligent, armed, cold-blooded carnivorous dinosaurs riding spurred and bridled herbivorous dinosaurs? They were real.

Had they been more alien, more weird, more unearthly than their very forms suggested, I might have believed. There are so many unearthly life-forms on Kregen that one can understand the profusion of life and its multiplicity; had they been like those morfangs, or the wlachoffs — incredibly alien in appearance

— or any other of the many unterrestrial creatures I have encountered on Kregen, I might have reacted sooner. As it was their very suggestion of Earthly dinosaurs riding Earthly dinosaurs, a conception staggering to me then, if not so much later, with its immediate impact of rejection and dissociation in that bath of hallucinogenic compounds, made me laggard and late.

Thick blood-red strands fell about me, tacky and binding, dragging my arm and long sword into my side, entangling my bow and quiver, wrapping me from shoulder to ankle. I fell. The smash of the hard stone against my cheek awoke me.

But it was too late.

Enmeshed I was dragged along the hard stones of the road, back toward the west, back away from the coast, back into a slavery of the kind I had seen in those unfortunates skulking among the rocks and fetid pools.

Triumphantly shrilling, the Phokaym dragged me away.

Had they had eight limbs each, I would have believed in them, and my long sword would have drunk cold reptilian blood. Had they had eight legs, I would have believed. Six legs, even. . .

CHAPTER FOUR

The Phokaym

An old crone of an Och came to me in the corner of a cave where the Phokaym had flung me, still tightly bound in the thick blood-red strands. She was old and her stringy bleached hair hung lankly down. She stood before me on her legs, holding the pannikin of foul water with her middle limbs, and brushed the scum from the surface of the water with one of her upper hands, while the other dipped the stone spoon and so dribbled water between my lips.

“They want you alive and healthy for the voryasen.”

The spoon was merely a dumbbell-shaped piece of stone with one end hollowed out. Most of the water trickled down my chin and into my beard — which was longer and more ragged than I customarily allowed — but the drops I sucked in, despite my knowledge of their stinking condition, tasted like the best Zond wine.

The Och made no attempt to free me. She cringed at the slightest sound, shutting her eyes and hunching her head down into her neck. She spilled more water than I got, but at least I felt a little more myself. I asked her impatient questions, and when I mastered myself enough to soothe her, she was able to speak, albeit falteringly and with many frightened glances over her shoulder. Outside came the noise of people moving about, the rhythmical gong-like notes as stone struck against stone. The suns had set, but it was still hot.

“The Klackadrin.” The old Och woman sighed. Her name, she said, was Ooloo. She had no clear memory of any life before this; yet she must have been brought here in some way, if she had not been born here. She did not remember. “The Klackadrin. It is evil, weird, ghosts and bad spirits dwell there. No one can cross it at all — only the roads, only the roads—”

How many of these poor devils had sought to escape via the roads, only to have the fearsome Phokaym astride their risslacas hunt them down and bind them with the blood-red cords and cast them to the voryasen?

“Devils,” she said, muttering, and cast a terrified glance toward the cave mouth. The Klackadrin, she told me, was not a great distance in an east-west direction, although its north-south axis, meandering and curving, stretched she did not know how far into North Turismond and ended, she thought, far down into the south, perhaps as far as the Cyphren Sea where the Zim Stream sweeps up from unknown oceans.

“Evil dreams, nightmares, madness, that is all the Klackadrin can offer. There are monsters there —

monsters—” She shut her eyes. I had had no food and when I asked she brought me a piece of raw opossum which, as a warrior, I knew I must eat to keep up my strength, yet tasted hard and stringy and needed much chewing.

“One day, perhaps, the Phokaym will go away and leave us in peace,” said Ooloo. It was pathetically transparent that she did not believe this would ever happen.

By continuous perseverance I discovered I could move my fingers a little within the constriction of the blood-red strands. I kept working away, pushing and pulling one muscle against the next in well-remembered drill, seeking to keep them flexible and the blood coursing through my body. If I was to escape I could not have the agony of blood returning to circulation slowing me down. I was working on my upper arms when the Phokaym amid a loud noise of clashing weapons and scaled armor came for me.

“The voryasen!” whispered old Ooloo. As I was dragged out with a great shouting and much buffeting I heard her say, “Jikai, Jikai,” and I thought she sobbed.

We warriors always felt a trifle contemptuous of Ochs with their little round shields when it came to combat; but I think I can trace my emergence of a better feeling for them from that encounter with old Ooloo there in the fetid caves of the Phokaym.

Clouds drifted across the sky and She of the Veils, the fourth moon, shone more fitfully even than usual, while the first moon, almost twice the size of our own moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, was already setting far across the Owlarh Waste.

The collection of food and the production of tools and utensils were the primary concerns of the crushed-down people, both men and half-men, under the despotic rule of the Phokaym. Tonight was to be a spectacle night, an occasion when the risslaca Phokaym emphasized their absolute power. A man was to be tossed to the voryasen. Consequently, so I gathered, more torches than usual were lit, painfully gathered by the slaves from the waste, twisted and gnarled branches they had so painfully gathered set alight gleefully by the Phokaym to illuminate their celebrations. I saw stone jugs passing from claw to claw as the Phokaym gathered. Their scales glittered in the torchlight. It was difficult to distinguish just what was armor and what was their own scaly hide. I was dragged toward the stone lip of a great pit. Above the pit an arrangement of wooden supports lashed together projected, like the boom of a crane. The Phokaym crowded toward this pit. I was hoisted upside down and my lashed ankles were fastened by a rope painstakingly woven from dry stems. Torchlight glared upon the scene, ruddy and orange, streaming light and driving weird shadows cavorting among the rocks and the stunted bushes.

Up I swung, twisting and turning, upside down, hanging from the rope. The boom moved and turned and I was carried out over the pit. I looked down.

A voryas is a form of risslaca one might imagine in nightmare, part crocodile, part tylosaurus, a giant fang-filled mouth, all jaw and muscle, and an agile scaly body and bludgeoning tail, that one would do well never to imagine, even in nightmare, let alone care to encounter. Bound and helpless, with all my weapons about me and unable to use them, I swung upside down above a water-filled pit crawling with the saurian horrors.

They lifted from the surface of the water, hissing and spitting, their jaws wedges of fangs, their eyes red and wicked and glaring upon me with voracious intent.

The Phokaym had fun.

They kept paying out the rope and lowering me down toward the surface of the water so that the voryasen would leap up at me, giant scaled forms gleaming dully emerald and amber, surging upward to fall back, baffled, hissing their rage, as the rope was hastily hauled in. Up and down I went, and the voryasen leaped and hissed, and the world turned scarlet from the thrum of blood in my head and my eyes threatened to start from their sockets, and my body grew numb. By a stupendous effort I managed to jackknife my body and look upward. A Phokaym, his teeth glinting as carnivorously as any voryas in the pit below, held out a blazing torch. He was touching the fizzing and sputtering torch to the rope holding my bound body above the pit.

Furiously I struggled with the blood-red cords, but they would not yield. If I could swing, I could reach the timber support of the boom from which I hung suspended. The smells, the shrieks, the whole cacophony of noises spurted up to rumble and roil in my head. I was helpless. Below me the carnivorous water-predators saw the flame of the torch and their hissing redoubled. They knew what would happen when the torch burned through the rope. They knew!

I was sweating now; everything whirled about me. One crunch of those gigantic fanged jaws below and I would be cut into two bloody halves.

There could be no last-minute rescue. There was no one within a hundred dwaburs who could aid me now — no one anywhere on this wild and savage world of Kregen.

The pit yawned beneath my dangling head. Torchlight splintered back from the scales and the eyes of the voryasen below. Now their hissing bounced back in magnified echoes from the pit walls. I craned up again — the rope was burning!

I could see the frayed and blackened strands parting, one by one, curling out like spent matches. The torchlight burned into my eyes.

The shrieking and yelling of the Phokaym deafened me.

I swung. . .

My mouth was wide open, but I was not yelling.

This might be the end of it all, of all the high dreams I had had, here on Kregen, of winning my princess and of taking her to my palace and estates in Zenicce, of once more riding with my loyal clansmen across the great plains of Segesthes. . .

I swung. . .

The world dizzied before my swimming eyes. Smoke and flame mingled and blinded me. But I could see the fire of burning rope, see the strands parting, see the evil flickering flame gnawing through the only thing that supported me above the fangs and jaws of those merciless risslacas below. . . I saw — I saw the last strand burn, the rope part and break and then I yelled—

* * * *

At this point the tapes from Africa end.

The following narrative picks up the story later on in Prescot’s life on Kregen. It begins in the middle of a sentence.

The end of the last cassette came with a noise — a sound — of such unimaginable ferocity as to chill me to the heart when I first heard it, and which I hesitate to play over again. After that the tape spins emptily through the heads. Whatever it was that made that frightful sound, I have grave doubts that even the African jungle harbors its creator.

The beginning of the fresh cassette is garbled and there is some confused noise as of laughter and — I guess — the popping of champagne corks. This, as I think you who have followed the saga of Prescot this far will agree, is well in keeping.

The writer who has been giving me invaluable assistance in editing these tapes, a distinguished author with an international reputation, when he heard this portion observed, with what I took to be wry admiration: “Dray Prescot has successfully pulled off one of the oldest classical clichés in the book.”

“Of course,” I told him. “That’s Dray Prescot’s style.”

I do wonder, though, if we will ever be privileged to hear what failed to record at the beginning of this tape. Just how did Dray Prescot do it? Those of you who have followed his saga so far will have no doubts whatsoever that he could do it. . .

And, there is the yellow fang of the Phokaym Prescot gave to Pando to act as a clue. . . Alan Burt Akers

* * * *

. . . bringing me up out of the light doze into which I had fallen and this time louder and more urgent. I opened my eyes and cursed and stretched out a hand across the wide rumpled bed where the fused jade and ruby light from the twin suns threw a miniature landscape of mountain and valley. The light glinted back from the hilt of my rapier as I took it up into my fists. Again the scream knifed up the narrow black-wood stairs of The Red Leem. I cursed, and groaned, for my legs were still rubbery and my head throbbed as though an impiter smote me with his coal-black wings.

“What in the name of Makki-Grodno’s diseased armpit is going on?” I yelled. By the time the third scream ripped out I recognized Tilda’s voice. I staggered a little, and gripped onto the bedpost. The wooden floor with its scattered rugs of bright Walfarg weave swayed under me like the deck of a frigate blockading Brest. I shook my head. I had my old scarlet breechclout wrapped around my middle and my rapier in my fist. Hastily I snatched up the main-gauche and started for the door. The door burst open and young Pando appeared, his hair wild, his eyes reflecting more of the red light than the green, his whole body animated with anger and furious defiance. He shouted at me, his words tumbling over one another, a little dagger in his fist that shook with his passion.

“The Pandrite-forsaken devils!” He danced up and down. “They’re insulting Mother — Dray! Come on! You’ve got to help!”

“I’m coming, Pando.” I set straight for the door and bounced from the jamb. Pando grabbed my arm and steered me through the doorway. “You’d best not stick ’em with that toothpick, Pando,” I said.

“You’ll only upset them.”

“I’ll degut ’em all!” he shrilled. He was only nine years old, as I had to remind myself, and he thought everything in life was black and white.

Then, as though commenting on my thoughts about him, he gave me a kick to help me on my way. I wobbled toward the black-wood stairs, twisted, my feet shot from under me on one of the Walfarg rugs, and down the stairs I went, bump, bump, bump, to the bottom. The bottom hit me hard. Through the arched opening into the main room of the inn I could see the counter with its ranked amphorae, its trim rows of sparkling glass cups, the covers over the food, everything neat and tidy and waiting for evening when the men and women of Pa Mejab would crowd in for their evening’s entertainment.

The chief source of their entertainment was now struggling in the grip of three men. They were ruffians, all right, intent on their prey. As I stood up, smarting, and stared blearily at them I fancied they were leem-hunters, men from the back hills away to the west and probably men who would venture almost to the Klackadrin itself. They wore clothes made from leem pelts, and broad leather harness, with swaggering rapiers and daggers and large riding boots and all seeming to me to be very powerful and blurry.

I blinked.

Tilda’s blouse had ripped down over one shoulder and then the other, and the men laughed.

“Let go, you stinking cramphs!” Tilda was yelling. Her long mane of black hair floated freely from her head, swirling out, in truth, very much like the wings of an impiter. She got one arm free and slapped a leem-hunter across his leathery, whiskered cheeks, whereat he roared with laughter, and, catching that arm, bent it back and drew his face close to Tilda’s.

“You won’t dance for us, ma faril, when we ask all politely, so you’ll dance to another tune now.”

“Wait until we open our doors, rast!”

“Hold on!” shouted another of the men, too late, for Tilda’s naked toes slammed into him. He doubled up, clutching himself, and rolled away, both laughing and retching. Yes, they were ruffians, all right. In from the country and wanting their fun. Pando ran past me, straight up to them, and struck wildly with the dagger at the man gripping his mother.

“Pando!” I yelled, alarmed.

The man back-handed Pando off. He staggered back, cannoned into a table, went over spilling the vase of moon-flowers onto the floor. The man roared his good humor. About to bend again to Tilda he caught sight of me, in the doorway, the rapier and main-gauche in my fists. He straightened up and threw Tilda into the arms of the third man, who grabbed her — most familiarly, I thought — whereat she squealed and tried both to kick and bite him.

“So what have we here, by the gross Armipand himself!”

He ripped his rapier from its sheath, and the dagger followed as quickly. The man Tilda had kicked hauled himself up, turning to face me, his features still twisted and the tears still in his eyes. For a moment the tableau held in the main room of The Red Leem. I was conscious of the stupidity of all this. My head rang as though a swifter’s oars were beating my skull all the way along the hull of a two-hundred-and-tenswifter.

“You had best release the lady,” I said with some difficulty.

They guffawed.

“A tavern wench a lady! Haw, haw!”

I shook my head in negation — and that was a mistake. All the bells of Beng-Kishi clanged resonantly inside my skull.

“She is not a tavern wench. She is Tilda, the famous entertainer, a dancer and actress. She is,” I added with words more like myself, “not for scum of the likes of you.”

“Ho! A ruffler!” The leader of the leem-hunters abruptly threw himself into the posture of the fighting-man. “A swagger with a rapier and dagger! Come on, little man, let us see you back your words with your sword point.”

When I say my legs felt like rubber, it would be more correct to say I could hardly feel them at all, and my knees seemed like mashed banana. I took a step forward, and my rapier point described trembling circles.

The three men laughed hugely.

“Serve him as you served the landlord, Gorlan!”

Portly Nath, the landlord, lay huddled beyond an overturned table. All I could see of him were his legs and feet in their satin slippers, and his balding head, the face turned away from me, and a small trickle of blood. He was not dead, for he moaned; but he had been struck a shrewd blow.

“I am not a fat old innkeeper,” I said.

“Then I will open your tripes and find out!” said this Gorlan, flickering his blade very swiftly before me. He lunged.

My dagger seemed — of its own volition and without any conscious effort of my muscles — to do as it pleased. It sliced up, deflected the rapier blade in a screech of metal, and so drove Gorlan back, with a spring, his face abruptly blackening with thwarted anger.

“You miserable cramph!” he bellowed.

He drove in again, powerfully, overbearing me by sheer weight and ferocity. My twin blades beat him off. The metal slithered and clanged, sliding and twisting with many cunning tricks and turns. He scored a long slicing cut across my left arm and then my rapier point pressed into his throat and his dagger flew spinning across the inn. I did not hear it land.

“Oh, Gorlan,” I said, rather thickly and with the world jumping and dancing with purple spots and streaks of white fire. “Oh pitiful little Gorlan!”

His face blanched. It was a very wonderful sight to see that swarthy visage drain of blood, the eyes glare in terror upon me, the lips go suddenly dry.

“Dray!” screeched Tilda.

I swiveled to my right, taking the rapier around ninety degrees and showing its point to the man Tilda had kicked and who was now rushing upon me with drawn sword. My left hand gripping the main-gauche swung around with my movement and my fist smashed sloggingly into Gorlan’s jaw. He dropped like a sack.

The second man hauled up, his rapier engaging mine, and for a short space we circled. With an oath the man grasping Tilda flung her from him, drew his own weapons, and charged in upon me at the side of his companion. The difficulty of focusing nearly betrayed me; I did not want to kill these two, as I knew they would not wish to kill me. This was a tavern brawl over a woman — as far as they were concerned a tavern wench — and they knew the arm of the law of Pandahem stretched here to Pa Mejab. As for me, the same strictures obtained. That Tilda was in very truth a famous actress, here in this colonial port city of Pandahem only because she had married for love, and her soldier husband had been killed here, leaving her stranded with her nine-year-old son Pando, meant nothing to them, although it meant a great deal to me.

So I engaged, and parried, and feinted, and took their blades upon my dagger, and thrust in the attempt to disable them. And all the time the world pressed roaring and swirling in upon me, my sight dimmed. I felt my banana knees bucking, and their onslaughts grew stronger and stronger as I grew weaker. By a desperate piece of sheer outrageous Spanish-style two-handed fencing that would have had my old master, the cunning Spaniard, Don Hurtado de Oquendo, foaming with outraged professionalism, I managed to disarm the second man and send him reeling back with blood spurting from a pierced bicep. But the other fellow bored in and my sluggish legs wouldn’t drag me around in time to meet his attack. Then — like an avenging angel — Tilda rose up at his back and, two-handed, brought down a jug of purple wine upon his head.

He grunted and lurched forward and his rapier skewered the floorboards as he smashed on past, the blade vibrating backward and forward and the hilt seesawing like an upside down metronome. As though hypnotized by that rhythmic motion I went to my knees, toppled slowly forward, and so came to rest beside the leem-hunter — and all of Kregen fell on me in blackness.

CHAPTER FIVE

A zhantil-skin tunic for Pando

Tilda would not tell anyone — not even me — any other name by which she might be known in Pandahem. Tilda was her professional name, her stage name, and by it she had become famous. What personal tragedy lay as the cause of her moldering, as I termed it, here in a distant colonial port city she also would not reveal. I gathered this had something to do with her husband, and of him all she would say was that he had married her against the wishes of his family. As a soldier he had been posted to Pa Mejab and, leading his squadron one day, had been slain.

She was fanatically proud and possessive of Pando, who was, as you have seen, an engaging imp of a rascal. She fretted continually over his safety and welfare, constantly chiding him for not wearing enough clothes, for not eating enough, for fighting the other children thronging the busy streets. But, in all this, she never lost sight with a clearheaded practicality that Pando was the son of a soldier, that she must look to him one day, and that he must develop as a man.

I confess that I grew to a better liking for both of them with each day that passed. My room at The Red Leem had always a vase of colorful flowers, and the sheets and sleeping furs were changed with hygienic regularity. Old Nath, the landlord, recovered of the knock on the head, consented to allowing me a reduced rent when I went on the guard duties by which, perforce, I earned my daily crust. He was only too well aware of the business Tilda brought into his inn. In the evening when she sang and danced, when she gave recitals of the great parts in Kregen drama, tragediennes and comediennes, performances so moving in both cases that they brought tears to the eyes of her audiences, rapt in silent admiration, Pando and I would sit companionably together and listen.

Pando, at nine years old, had the most fanatical admiration for his beautiful mother. For, as I have said, Tilda was a beauty with her ivory skin and ebony hair, all swirling and glowing, with her firm figure that had no need of the theater’s contrivances to drive men’s blood singing through their veins. Her violet eyes and her voluptuous mouth could melt with passion, could become stern and regal, could blast all a man’s hopes, could urge him to fire and ardor and unthinking gallantry — and all this on the tiny scrap of stage mounted at the far end of the main room of The Red Leem!

Pando is a familiar name for children of Pandahem, the great rival trading island to Vallia. It was only on the second day of my stint as a caravan guard that he was discovered hiding among the calsany drovers. The overseer, a tough and chunky man with a cummerbund swathing the results of many a night at The Red Leem, and, probably, all the other inns and taverns of Pa Mejab, hauled Pando out by an ear and ran him up to me where I strode along on the left flank of the leading flight of calsanys.

“Dray!” roared the overseer, one Naghan the Paunch. “Dray Prescot! Look what has dropped with the nits from the hides of the calsanys!”

I sighed and stared at Pando with a greatly feigned air of complete despair.

“We have no room for passengers, Naghan. Therefore he must either be slain at once, or sent back alone — or—?” I cocked an eye at Naghan the Paunch.

He pondered deeply. “To slay him now would probably be best, for he would never reach Pa Mejab against the leems and the wlachoffs who would rend the flesh from his bones and devour him until not a morsel was left.”

Pando, squirming against the brown hand that held his ear in so tight a grip, looked up, and the whites of his eyes showed.

“You wouldn’t do that to me, Dray! What would Mother say?”

“Ah!” said Naghan the Paunch, enjoying himself. “Poor dear Tilda the Beautiful! Tilda of the Many Veils! How she will grieve for this limb of Sicce himself!”

“Dray!” yelped Pando.

I rubbed my beard. “On the other hand, Naghan, Pando did run with his dagger to protect Tilda the Beautiful when she was attacked by leem-hunters. If he could do that, might he not thus also attack the leems themselves?”

Naghan twisted the trapped ear. “Have you a dagger, boy?”

Pando was thoroughly aroused now. He tried to kick Naghan. “Had I a dagger, oh man of the Paunch, I would have stuck you with it long before this!”

“Oho!” quoth Naghan the Paunch, and laughed.

And I laughed, and so — I, Dray Prescot, laughing! — because we could not send Pando back across that dangerous land we had perforce to take him with us. He was a bright lad, full of wiles and mischievousness, and yet with an endearing streak of pleasant loyalty and quickness of wits, and a readiness to learn that I knew would stand him in good stead on Kregen, where a man must be a man if he wishes to survive.

His greatest vice was his inveterate untidiness. Nothing he touched could be found in the same condition, and even to enter his tiny cubicle-like room in The Red Leem was usually impossible for the chaos strewing every surface and the floor, unless one did as he did and took a flying leap onto the trundle bed. The caravan, with its long lines of calsanys head-to-tail in their stubborn purposeful swaying movements and with the smaller numbers of plains asses separated from the calsanys, pressed on toward Pa Weinob in the northwest. Pa Weinob was an outpost town, part of the spreading web of influence the men of Pandahem were spinning along the seaboard and hinterland of eastern Turismond. There was set a definite limit to their western expansion as the same limit was set for all the peoples seeking to extend westward here. The Klackadrin with its cold hallucinations and its Phokaym waited out there. I have spoken a little at my chagrin at finding myself in a port city of Pandahem when I had wished to reach Port Tavetus, of, failing that, Ventrusa Thole, both colonial port cities of Vallia. The difficulty of finding a ship at all to take me to Vallia had been further compounded by this enforced arrival at a port locked in mortal combat with Vallia. Mention of Vallia here was — almost — as mad as mention of Sanurkazz in Magdag, or of Magdag in Sanurkazz. There was a faint gleam of light in that I detected less vicious acrimony between the men of Pandahem toward Vallia, more a kind of grudging respect and a direful determination to do them down, than the out-and-out obsessional hatred on the inner sea between the red and the green.

Tilda often wore a green gown; and I was used to that now.

Naghan the Paunch kept Pando very busy about the calsany lines, and the youngster learned very quickly not to be anywhere near them when they became frightened. Naghan himself rode a zorca — a fine powerful specimen of that graceful riding animal. It had been a long time since I had seen a zorca —

a long, long time. In the lands fringing the Eye of the World men rode sectrixes, and in the Hostile Territories they rode the near cousin of the sectrix, the nactrix. I looked at that beautiful zorca and I felt my hands clench in envious longing, for I had to pad along on my bare feet. This zorca, like all the breed very close-coupled and with four impossibly tall and spindly legs, possessed a particularly fine horn, twisted and proud, flaunting from the center of his forehead. I would march along and look at the zorca and think.

What little money I earned — heavy silver pieces of Pandahem coinage called dhems, and duller and often-chipped copper coins called obs, one eightieth of a dhem — I saved for my food and keep and lodging, and, most particularly, to buy myself a zorca. I had seen no voves. You must remember that this city and zonal region of Pa Mejab was civilized, or as civilized as any area of Kregen given its situation had any right to be, and I could not just knock over the first person I ran across and take his gear and weapons, mount and cash, as had been my lamentable habit in more savage times. I had to earn what I needed, as I must earn a passage to Vallia. Often I have laughed since to think that the great and puissant Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, Lord of Strombor, had been placed in this position; but there was no shame in it at all. Nothing had happened to me here to give me an opportunity, and a great deal of the blame for that must lie at the door of my terrible weakness that debilitated me as a result of my experiences. You will know that after my immersion in the pool of baptism in the River Zelph of far Aphrasöe I could look forward to a thousand years of life, and, equally, that I did not take to disease and mended quickly from wounds, so that my weak state gives some inkling of the ghastly passage of the Klackadrin.

Here I was once more in the sphere of influence of men and institutions that had surrounded me when I had first carved my way in Segesthes. Between this eastern coast of Turismond and the western coast of Segesthes lay the northern tip of Loh, that mountainous and mysterious land of Erthyrdrin, and Vallia, I was back among rapier and dagger men, among tall ships, among zorcas and voves — gone were swifters and sectrixes and the Krozairs of Zy.

Although — the Krozairs of Zy held now my undying loyalty.

Gone, too, were impiters and corths, although it was foolish to dream that those great flying beasts of the air might bear me across all the pitiless dwaburs to Vallia over the shining sea. When I made inquiries to discover if the Pandaheem possessed airboats, those fliers manufactured in distant Havilfar and widely used by the Vallians, I was met by a curse and a shrug. Evidently, Havilfar did not sell their fliers to Pandahem. Equally evidently, the snub to trade was resented. A light cheerful voice singing fragmentary snatches of the robust ditty “The Bowmen of Loh” brought me back to the present with a start. How that cunning and hilarious song brought back memories of Seg! Of how he and I, with my Delia and poor Thelda, had marched through the Hostile Territories singing!

Before I could yell, Obolya, an exceptionally tall and heavily-built man with a bristle of black hair all over his muscular body, cuffed Pando around the head.

“Sing somewhere else, you pestiferous brat! Little rast! Your screechings make my guts rumble!”

Obolya was a guard, a man whose profession as a mercenary had made of him a man embittered, callous, unfeeling. Whatever he once had been, growing as a young man at his mother’s knee, seemed all to have been wiped away during his years of hard fighting and long tramping. He owned a preysany, a kind of superior calsany, used for riding by those whose estate in life did not extend to the purchase of a zorca. He considered himself invaluable to the caravan, and Naghan the Paunch treated him with some respect.

It was with Naghan himself that I had taken service, as I have related. Now Obolya was being tiresome again.

The word “one” has many definitions and names on Kregen, of which “ob” is — if you will pardon the pun — one. Obolya,[4]a common name in various forms, indicates that its recipient was the firstborn of the family’s children. The Obolya who had just knocked Pando flying was tall, over a knuckle taller than I. Others of the guards on this left flank of the caravan with a few drovers crowded across to see the fun. Zair knew, walking caravan duty was monotonous enough so that any break in the routine was welcome. And Obolya was known of old; until every fresh guard knuckled down to him he would be ever seeking to force a confrontation which poor Naghan the Paunch, who valued Obolya’s massive thews in defense, must condone.

Pando just managed to avoid the nearest calsany’s instinctive response and scrambling up flew toward me.

“Just rest quietly, Pando,” I said, “while I speak with this limb of Armipand.”

Armipand was one of the devils in which many of the more credulous of the Pandaheem believed devoutly.

“Cramph!” roared Obolya. “You have a mouth wider than the Cyphren Sea! I must fill it — with my fist!”

“May Pandrite aid you now, Dray Prescot!” said Pando, overwhelmed by what had happened. He had known me long enough to know I would not shrug off an insult; but also he had seen me only as a weak and ill man, lucky to be employed by the overseer Naghan on the personal request of Tilda of the Many Veils. Pando sucked in his cheeks, and his eyes grew very round.

“Crawl back into the hairs of a calsany’s belly where you belong,” I said to Obolya. He stuttered. The black bristles on his cheeks and chin quivered. He pointed at me, and threw back his head, and roared his contempt.

“You! Cramph-begotten rast! You who carry the leavings of a blacksmith’s shop upon your back!”

This was a reference to the Krozair long sword. Now, in this culture of rapiers and daggers, I carried the long sword on my back, still in the sheath Sosie had made, beneath the quiver of which I have spoken. The weapon was in many respects anachronistic here. The guards carried short broad-bladed stabbing spears for butcher work until the rapiers came into action. This would be after the bows had taken the first toll, and it was as a bowman that I had been engaged by Naghan. He would say to me, half surly, half jesting: “You carry your bow in your hand, strong, and with an arrow nocked, Dray Prescot, when you guard my caravan. That is what I pay you for.”

The hope that by carrying the long sword over my back and thereby escaping its notice had not, in the case of Obolya, succeeded. Just how long he would go on hurling insults before he got down to action I did not know. I was almost back to my full strength, the fresh air and the suns-light and the daily marching had all combined in my recuperation. But, as always, hot though I am to resent authority, I attempted to avoid an unnecessary clash and a dangerous enmity. Pride and a hot temper are all very well for those who do not think; my trouble is that I think first — and then still go berserk, to my sorrow. Obolya wore a bronze breastplate of a reasonably high standard of workmanship; but for more complete protection he had under it only a leather tunic. On his arms and legs were boiled-leather strappings, and he wore a boiled-leather cap reinforced with straps of iron. He was as well-enough armored as many men who work as mercenary guards for a living; his armor, of course, would have made my clansmen smile and evoked mirth from the mail-clad men of the inner sea. I wore only my scarlet breechclout. My sleeping gear, along with Pando’s, was carried aboard one of the guard detachment’s plains asses.

“You affront me, Obolya. But, as I do not wish to deprive you of your few remaining teeth, black and stinking though they be, I will refrain from fighting you now.”

The crowd roared at this and Naghan the Paunch came running up, sweating, starting to yell and drive us back to our duties. But Obolya waved him down and Naghan, seeing how the wind blew, took himself off, sweating even more over the safety of the caravan he had contracted to protect. The crowd roared again as Obolya threw down his spear and crouched. He used a large and variegated collection of foul Makki-Grodno oaths. He advanced on me to, as he informed me with great relish, tear my head off and stuff it between my knees.

He wouldn’t kill me, as he knew I would not kill him. This was a bull moose confrontation, to decide who was who in the hierarchy of the caravan guards.

I handed the longbow to Pando. “Hold it off the ground, Pando. The bow is more valuable than this kleesh.”

A kleesh is violently unpleasant, repulsive, stinking — and the name was guaranteed to drive Obolya like a goad.

His infuriated roar was quite up to the standard of a leem caught in a pit. He charged.

He sought to grapple me to his breastplate and, holding me there, bend me back until I cried quarter. I stepped to one side and drove my fist into his jaw — and Obolya was not there. His speed was surprising. He hit me higher on the chest than he’d intended, because I moved; and in that I was lucky, for a blow from those massive arms would have taken my breath.

“Dray!” yelled Pando, mightily excited.

I did not deign to rub my chest, where the dint spread a pain I ignored. This time I rushed — halted, with a twist — took the blow on my upraised forearm — smashed Obolya in the breadbasket — drove him to a knee — chopped down on the back of his neck — and so laid him on the grass, insensible. Someone let out a screech. Someone else was swearing by the gross Armipand. Another was laughing. In truth I had welcomed the exercise and now I regretted hitting Obolya hard enough to knock him out. A little more of fisticuffs would have suited me, then, for I was strangely slow in getting back to my usual form. The Phokaym and the Klackadrin had drained more from me than even I realized. Pando bent and retrieved a yellow object from the grass. He held it out to me, holding it gingerly.

“This fell from your loincloth, Dray, when you fought.”

I took it. It was a six-inch fang I had taken from the jaw of a Phokaym as a memento. About to stuff it back, I stopped. Pando was looking at it with undisguised curiosity.

“What is it, Dray? It looks like — like a risslaca fang.”

If I told him what it truly was, he wouldn’t believe. No one who did not know me, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor, would or could believe.

“It’s a risslaca tooth, Pando. Here.” I tossed it to him. “Keep it as a memento of the fight. Boys collect anything — your friends won’t have anything to match that for a space, I’ll wager.”

Pando took it eagerly. But, turning it over in his hands, he said: “Young Enky has a risslaca fang almost as big. And Wil had a claw he said his father cut off a risslaca himself.”

I was, as you may imagine, duly cut down to size.

Pando went babbling on about the fight. I took my bow and nocked an arrow — for Naghan the Paunch only half jested — and resumed my station. Guards who had felt Obolya’s fist were helping him up. I saw him shake his head, looking dazed, and he dragged his feet as they helped him along. All this time the caravan had not halted, and we were well into the outer cultivated areas surrounding Pa Weinob. I said, “Don’t let your mother hear you singing The Bowmen of Loh,’ Pando. You’re only nine.”

At his reproachful glance, I went on, “As for me, it is a fine song, and you may sing it as you will. I do not think anyone else will tell you to stop.”

“By the glorious Pandrite, they will not, Dray!”

A shouting at the head of the caravan followed by a series of shrieking roars heralded fresh trouble. I doubled up past the plodding calsanys, but by the time I reached the van the problem had been solved. The zhantil had been slashed to death by many thrusts from the broad-bladed spears of the advance guard. This zhantil was of moderate size, about the length of a leem, although his massive mane and forelegs lent much greater weight to his foreparts than has the weasel-shaped leem. He was magnificently banded in tiger-stripes of glowing umber and ruby, and his richly golden mane fell about him. His blood pumped out to foul all that rich and gaudy marking. I felt sorry for the beast, and I know many of the caravan felt as I did. Although, of necessity, we must defend ourselves from zhantils when they attacked us, we did not feel for them the loathing and determination to destroy with which we regarded leems. Naghan the Paunch, puffing, rolled up and at once began berating the guards.

“Fools! Imbeciles! Look at the pelt! Aie, aie — that would have brought many dhems had you not slashed it to pieces!”

An archer guard, one Encar the Swarthy, cursed and said, “We slashed it, good Naghan, because it was trying to slash us!”

“Well,” persisted Naghan, wiping his forehead and neck, “you might have slashed with a little more care not to spoil the pelt.”

Pando and I looked at each other, and Pando broke first, and held his belly and roared. Some of the other guards and drovers, knowing Naghan the Paunch, chuckled at the jest. I said, “Naghan — will you spare a portion of the pelt — a trifle — to give Pando here a fine new tunic?

Remember, he is the son of Tilda the Beautiful.”

Naghan put a foot into the stirrup of his zorca, who sniffed once at the zhantil, and finding it smelling dead, thereafter ignored it. He twisted around, his paunch straining that brilliant blue cummerbund.

“A tunic for Pando? Of zhantil skin? Ho — I think Tilda of the Many Veils would like that. Ay! She would part with a whole amphora of the best wine of Jholaix for such a zhantil tunic for her adored son!”

Jholaix, I knew, was the extreme northeastern country of Pandahem, which island is split up into a number of nations of the Pandaheem, and, further, I knew Jholaix wine to be scarce, dear, and extremely potent and pleasant to the tongue.

“You mercenary old rascal, Naghan the Paunch!” I said.

But he merely mounted his zorca, with an almighty belch, and winked down at me, whereat I nodded and said, “Done.”

Between us, Pando and I took enough of the zhantil skin to make him a fine tunic, and, also, I cabbaged enough to make a belt for him, also. I would pay the cost of the amphora of Jholaix wine — and, thereby, put back the time when I could buy a passage out of Pa Mejab. But, looking at the rosy glory of Pando’s young face, and the sparkle of sheer delight in his eyes, I knew my Delia of the Blue Mountains would forgive me.

Zair knows, she had much for which to forgive me. . .

Naghan’s servant, a one-eyed shaven-headed Gon, remained with us to take the rest of the skin and the mane, all of which, by virtue of his office, were the property of Naghan. The caravan had gone perhaps a little farther on than was altogether advisable by the time we had finished, and I made Pando step out smartly. The bloody pelt, rolled, I slung over my left shoulder.

The shout for help, when it reached me, made me whirl about and fling the pelt down and draw my bow fully.

There was no need immediately for violence.

The man who crawled toward us from a clump of missal trees was smothered in blood, and the long ax he bore glistened with gore. He tried to stand up to run toward us, but collapsed and fell. He twitched once and then lay still.

“Dray!” yelled Pando.

“Pick up the pelt, Pando. Go back to the caravan — and hurry!” I shouted at the one-eyed Gon. “Run, too! Warn Naghan — the caravan is attacked!”

For, beyond the man collapsed in his own blood and that of his enemies, I could see the wolfish shapes of halflings riding preysanys coursing toward the caravan, their fleet forms half-hidden by the missals. The opaz glitter from the twin suns speared back blindingly from their brandished weapons. In scant seconds they would be upon the caravan.

I loosed at the nearest rider and then slung the bow, ran toward the fallen man, and hoisted him upon my back. He was incredibly tall and thin. As I lifted him his eyes opened and he gasped. His right hand did not relax its death-grip on the haft of his ax.

“Bandits!” He choked the word out, and I knew from the way he spoke he had summoned up all his strength of purpose to run and warn the caravan and had been struck down. “Bandits!”

“Quiet, dom,” I said. “Rest easy.”

Then I raced back toward the caravan where already I could hear the shrieks of men engaged in mortal combat, and the slither and clang of iron weapons.

CHAPTER SIX

Concerning the taboos of Inch of Ng’groga

The guards around the center flight of calsanys were already in dire trouble. The caravan had come to a halt and the beasts were milling. Hastily dumping down that impossibly tall man with his ax beside Pando, and yelling to him to keep out of sight and trouble, I drew the longbow. The time had almost passed when archery could help; but I was able to feather four of the bandits before a gang of them swung their preysanys and coursed in at me, waving their spears. Getting the long sword out of Sosie’s scabbard over my shoulder demanded a convulsion of effort, and I had to jump up and bend over in a most undignified fashion to do it. But, once the deadly Krozair brand was in my fists, I was ready to meet these throat-slitting bandits, and to earn the wages Naghan the Paunch paid me.

Since that long-gone day when I had met Hap Loder on the beach and we had made pappattu and then I had taken obi of him, I had learned much of sword fighting. Then I had been accounted a useful man with a cutlass, and had learned a great deal with those wonderful swords of the Savanti; but, all the same, when my clansmen armed with broadsword and short sword had gone up against the sophisticated rapier and dagger men of the city of Zenicce, I had worried about them. Now, I had all the skills and scientific knowledge, and the art and mystic practice, of the Krozairs of Zy to drive my nerves and impel my sword arm.

The rapier and the left-handed dagger are excellent weapons, as I have indicated, and they can between them take on much variegated weaponry. By this time the bandits and the guards were at it hammer-and-tongs, their broad-bladed spears flung down, and the rapiers and main-gauches, the Jiktars and the Hikdars, flaming and slicing, cutting and stabbing, in a welter of slivers of finely-honed steel. I charged the bandits running at me with a great shout of: “Hai! Jikai!” and at once that terrible Krozair long sword was whirling a path of destruction through the bandits. My own rapier and dagger bounced scabbarded at my side.

The long sword took the head off the first bandit — he was a man of uncertain origin (but of certain destination) — and sliced back to lop the rapier-wielding arm of the next one. They spurred their preysanys in to get at me, and this, I believe, led to their own destruction, for I could reach them with the long sword and they could not reach me. This fight roared and bloodied away. At least to me it appeared topsy-turvy, for the mounted men used weapons shorter than they should, given the fine length of their rapiers, and I had no long pole arm. In this fight I did not learn, truly, of the full problems of long sword against rapier and dagger. The fight taught me only that I had to get it over fast, for I caught a distorted glimpse of young Pando, with a snatched up dagger, trying to hamstring a bandit preysany. If anything happened to him. . .!

Already Tilda must be frantic with worry over where the little devil had got to — and if I returned and told her he had been with me, and had been killed . . . I couldn’t face that. So my long sword became a bloodied blur. The bandits fell before me. They were of many races of men and half-men: Fristles, Ochs, Rapas, Gons; alike they fell before my brand. Obolya I saw, fighting like a demon, spitting his man, taking another’s attack on his dagger, twirling with a laugh full of braggadocio, lunging into the belly. Naghan the Paunch I saw, also, striking about him with a broad-bladed spear that from his height on the zorca kept the bandits at bay. I shortened the long sword and drove it carefully into the neck of an Och, sliding above his out-thrust shield. I body-swerved to avoid the thrust that his last involuntary movement impelled. I jumped over his falling body. Right-handedly I slashed away a Rapa who, wasting time screeching, tried to spit me. He went over with his beak sheared off.

I jumped over a preysany, my Earthly muscles back to full power and tone, chopping short and hard down onto the man who ducked far too late. I landed neatly enough, removed another Rapa beak, swung and slashed and so forged my gory way toward Pando.

He came up screeching, scooped under my left arm. I laid the flat of the sword across his rump, whereat he yelled like a trapped leem, and left a long blood smear there.

“Quiet, you imp of Sicce!”

Obolya was down.

A Rapa, his fiercely predatory bird face gobbling with blood lust, was in the act, seeming so deliberate, of thrusting his rapier down into Obolya’s belly. Without pausing in my run I swung the long sword in a flat arc that intersected first with the Rapa’s right arm, thus removing it and the rapier from Obolya’s intestines, and then sheared on into the Rapa’s side. He was wearing a bronze corselet. The Krozair blade smashed through in a screeching splintering of metal.

I wrenched the brand free, spun, caught a rapier and, with the supple wrist-twist that is easy enough with a rapier, damned difficult with a long sword, managed to thrust the blade into the bandit’s throat. He vomited blood and went over.

Obolya was up. He glared at me.

“How many more are there, Obolya, in Zair’s name?”

“Enough for me to repay you my life, Dray Prescot.”

There was no time to wonder about that. The bandits pressed and we guards earned our money. When I had contrived to deposit Pando back among the plains asses — who were more restful and far less impossible than the calsanys, to whom everyone fighting gave a wide berth — and sorted out another group of bandits, I began to think we would best them.

They had waited for us here, on the outskirts of the cultivated areas, thinking that having traversed the dangerous lands we would relax our guard. As it was, with Naghan yelling us on, with Obolya fighting like a demon, and with my long sword that simply destroyed them, they had had enough. The last we saw of them was the dust their preysanys kicked up as they ran. Without pausing I ran across to a preysany from whose saddle a man hung with his foot entangled in the stirrup. I put my foot on his face and kicked him free. Then I swung up into the saddle. Naghan yelled: “Don’t pursue them, Dray. They won’t be back.”

I rode across to another preysany which stood nuzzling the bloody rags around the head and shoulders of the Gon, its late master. The head and the shoulders were separated by a space of bloody grass. I remembered that one. Grasping the reins, I pulled the animal away and, a little reluctantly, it followed. I said to Naghan the Paunch: “I claim these two preysanys for Pando and me. Agreed?”

He huffed his paunch more comfortably in the saddle and nodded. “You may claim them, Dray Prescot, with pleasure. Under the terms of our contract they are mine, as you well know. You can work them out of your pay.”

“Naghan the Paunch!” I yelled.

He was chuckling and wiping the blade of his spear and reveling in it. I did not chuckle; but I suddenly shouted: “Hai!” and the zorca started and leaped and Naghan went careering across the grass, wildly grasping anything to keep from falling off.

I heard a deep belly-rumble of laughter and turned and there was Obolya with his black-bristle face all crumpled with malicious mirth.

“You treat men hard, Dray Prescot.”

No surprise showed on my face. This was only a petty border skirmish, a thing to be done and forgotten and not to be placed alongside the great battles and campaigns of my life; but a man can be killed as easily in a skirmish as a world-shaking battle.

“True, Obolya. To their deserts.”

He eyed me a moment, and then went off about the business of a mercenary guard — stripping the dead of their valuables. In this I heartily agreed. Pickings are hard-come-by. But when I saw Pando engaged in the same occupation I started off at once to check him, outraged, wondering what Tilda would say if she could see her son — and then I stopped. This was life. This was what fighting and killing were all about. Let Pando learn the true facts, and then, perhaps, in later life he would not be so quick to provoke a quarrel or to seek to kill.

I went back to see about the tall and thin man I had rescued, with a parting shout to Pando: “Don’t waste time on trifles, Pando. Pick the best.”

On the way back I took three rings from bandit fingers. As it happened the rings came off easily enough, greased by blood. Had I had to hack the fingers off to get at the rings this I would have done. I needed cash to buy a passage to Vallia and my Delia.

The drivers were sorting out the calsanys now and soon the caravan got under way again. The tall man, still smeared with blood, was loaded facedown onto one of the preysanys I had acquired and the loot obtained by Pando and myself bundled in our sleeping gear on the other. Pando was hopping wild with excitement still, running up and down and emitting shrill Red-Indian-like war whoops. I let him blow off steam. Any fancy modern notions that his mind had been affected by the horrific sights he had seen, of course, did not apply on Kregen, where the absence of such sights usually indicates abject slavery on one side. He was growing up into a world of great beauty and wonder, for Kregen is a planet at once gorgeous and barbaric and highly-colored; but at the same time he was also preparing himself to face the other side of Kregen, the terror and the horror and the continuous struggle for existence. Young Zorg, the son of Zorg of Felteraz, Krozair of Zy, my friend and oar comrade now dead and eaten by chanks, and his sister Fwymay, were both preparing themselves to enter the adult world of Kregen, far away there in Felteraz on the shore of the inner sea. Their mother, Zorg’s widow, Mayfwy and Tilda had little in common except a love for their children and the sense of loss for their husbands —

but I thought of them both, then, as I strode along, thinking, as I always do, mostly of my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond.

When we camped that night the man I had rescued had so far recovered as to consent to being washed. I discovered that most of the blood splattering him was not his. He kept that great ax close by him. He had had a thwacking great thump on the head, that I judged had smashed beyond repair the helmet he had lost, and was still a little muzzy. After some wine — mediocre red stuff from a local Pa Mejab vintnery — and a morsel of bread from a long Kregan loaf, liberally smeared with yellow butter, he sat with his back wedged against a tree bole munching a handful of palines. They would soon clear his headache.

“I am Inch,” he said. “From Ng’groga.”

So far had I come from Magdag that all those “G’s” did not worry me. Inch told us that Ng’groga was a nation situated on the southeastern part of the continent of Loh, facing the unknown southern sea. He was, himself, a somewhat amazing individual. He was, as I have said, incredibly tall, some seven feet of him from toe to the top of his head. That head was covered in long and silky yellow hair that hung to his waist and which he would bind up and coil when in action. He was thin, also, but I did not miss the bulge of muscle about that sinewy body. At the moment his only clothing was an old and tattered brown tunic, gathered in by a leather belt of lesten hide. Beside his great ax, which reminded me of the Danish pattern carried by the clansmen of Viktrik, with the addition of a daggered head after the fashion of my own clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm, he bore at his waist a long knife. He had no sword.

“I shipped out as a mercenary, as so many youngsters do,” he said. “The life suited me but ill. Then I was betrayed — that does not concern me now — and was sold as slave. So I escaped and joined the brigands. But, that life, also, was not for me.”

“Then what happened?” demanded Pando. He was hunched up, eagerly listening to the story, which Inch embroidered far more than I have indicated.

“At last the bandits said they were going to attack the next caravan, slay all the men and — ah—” He cocked an eye at Pando, and went on after a cough. “Abduct all the girls. I had an argument with the chief of the bandits and left him, I fancy, with his ears wider apart than they had been.”

As he spoke he moved his hand across the ax, and I could well imagine that mighty weapon splitting down through the skull of the bandit chief.

“And?”

“That was a foolish thing to do. My taboos had not warned me adequately, which was passing strange.”

This was the first I had heard of Inch’s taboos; but not the last, oh, certainly, not the last! As you shall hear.

“So I ran from them, and they pursued, and I killed many; but then Largan the Wily hurled a stone, and I fell, and they would have beaten my brains out but for my old helmet.” He reached a long hand up to his head, and felt his yellow mane of hair. “I am sorry I lost that, by Ngrangi, yes!”

“Yes, yes!” said Pando. “And then?”

“Then, when I thought I was done for, and the caravan gone, I called out and this monstrous man here, Dray Prescot, came and took me up and shot Largan the Wily with that bow that, if I mistake not, is a true bow of Erthyrdrin.”

“Yes,” I said. I could not speak of Seg, not yet, to Inch.

For, from what Sosie had told me, I knew this Lohvian bow she had given me was a true bow of Erthyrdrin, made from true wood of the Yerthyr tree, long matured and sweetly seasoned. I thought even Seg Segutorio would be happy with this bow, although comparing it always unfavorably with his own stave he had cut himself from the private tree of Kak Kakutorio.

Gone — those days, gone and dead and best forgotten!

In Pa Weinob, a city of wooden, high-built houses and a wooden stockade with watchtowers, we waited for the goods to be collected for the caravan to take back to the coast in exchange for the manufactures we had brought here. During this period I had a local woman recommended to me cure and prepare Pando’s zhantil skin. Another woman, a clever seamstress, sewed him a fine tunic and belt. When he donned the gear and turned to let us see, both Inch and I made all the necessary noises of surprise and gratification. In truth, Pando did cut a dashing figure, and he was as pleased as a woflo eating his way through a whole Loguetter cheese.

By the time the country produce had been baled and loaded and we set forth to return to Pa Mejab, Inch had been taken on as guard by Naghan the Paunch, and he and I and Pando had palled up in a way that surprised me, although Pando took it all in his stride.

One night when the Maiden with the Many Smiles shone down from a cloudless sky, Inch approached the fire where we were cooking a tasty vosk haunch purchased in the town. He crinkled up his nose at the delightful smell. Over his long fair hair he wore a huge mass of cloth, like a sloppily-wound turban. Not a scrap of his hair was visible.

Pando let out a yell.

“Hey! Inch! That’s my sleeping cloth!”

Pando started to pull the bundle of cloth from Inch’s head.

Inch went mad.

He jumped up, waving his arms, screaming words no one understood, words clearly of his local language of Ng’groga. A strand of hair fell loose. Inch shrieked as though his flesh was being wrung out by red-hot pincers. He jumped toward the fire — he jumped into the fire!

“Inch!”

“You have made me break a taboo!” he shrieked. He gyrated in the fire and his sandals smoldered and then burst into flames. He didn’t seem to feel a thing. He gyrated around, scattering hot coals, and the guards yelled and scrambled away, beating at their clothes.

“When the Maiden with the Many Smiles is alone in the sky, she may not shine down upon a Ng’grogan’s hair! It is taboo!”

I grabbed Pando and shouted to the other guards and we cleared off. We knew when to leave a fellow alone with his taboos.

After that when Inch went berserk, or solemnly took a cup of wine and threw it over his left shoulder, or dropped onto all fours and stuck his rump into the air and beat his head against the ground, we left him to it. It was a chancy business, living with Inch and his taboos.

Pa Mejab looked most welcome with its streets of wooden houses, some brick ones already shouldering out the earlier timber structures, and its cool groves of fruit trees, its harbor and vista of the sea. We were paid off by Naghan the Paunch, and precious little I had left after I had settled all my debts, what with the preysanys and the zhantil tunic, paid for by the amphora of wine from Jholaix.

“At least, Naghan, Inch and I can have a cupful of Jholaix with you tonight, eh?”

“Surely,” he said, patting his paunch. “Naghan is the most generous of men.”

“Ayee!” said Pando, most impudently.

We walked from the caravansary through the crowded streets to The Red Leem. If we walked with a trifle of a swagger — well, had we not crossed dangerous lands and fought wild beasts and wilder bandits, and brought the caravan safely home?

A shriek as of a Corybant broke upon our ears as we walked up to the tavern. Tilda, trailing a green gown, her glorious black hair swirling about her like impiter’s wings, flew down upon Pando. She caught him up, kicking and squirming, against her breast, and smothered him with kisses.

“Pando! My son, Pando!”

Then—

“Pando! You limb of Sicce! Where have you been?”

And with that, Tilda the Beautiful started laying into him with the flat of her hand, applied to the bottom of that brave new zhantil tunic, until Inch and I winced.

“He’s been all right, Tilda,” I said — like a fool. “He’s been out with the caravan, with me—”

“With you! Dray Prescot! Out there — out there, wild beasts, bandits, drought, hunger, disease — out there — Dray Prescot, I’ll — I’ll—” She left off beating Pando long enough to scream: “Get out! Get out of The Red Leem! If you show your face in here again, you vile abductor, I’ll scratch your eyes out!” She spared a hand to rip off a slipper and hurl it at me.

“Out! Out!”

Inch and I walked off, hurriedly and without dignity.

“Nice class of friend you have, Dray,” was all Inch said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

How Tilda the Beautiful fared at The Red Leem

Tilda’s anger against me did not last long when Pando managed to tell her what had happened. For his pains he was sent supperless to bed that night, as Inch and I quaffed best Jholaix in company with Naghan the Paunch and Obolya. Inch disappeared for a time and when he came back he winked at me and leaned over, whispering.

“Climbing the back wall was easy, Dray. That young devil is munching a vosk-pie now, and probably getting disgustingly drunk on a thimbleful of Jholaix.”

“If Tilda catches him and he tells on you, Inch—”

Inch looked pleased with himself. “Sending boys to bed supperless is against my taboos,” he said, and winked.

I perked up. Inch was turning into a comrade, rather than a companion. Now, if Seg were here — or Nath, or Zolta. Or, Gloag, or Varden, or Hap Loder . . .

I must not think of Seg, I thought then.

Inch was laughing and telling how a friend’s taboos had given him a pair of horns, and Naghan and Obolya were laughing, too, and I could understand Naghan the Paunch, not Obolya. If I was asked to describe the Pandaheem succinctly, I would show my interlocutor Naghan the Paunch. He was Pandaheem to the very last nail of him. Built for comfort, the Pandaheem, as were their ships. Obolya, now, while he had changed since I had knocked that Rapa off him, was still as surly and vicious as ever to everyone. To me, he maintained a watchful respect, the result, I imagined, of our fight. He did not, to me, fit in with the men of Pandahem at all. I had discovered that the island of Pandahem, which lies to the east off the coast of Loh, due south of Vallia, was divided up into a number of separate nations, most of them governed by kings jealous of their own power and prestige, continually at loggerheads with their neighbors. They seldom united even against Vallia, whose single mighty empire operated from the secure base of an island under one government. This division weakened Pandahem. Pa Mejab, which lay well to the north of Ventrusa Thole and just tucked into the bay south of the great promontory projecting from Turismond into the Sunset Sea, was a colony city of the human nation of Pandahem called Tomboram.

Tomboram, as I learned, is a pleasant place in almost every respect, situated in the northern and eastern part of Pandahem, with Jholaix as a smaller country to the northeast. The Tomboramin are a happy folk, they had made me welcome, and although they would fight their neighbors, and Vallia, and the mysterious pirate ships that sailed up out of the southern oceans, they much preferred to sit in a tavern and drink, or watch and applaud a great dramatic performance. Industrious when working and idle when playing, the Tomboramin were people with whom I got on well.

And yet — I could not forget the bitterness with which Thelda, of Vallia, had spoken of the Pandaheem, of how she had sworn by Vox that they must all be destroyed one day. My Delia was a Vallian — she was the Princess Delia, Princess Majestrix. These people among whom I sat and drank and sang were her bitter commercial rivals, and deadly foes upon the seas. Even now a great deal of talk was in the air of the next expedition to probe southward to attack the Vallian colonial port city of Ventrusa Thole.

My distress you may imagine; my determination to reach Vallia, I assure you, was in no way impaired by all this newly-found good fellowship as we drank and roistered in The Red Leem and watched the incomparable actress, Tilda the Beautiful, perform so gracefully and movingly for us. When Vallia was mentioned by the Tomboramin, it was with a curse and a bitter feeling of betrayal, a sense of dejection and doom. No, these good people of Pa Mejab did not care for Vallians. Listening to them, hearing tales of treachery and deceit, I absorbed some of that feeling. Vallia was overbearingly powerful, omnipotent, almost. Vallia scorned all other nations. Vallia made treaties and broke them, contemptuously, careless of good faith. Vallia was as perfidious as, I suppose, the England of my day was considered by France.

Albion Perfide was now Vallia Perfide — indeed!

These days I habitually left my long sword in my room and in deference to local custom wore only the rapier and dagger about the town.

Tilda, in conversation one day, mentioned that political difficulties were growing worse every day with the Pandahemic nation immediately to the west of Tomboram, a nation she called The Bloody Menaham. I took little notice, although I knew that Menaham had sited a colonial port at what appeared to be perilously few dwaburs to the north, being more concerned over my own problems and being a trifle irritated that the wrangles on one island of Kregen were preventing me from reaching another. In this I should have been more careful; for The Bloody Menaham, no less than Tomboram, was to play a large part in my life before I found Delia again.

We discovered that it was taboo for Inch to eat the tiny and delicious fruit called squishes and Pando took a fiendish delight in bringing in great baskets of them from the orchards, for they were in season, and leaving heaping bowls of them everywhere in The Red Leem. Inch doted on squishes. This convinced me that his taboos differed radically from what is considered a taboo on Earth; there, had the squishes been taboo, he would never have eaten one in the first place. As it was, whenever we came upon Inch standing on his head, his face expressing the greatest anguish, we knew he had broken his taboo and gone munching squishes.

And Pando, the imp of Sicce, would laugh.

“I wonder, Dray,” he said to me, very solemnly, with Inch on his head in a corner close by. “If I had to stand on my head every time I ate vosk-pie, would I go off vosk-pie?”

“Such gratitude!” said Inch, and succulent squish juice dribbled down into his eye.

“Stick to palines, Inch,” I said. “There is nothing more sovereign.”

He groaned, and shut his eye, thus winking at us when he had nothing in his head to warrant a merry wink — at all.

The time was fast approaching when the armada might be expected in from Pandahem and the caravans would be loading again and Naghan the Paunch would be hiring guards. Due to the depredations of pirates — call them corsairs, rovers, buccaneers, privateers, as you will, to honest sailor-men of Kregen they were renders all — abroad on the outer oceans ships tended to sail whenever they could in great convoys called armadas. I heard Naghan shaking his chins and his paunch and saying, “The swordships make life hard for a merchant, may Armipand drag ’em down by the short and curlies. I sometimes make myself remember, when my caravan is attacked, that I am lucky not to be a ship’s captain.”

“Come now, Naghan!” I protested, out of my ignorance. “Surely the Sunset Sea and the Cyphren Sea do not harbor so very many swordships?”

“Enough and to spare, Pandrite rot ’em!”

Well, I had been to Segesthes and I was now in Turismond; but I had never traversed the seas that lay between.

When the bells began to ring and the people streamed out of their houses and ran in wild excitement down to the harbor you may be sure that Pando was well up with the leaders and I not far behind. Everyone looked out over the sea, toward the southeast and a great cry went up when we saw that armada of sails.

The commotion and seething rushes, the fluttering scarves, the hats tossed into the air, the cheering, the ringing of bells, the frenzied scamperings of children and the mad gyrations of dogs through the crowds, the gusts of happy frothy laughter — all were prodigious.

With a somewhat more cynical eye, I, an old sailorman, looked at that distant white-glinting armada of sails, and the sea between, and felt the wind, and I remembered days hanging around in the Downs, and said to Pando, “I am thirsty, Pando, and am going back to The Red Leem for a drink.”

“But the fleet, Dray! You’ll miss the ships!”

“They will still be in the offing when I return, never fear.” He wouldn’t budge. “If you fall in,” I told him,

“apart from realizing that I told you so, swim to the steps and take your time. The seawall breaks the force of the waves.”

After I had sunk a couple of glasses of the local red biddy — not for me the best of Jholaix when I needed every ob — Inch joined me and we strolled back to the harbor. I was surprised. The first ship was already entering the stone-built entrance past the pharos, gulls swinging whitely about her three masts, her sails coming down, her crew gathering on her forecastle with ropes. A band was playing and the music lolloped into the air as this broad-beamed ship lolloped through the sea. I studied her lines critically.

The Pandaheem called these high-charged ships of the outer oceans argenters. They were rigged with square sails; had they been rigged with lateens they would have looked remarkably like caravels, with their high forecastles and their half decks, quarterdecks and sterncastles. As was to be expected they were decorated lavishly with much gilding and carving, fine gingerbread work that glittered in the opal glare.

They were broad in relation to their length, solid, heavily-built, comfortable ships — and, therefore, slow. They carried courses and topsails on their fore and mainmasts, and courses — a crossjack — on their mizzens, with a spritsail on the bowsprit. I gained the impression, watching the argenters glide solidly and squarely into port, of rolling argosies of sail, dependable, unimaginative, lofty as to hull, cautious as to sail area and plan.

As you know it has been my custom not to jump about in this narrative but, rather, to attempt to tell you of what happened to me on Kregen beneath Antares in as good a chronological order as I can contrive. Maybe that skyjacking has loosened up my time-sense. I will, therefore, quickly say that when I — at last, at long last! — saw the ships of Vallia I saw immediately how like galleons they were. And I mean a real galleon, the type of ship invented by the English: low, streamlined, fast, daringly sparred, superb sailers. Despite the plethora of names the Vallians use for their ships I have always thought of Vallian ships as galleons, and will so refer to them when the time in this narrative is ripe. By contrast — and I thought of it then, as I stood with Pando and Inch and saw the Pandahemic argenters without knowledge of the Vallian galleons — these ships of this armada sailing into Pa Mejab were reminiscent of Portuguese and Spanish caravels and carracks. Maybe history does repeat itself, even though it takes place on different worlds separated by four hundred light-years of interstellar space. To finish this anachronistic comment, the reason — or one of them — why I could never seem to catch a Vallian ship on the inner sea lay simply in the galleon’s superb ability to drive on in wind that would have overset a swifter in a trice.

As well as varters — the ballistae as used by swifters of the inner sea — these ships carried catapults powered by many twisted strands of sinew and hair. Watching critically the evolutions of the ships as they lost way, brought their canvas in, dropped their hooks, and swung to, I was reasonably satisfied that they were seamanlike enough. They were not in a hurry. The reason they had gained the mouth of the harbor before I had expected was explained by their use of sweeps thrust through a few ports cut in their sides. People around me commented on this, giving as their judicious opinion that great news was carried aboard the ships, for using the sweeps meant hard work, and the Tomboramin only worked hard when a definite end lay in view.

The wind was free, was it not, dom? So why sweat at the oars?

If these men were in a hurry — I shuddered to think what their customary seamanship would be like. With the taking in of the fore and main courses disappeared the huge and gorgeously painted devices of Tomboram. Tomboram proudly flaunted the pictured representation of a quombora, a mythical monster of devilish aspect, with much fangery and toothery and clawery, spitting flames and smoke, as her symbol. The fore and main topsails carried the painted devices of the individual ships and owners. Many bright blue flags fluttered.

A swarm of boats put off to the ships, and the first pair were being warped alongside the jetty to begin unloading. The show was over. My next and most immediate plan was somehow to arrange a passage on one of those ships when she returned to Pandahem. I would have to sign on before the mast. That procedure must — given the physical facts of sailing-ship travel in relatively primitive ships across many dwaburs of open ocean — entail prodigious suffering and discomfort which meant nothing, of course, beside my determination to seek out Delia.

In a directly straight line from Pa Mejab to the chief port of Tomboram the distance is approximately eight hundred dwaburs. Distances of this order might be covered by a ship without calling in for water and supplies; normally the armada would make port somewhere in northern Loh, along the coast of that great thrusting promontory of Erthyrdrin. As I understood it ships of many nations shared port facilities here, docile under the constraint of the sufferance of the Erthyr. From thence a journey due east or northeast would bring a ship to Vallia. For Pandahem the course would be southeast, either outside or inside the long chain of islands that parallel the northeastern coast of Loh. Inch and Pando went back to The Red Leem, for there would be new customers to care for and probably, if old Nath was lucky, passengers to be accommodated, while I went to find Naghan the Paunch and explain that I would be unable to go with him on the next caravan. I knew he would shout and swear and call me an ingrate; but my purpose was set.

Naghan the Paunch did all these things. In addition he threw a wine bottle at me, for I found him soaking in the small room of The Marsilus and Rokrell. I ducked.

“Peace, good Naghan. Oh man of the Paunch, I have served you well and taken your silver dhems, let us then part in friendship.”

He glared at me. Then he pulled up another glass and bottle, and poured, and lifted his glass to me, as I did to him. “You are the finest bowman I have ever engaged, Dray, you and that great Lohvian bow of yours. I have seen many bowmen, and some almost your equal.” He drank and wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “But never, no never, have I seen anything like that damned great cleaver of yours!”

I drank to him, and said, “I shall not forget you, Naghan the Paunch. Care for young Pando, if you can, and Tilda the Beautiful, his mother.”

“That I will always do. By the glory of Pandrite, I swear it!”

“Remberee, Naghan the Paunch.”

“Remberee, Dray Prescot.”

I went back to The Red Leem.

People were moving about the streets, all of them still excited over the arrival of the armada, and passengers were already coming ashore. I saw a cart trundle along, the two calsanys drawing it impatiently goaded by the imp in charge, the cart’s master dragging them by their stubborn jaws. Bundles and bales and casks and kegs would be coming ashore, and Pa Mejab was coming alive again, fed through all those dwaburs of sea by the mother country. It was a gala day. Pa Mejab was not forgotten by the king and the nobles and the merchants and soldiers and all the people in their far-off homeland. As you may well imagine, I had made all my usual inquiries, but no one had heard of Aphrasöe, the Swinging City.

About to put my foot on the fantamyrrh, the habitual unthinking act performed by every Kregan entering a house, I paused. Pando shot out of the doorway, wild-eyed, his hair tousled. He did not see me at once and just as his eyes fell on me a hand at the end of a long arm reached after him, clapped around his mouth and neck, jerked him back. He disappeared.

That long hand and arm did not, I thought, belong to Inch.

Young Pando was a handful, I knew that well enough, and an imp of mischief, and it could well be that he had so upset a new guest in the inn that chastisement had been considered necessary. Yet I hurried inside, anxious that no real harm should come to the lad, and, if the truth be told, growing indignant that someone else other than his mother should lay hands on the child.

The noise of people in the main room drowned out any sounds of beating that might be coming from the upper floor. Quite a crowd had gathered already as the news and gossip of far-off places were detailed, and the merry sound of clinking glasses and the throaty exclamations of amazement accompanied me, along with the heady smells of wine and cooking food, up that narrow black-wood stair. As I reached the top I saw Tilda’s door slam shut.

I stopped at once, making a face to myself. No man with a pennyweight of brains interferes between a widow and her son in moments like these. But then — a stir of unease ghosted over me. That had not been Tilda’s slender and shapely ivory-skinned arm that had so roughly pulled Pando back, and I had not passed the owner of the offending arm on the stairs. Strange.

With a certain hesitation — an unfamiliar sensation for me — I moved quietly toward Tilda’s door. I listened. I heard nothing except a hoarse breathing, close up against the polished wood. I kept my own breathing steady and quiet.

Then a man yelped in sudden pain — as though, for instance, a woman had driven her bare toes agonizingly into his middle — and a woman’s voice rang out. Tilda’s voice.

“Help! Help! Murder!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wedding plans for Delia, Princess Majestrix of Vallia

I smashed the door open with a single kick and leaped into the room. These were no rapscallion leem-hunters out for a good time, unwilling to kill, ready for a bit of rough-and-tumble.

I knew this breed. These were killers. There were four of them. They were tall, lithe, poised men, all bronzed from the suns-light, muscular and predatory. Their rapiers and daggers were plain, workmanlike, efficient.

They wore dark clothing, plain tunics and well-oiled leathers, high black boots, and their broad-brimmed gray hats with the curling blue feathers cast shadows across their faces from which the gleam of their eyes in the suns-light through the windows struck leem-like.

One held Tilda around the waist and his dagger lifted above her ivory throat, poised to strike. Another stood holding his middle and retching — I did not smile — and the other two swung around to face me. Reasonable odds for the Lord of Strombor.

There was no time to consider. The dagger was about to plunge down into Tilda’s throat, and all Pando’s despairing yell as he struggled between the legs of the assassin would avail nothing. My rapier and dagger were in my hands. I threw the dagger. It flashed across the room like a streak of sunlight, buried itself in the neck above the squared tunic. The man gulped and dropped his own dagger. His knees buckled; but I could watch him no more for with a clang and a screech of steel the two assassins hurled themselves upon me.

Our blades met and parried and I had to dodge and skip for a few wild heartbeats as I avoided their attack, my left hand empty.

I spitted the first one in the guts, recovered, slashed savagely at the next and did not complete the stroke, leaping back so that he parried with his dagger against the empty air. I ran him through the heart, aiming delicately between the requisite rib members. As I withdrew, the meanness of these men showed itself in the last one’s actions — for, knowing he faced a master swordsman and knowing he faced thereby his own death — he turned and dived headlong through the window taking the glass and the framing with him in a great splintering crashing.

One spring took me to the wreck of the window. I looked down.

The assassin was picking himself up, his face still with a greenish hue from Tilda’s kick and blood on his face from the smashed glass.

Inch was walking up toward The Red Leem, whistling.

I shouted, “Inch! If it is not against your taboos, kindly take that fellow into custody. Don’t treat him gently.”

“Oho!” said Inch, and ran in and planted a tremendous kick upon the assassin’s posterior as he attempted to stand up. I jumped out of the window, landed like a leem, grabbed the fellow by the tunic, and hit him savagely on the nose. Blood spurted. I did not knock him out.

“Talk, you rast! Or I’ll spit your liver and roast it!”

He gabbled something, something about Marsilus, and gold, and then blood poured from his mouth and he collapsed.

Inch looked offended.

“I did not kick him hard enough for that, Dray. Nor would your blow upon the nose have hurt a fly —

So why is he dead?”

I was annoyed.

“He must have smashed his guts up jumping through the window and falling awkwardly. By the disgusting nostrils of Makki-Grodno! The fellow is dead and that’s an end to it.”

We left him there to be collected by the mobiles of Pa Mejab, who were later fully satisfied with our explanation of four dead men, and went back to Tilda and Pando.

The assassin I had first run through was in the act of dying as we entered the room. There was nothing to be discovered. Pando collected four rapiers and four daggers, which I was pleased to sell later for good silver dhems, and Inch took the best of the leather boots which fitted him, for his feet were inordinately long and thin. I had a pair, also; as an addition to my wardrobe, just in case. Two of the broad-brimmed hats, also, with their curled blue feathers, might come in useful. The tunics would not fit either Inch or me

— I was too wide in the shoulder and Inch too narrow — so we sold the rest of the gear.

“If they have any friends come asking for them,” I said to Nath, the innkeeper, “then let us know, by Zim-Zair, and we will wring the truth from them.”

But no one else bothered us thereafter on the score of the four assassins while we were in Pa Mejab.

“They swaggered in and demanded to know if the actress Tilda and her son Pando lodged here,” said old Nath, mightily shaken up by the event. He kept a respectable house, as, indeed, he must, otherwise Tilda would not have lodged and performed there. These goings-on were not to his liking. They might be common in The Silver Anchor and The Rampant Ponsho along the waterfront, not here in this respectable street and The Red Leem.

Not one of the four dead men yielded any personal identification to prying fingers. Apart from money and the usual items to be found in the pockets and gear of any man they were devoid of information. Inch wondered if we might make a few discreet inquiries among the ships; but Tilda, rather alarmed, vetoed this idea at once.

Looking at her, I caught the impression that perhaps she knew more about this business than she was prepared to discuss with us. After all, Inch and I were strangers. A considerable number of people had taken lodgings with old Nath and he had let all his rooms. The main room was crowded that evening. Tilda had insisted that she was perfectly all right and could go on. Old Nath, gallantly protesting that she should rest up after her ordeal, visibly showed his relief that she would give her performance, whose fame accounted for his vastly increased trade and profits. But I do not condemn him for that; he was good to me as well as others.

When Tilda made her final exit to rapturous applause that thundered to the rafters and set all the glass wine cups on the shelves ajingling, she came over to my table as was her custom. Old Nath did not mind me occupying a table just so long as I paid for what I consumed in the same way as an ordinary customer. Most often I did not bother, saving my scraped wealth, but this night was different. Just as we were preparing to listen to the beginning of Tilda’s impassioned rendition of the execution scene from the music drama — not quite the same thing as an opera — known over most of Kregen as The Fatal Love of Vela na Valka — I had heard the light musical voice of a young woman say: “Oh, Pando — there is not a table left!”

A young couple stood in the doorway, looking disappointed. She was young, lissome in the normal way and with fine eyes; at the moment she was pregnant. Her husband was a soldier, a Hikdar, handsome in his Tomboramic uniform. Naturally, I offered them seats at my table, and Wil, who had been brought in to help, quickly brought glasses and wine — a yellow wine of Western Erthyrdrin — so that when Tilda joined us we had already been thrown into the quick and casual friendships of the frontier. Inch had discovered a taboo and now came across, brushing sawdust from his long fair hair, and sat down. The young couple told us all the news. The Hikdar was a cavalryman and burning for adventure out here on the borders of the spreading empire of Pandahem. His name was Pando — the cause of my immediate reaction when they had entered — Pando na Memis. His wife’s name was Leona.

“Memis,” said Tilda, gracefully drinking the yellow wine. “I know it well, those tall red cliffs falling to the sea, the islands and their gulls — oh, millions of gulls! — and the wine there.” She laughed. “It is far smoother on the tongue than this Erthyrdrin—”

Pando na Memis looked somewhat confused and beckoned quickly. I watched the byplay. Young Pando trotted up, he also having, for a change, been conscripted.

“Bring a better vintage than this, young one,” said Pando na Memis. “It is not to the lady’s liking.”

Pando — the urchin of that distinguished name — made a face at me, whereat I lifted my fist, so that he scuttled off, laughing. Tilda looked gracious, oblivious of the exchange. Pando na Memis pushed the bottle of yellow wine away across the table — and a long lanky arm reached out from somewhere and Inch grasped the bottle by the neck. Leona na Memis had not missed a single nuance. Much of the traffic and trade of Kregen is devoted to this kind of mutual exchange of commodities. It is an infuriating fact of human nature that the grass is always greener over the neighbor’s fence; and that is why wine from Western Erthyrdrin reached Turismond, why in Zenicce we drank Pandahem wine when the good vintages of Zenicce were shipped to Vallia. As to Vallia, her wines were carried to the far corners of Kregen. Despite all that, I still preferred the fragrant tea brewed by my clansmen in far Segesthes.

Inch, I considered, would be happiest with a bottle of dopa, that fiendish stomach-rotting drink that I had seen at work in the warrens of Magdag.

Drunkenness is relative on Kregen. Few Kregans consider getting drunk the occupation of a fully rational man, and my two oar comrades, Nath and Zolta, although they might become as merry as nits in an eiderdown, seldom ever achieved that disgusting paralytic sick drunk common in certain so-called civilized countries of this Earth. Kregans love to roister; and that means enjoying themselves. Getting sick drunk and puking over everything is not, really, much idea of fun. The conversation wended on, and we heard of Pando na Memis’ plans for the future, of how he craved for action — at which Leona looked alarmed — and of how, soon, the Tomboramin would advance along the old Lohvian roads through the Klackadrin.

“After the old Empire of Walfarg fell,” said Pando, “the land must have gone back. The Hostile Territories are still there, waiting for strong men to ride in and take over. One day, and soon, we of Tomboram will do just that, before the rasts of Vallia or Menaham or anyone else!”

I made the right noises, saying nothing.

Then the name Marsilus came up. A great noble of that name, old, crotchety, more than half-mad, had just died back in Tomboram and his estates, reputed valuable beyond price, had fallen into the hands of a nephew, who was also a nephew to the king. Pando na Memis whistled when Tilda, rather sharply, I thought, said: “Are the estates then so valuable?”

“Are they not! They rival the king’s. Now that Murlock Marsilus, the nephew, has inherited, the king must be greatly pleased, for the kingdom may inherit also when the king dies. There was a son to old Marsilus. Unfortunately, he died.”

Speaking very precisely, Tilda said, “Was the son disinherited, then?”

“By no means. But he is dead and — there was a story — he was banished in disgrace. Married out of turn, so the story goes. Everyone has heard it — you must have, surely?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

After I had given some explanation of myself, brief and almost totally untrue, Zair forgive me, Pando na Memis went on: “Murlock Marsilus is now Kov of Bormark, but the story goes that the old Kov, old Marsilus, screamed and shouted for his son on his deathbed. He relented of his punishment of the boy when he married. There was a grandson — but, of course, he stands no chance of the title and estates now that Murlock holds them under the king’s agreement.”

“The old man was stricken with the shrieking horrors,” said Inch, wisely. “It is known. He wanted to go to the Ice Floes of Sicce with a clean mind and with clean hands. One can visualize the scene. Poor benighted of Ngrangi!”

I leaned forward. “The king,” I said, “and this Marsilus, Kov of Bormark, who had died. They were brothers?”

“Yes,” said Leona, smiling at me. “You must be from some wild and untamed part of the world!”

“I am,” I told her. “Oh, yes, indeed, I am!”

The conversation changed course then; but I noticed Tilda was very quiet after that. The hated name of Vallia came up and with it tidbits of gossip and scandal. Of these I felt my heart lurch when Leona, speaking with a gentle malice quite natural in the circumstances, said: “The Princess Majestrix of Vallia!

Such a proud hoity-toity madam! Her father, the emperor has ordered her to marry—”

“To marry!” I shouted — and they all leaned back from me, their faces shocked, expressive of bewilderment and disgust. They must have seen that devil’s look on my face. I made myself calm down. My Delia! My Delia, Princess Majestrix of Vallia, ordered by the tyrant emperor, her father, to marry —

to marry some blundering oaf of his choice. I had to hold onto my sanity and my temper then. I do not apologize, so I just said: “You were telling us of Delia, Princess Majestrix of Vallia, Leona. Please go on.”

In a voice she struggled to keep from quavering, Leona went on speaking. And, as I listened, I felt a warm sweet relief flooding me, and I breathed easier.

For my Delia had defied her father!

She had flatly refused to marry the oaf picked out for her! She had stood up against his puissant majesty the emperor of Vallia, and told him flatly she would not marry. Not marry at all. This made my heart lurch afresh.

My Delia vowing never to marry?

Did she — could she — believe that I had abandoned her, as that scheming villain had planned when I had been drugged and dumped under the thorn-ivy bush? Had that foul scheme worked?

I had to get to Vallia — and yet, was there any greater urgency now than there had been? At least I knew my Delia was safe and well. She refused to marry. The emperor was still hale and hearty and, so the scandal went, quite prepared to wait and let his only daughter rot in maidenhood until she decided to marry the man of her choice. He would not force her; he would let time and nature take their courses. Once I had held Delia of the Blue Mountains in my arms and pressed her dear form close to my heart I had known that no other woman in two worlds could compare with her, no other woman could take her place. And I had known many women, blazingly beautiful women of arrogance and power, lovely women of lissome grace and refined artifice, women of passion and glory; and one had been to my Delia as a candle to the radiance of the red sun Zim. I had felt absolute confidence that Delia felt in exactly the same way about me, however little I deserved so marvelous a wonder. Delia was everything. No — she would not despair of me — she would not, she must not!

“You all right, dom?” said Inch.

“Assuredly, my long friend. Do I thus break a taboo?”

He chuckled and pushed the wine over to me and I drank and pushed the problem of Delia’s father, the emperor of Vallia, away for a space. At that time I had not settled the question. It rankled. I had to walk away from it for a space.

Leona, having exhausted herself on the scandal of a princess majestrix disobeying her father the emperor, had harked back to the Kov of Bormark, and was saying how lovely it would be if all that money were her Pando’s. Pando laughed. With what I considered to be deep wisdom, he said: “The money might be fun, Leona, my dearest; but what comes with it — ah, that is a different matter.”

Tilda was still sitting silently and sipping her wine and I saw her face suddenly tauten. I swiveled. Young Pando, his naked legs flashing, his brave zhantil tunic laid aside for the humble job of waiter, his hair tousled, was fleeting between the tables. A big fellow in the blue of a sailorman reached out and cuffed Pando alongside the head.

“Bring me a flagon, you rast of an imp of Sicce! Hurry, you little devil!”

Pando picked up his tray and what glasses were not broken. Someone else — a newcomer off the ships

— kicked him irritably as Pando bumped into his legs; but that was a reflex action. Tilda put a hand to her breast. Her violet eyes were large with anguish. Her supple voluptuous mouth shone, half open, pained, vulnerable.

I stood up.

Old Nath waddled across. “Now, Dray, please . . .!”

The sailorman laughed coarsely among his mates. He was big and bluff, with the tattoos across his forehead and cheeks that some sailors believe indicate heightened sexual potency or, perhaps, will give them immunity to the demons and risslacas of the seas.

“You, Nath, have a stinking clientele in here, lately.”

“Please, Dray—”

I went across to the sailor who was already roaring for the little rast of a waiter and picked him up by the scruff of his blue tunic. He started to thrash his legs about so I clouted him — once was enough —

and carried him outside horizontally. It was done quickly and decently, and old Nath put his hands together and cast his eyes up to Zair and Grodno.

Outside I stood the big fellow up and said, “You hit a young boy, you kleesh. This may be wrong, it may be savage and barbaric, it may be against the divine dictates of Zair; but I do not like men like you who hit young boys.”

So, somewhat sorrowfully, for I know I sinned, I struck him in the belly. I stood aside as he was noisily and smelly sick. Then I kicked him where Inch had kicked the assassin and told him to clear off. I went back into The Red Leem and I managed to force out some sort of smile for Tilda. Old Nath had quickly whipped a round of drinks onto the sailor’s table and his mates were drinking and ogling the local dancing girls Nath had hired especially for the night. Tilda never performed more than once an evening. These girls were fine strapping wenches who danced like chunkrahs. They made great play with gossamer veils, they were heavily made-up, and each one would roll a sailor this night, or she was no true daughter of Pa Mejab!

Pando na Memis said to me as I sat down: “That was the captain of an argenter, you know, Dray.”

“I should hope so,” I said. “Nath runs a respectable house.”

Tilda said she was tired and we all stood up as she left the table. The night roared on and presently, mindful that I must see about a ship the next day, I, too, went to bed. Tilda stood by her door, beckoning to me. She had waited for me to retire. A lamp burned in her room. I had made plenty of noise coming up the stairs. Even then, I believe I knew what she was going to ask me. I sat on the bed, but Tilda prowled restlessly. She wore a long gown of jade, a green glinting and glorious. How strange, how incongruous, that I, Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy, dedicated to the utter destruction of the Green of Grodno, could sit and watch and not be moved!

Her ivory skin gleamed against the silk. Her black hair swirled as she walked. She prowled like a caged leem, like one of those leem stalking in the leem pit below the palace of the Esztercari in far Zenicce when my Delia clung in the cage above their ferocious fangs and claws.

“You need not whisper, Dray. Pando is fast asleep and it will take the wrath of the invisible twins to wake him. I sent him up to bed after — I saw that.” Her voluptuous lips tightened. “I saw that, and I made up my mind.”

I said, “What kind of life can he have, out here, on the frontier, Tilda?”

She clenched and unclenched her hands. She padded up and down those carpets of Walfarg weave, up and down.

“Old Nath runs a respectable house, for Pa Mejab. Yet already you have seen what can happen, Tilda.”

I tried to make my face smile for her; but I gave that up, and said flatly and, I fear, brutally: “You must take him home and claim what is his right.”

Her white hand flew to her throat. She halted, stricken, and gazed at me, those violet eyes enormous in her white face.

“What? You know — how can you know?”

“It is not difficult, Tilda. By Zim-Zair. His father must have been a man!”

“He was! Oh, yes, he was! Marker Marsilus! Who would have been Kov of Bormark this day, had he not died out here in this pestiferous hell-hole. And Pando is his son.”

“You mean, Tilda, that your son Pando is really Pando Marsilus, Kov of Bormark. He is, rightfully and legally. Is this not so?”

She looked at me, still and alert, like a risslaca watching a bird. “He is, Dray Prescot. Rightfully and legally.” She took a breath so that the green gown moved and slithered. What she said next rocked me back with surprise.

“I am going home to Tomboram and I am going to claim what is his right for Pando. Dray Prescot —

will you come with me and help Pando and me? Will you be our champion?”

CHAPTER NINE

We sail southeast past Erthyrdrin

Ochs, Rapas, and Fristles do not make good seamen. Chuliks may be trained, given the methods to which I had been born and grown accustomed, the system of the late eighteenth century, consisting of the lash, the starters of the bosun’s mates, a wall of marines — and the lash. Rum, in its counterfeit of shipboard wine, also helped.

As a consequence the vast majority of the crew of Dram Constant, Captain Alkers, were men of recognizable Homo sapiens stock. The few halflings were, and on their own wishes, employed in noncritical functions aboard ship — waisters.

No captain in his right mind would enroll a Fristle. I saw one being aboard — he was not Homo sapiens

— who interested me mightily. His body was square in the sense that the distance across his shoulders, waist, and hips was the same, and equaled the distance from his neck to his upper thigh. He had but two arms, and they were as long and thin as Inch’s, while his legs, also long, were nearly as thick as Inch’s, which is another way of saying he was spindly-legged in the extreme. His face bore a cheerful rubicund smile at all times, his ears stuck out, he had a snub nose, and he could run up the ratlines and around by the futtock shrouds into the top with the agility of a monkey. This man, one Tolly, was a member of the race of Hobolings, inhabiting a chain of islands that I have mentioned, that ran parallel to the northeastern coast of Loh from the tip of Erthyrdrin southeastward to the northwest corner of Pandahem opposite the land of Walfarg.

Dram Constant, as Captain Alkers was happy to tell me, was as fine and tight an argenter as it was possible to find plowing the Sunset Sea. He knew that this report of his ship had been the cause of our taking passage in her, our little party consisting of Tilda and Pando, and Inch and I as guards and champions to protect them and see they were not molested and reached their destination safely. I believe it is not necessary to dwell on the mental turmoil I went through after Tilda’s offer. As the days passed and the dwaburs slipped past our keel, as we sailed in the armada toward Loh, I had again and again to rationalize out my decision. Delia of Delphond waited for me in Vallia; yet I was to travel to Pandahem. Not only was I sailing away from her, I was voyaging to a land in deadly rivalry with her own. By taking an intense interest in every aspect of the argenter — an occupation easy to feign — I canceled out a great deal of my own misery and indecision. I thought Delia would understand, I prayed she would; and yet I doubted. . .

This argenter was about a hundred and thirty feet long — Captain Alkers told me she was a hundred feet on the keel — and almost fifty feet on the beam. She was thus little more than twice as long as she was broad. Captain Alkers also said she was eight hundred and fifty tons burdened; but this I tended to doubt. She was a fat, wallowy, comfortable ship, with good stowage place below. We quartered ourselves aft, within the three-decked aftercastle, and our cabins were of a roominess that at first amazed me, used to far more cramped quarters. One genuine improvement these sailors of the outer oceans had made in their ships over the swifters of the inner sea was in the use of a rudder and whipstaff in place of the twin steering oars.

With her three masts and her square sails, Dram Constant plunged gallantly onward, sheeting spray, and if she made a great deal of fuss about her passage she did make a passage over open and truly deep sea

— if at a snail’s rate of knots.

Pando loved to lie out along the bowsprit beneath the spritsail mast and watch the water smashing against the round cheeks of the bows, creaming and coiling away. Dram Constant, as it were, squashed her way through the sea.

Tilda was continuously on at Pando, and me, for the lad to come down where it was safe. After I showed him a few of the necessary tricks of the trade any sailorman must have, I felt a little more confident about him. But, all during that passage, he was a sore trial. Probably in an attempt to get his mind off ships and to confine him to one spot, Tilda got me to teach him rapier and dagger work. In truth, he was of an age when this very necessary accomplishment would be vital for him to learn quickly.

A full-size Jiktar and Hikdar would have overweighted him, but we were fortunate in being able to borrow a practice pair belonging to one of the young gentlemen signed aboard Dram Constant to learn their trade. With these I had Pando puffing and lunging, riposting, parrying, drawing the main-gauche back in cunning feints, carrying out all the many evolutions of swordplay — the twin-thrust, the heart-thrust, the thigh stop, the flower, the neck riposte — until he was dripping with sweat and limp as a moonflower on a moonless night. Tilda would sometimes watch, and when the boy flagged, would say tartly: “Get on, Pando, get on! This is man’s work now! Stick him!”

She did not, and for this I was mightily thankful, use that expression: “Jikai!”

Tilda and Pando proved excellent sailors.

Poor Inch lost a great deal of his dinner and his dignity over the side. Memories ghosted up — to be instantly quelled.

For me to be back on the sea again was an invigorating experience, and I snuffed the sea breeze like an old hunter let out to the chase once more. The sky gleamed and glowed above us, a few clouds streamed in the wind, the breeze bore us on, all our flags and banners snapped and whistled in that breeze, our canvas strained, billowing with all the painted panoply gorgeous upon it. We plunged and reared in the sea and in our wake we left a broad swathing wash of creamy foam. Yes, for a time they were good days. I knew that I would reach my Delia; first I had to deliver Tilda and Pando — that imp of Sicce who was now Kov of Bormark — safely to Tomboram.

Tilda had not told Pando, yet, just who he was. That would come later. A wise decision, I felt. We made landfall in due time at Northern Erthyrdrin, and took on fresh provisions and water and landed a man who had fallen and smashed up his pelvis. We shared berthing facilities with ships from other Pandahemic nations; but the peace was kept. I looked up at the gnarled mountains that thrust right up to the coast. Up there, in those mountains and valleys, lay Seg Segutorio’s home. I could walk there. I knew the way, for he had told me often. But I was committed. I vowed that one day I would go there, for I could walk directly to where he had cut his bow-stave, where he had held the pass, right to his home and greet the people as though I had known them for years. But my honor and integrity — such as they are and have value — had been enlisted in support of Tilda and the young Kov. Yes, one day, I would walk the hills and valleys of Seg’s home.

We were talking of the enforced amity of the different countries of Pandahem here, and I heard more stories of the horrors that did occur from time to time. There were massacres, and mutual extermination excursions, and tales of bitter fighting even when the Vallians laughed and stepped in to steal the prize. I came to recognize the different devices and characteristics that divided and marked one nation from another on Pandahem. In all this talk of division and what amounted to internecine warfare I began to wonder if the Star Lords had set another task to my hands.

As we sailed out in our armada and set our bows toward the southeast I leaned on the larboard rail and looked back over the larboard quarter. Out there, across the shining sea, lay Vallia. . . As I stood there dreaming I heard a harsh and savage cry. I looked up. Up there, slanting against the mingled rays of the twin suns, a giant bird circled, a gorgeous scarlet-feathered raptor, with golden feathers about its neck, and wickedly clawed black talons. I knew that bird, circling in wide hunting circles. The Gdoinye, sent by the Star Lords. As I watched I saw the white dove fly smoothly above me, circle once, and then rise and wing away. The white dove of the Savanti!

I felt a tremendous sense of elation, of relief, of lightness. I had not been forgotten. The Star Lords, who had brought me to Kregen, and the Savanti, who also had brought me here and then thrust me out of their paradise of Aphrasöe, both were watching over me. They would not take a hand to halt the cruel thrusting spear or sword. They wanted me for their own inscrutable purposes. I wondered, again, if there was work for them to my hand in Pandahem.

“What weird bird was that, Dray?” demanded Pando. His mischievous face was all screwed up against the sun glare, and quite serious.

“A bird, Pando. An omen.” I could not tell him the Gdoinye came from the Everoinye, the Star Lords.

“It means that everything is going to be wonderful in Tomboram.”

“Of course, I am excited at going there, and the sea, and the ships, and learning swordplay — but, Dray, tell me. Why is Mother going home?” His eyes searched my face. “Home to me is Pa Mejab. She knows that.”

“When you get to Tomboram, Pando, there will be many wonderful and exciting things to do. You will be a man. I know you will do your best to look out for your mother. She is a woman alone.”

“She said to me once, would I mind if she married again.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I would not mind if she married you, Dray.”

I pushed myself off the rail and swayed gently with the roll of the ship.

“That cannot be, Pando.” I spoke seriously, man to man. “Your mother is a most wonderful woman. You must cherish her. Yes, she will marry again, I feel sure, I hope — but I cannot marry her—”

But he was staring at me with such a black look that I felt sick. “You don’t like her!”

“Of course I do.” I looked around the wide deck, which was largely deserted on the larboard side, most folk being over on the starboard watching the last of the land. I bent toward him. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course I can.” He was most ungracious, his lips in a pout.

“I am engaged to a girl — a wonderful girl — and I—”

“Is she a princess?” Scornfully.

I eyed him. He had been hurt. But I did not intend to lie. Clearly, not even a princess was better than his mother — and how right and proper that attitude was, to be sure! — but if my betrothed was a princess that, so Pando must be reasoning, might go some way to explaining my boorish behavior. But I would never, quite, be the same to him again.

He was growing up.

“Do you know what a Kov is, Pando?”

“Of course — anyone does. He has lots of money and rides a zorca and is covered in jewels — and he has a flag — and—”

“All right.” A Kov, a similar rank to our Earthly duke, is what Delia had more or less confirmed me as, after my masquerade as Drak, Kov of Delphond, in order to avoid being killed by the overlords of Magdag. The title had been given me and she had confirmed it; I was not foolish enough to believe her father would do the same. As for the Lord of Strombor — as for all the other lords of the enclaves of the city of Zenicce — we were a cut above a Kov!

“As far as I am concerned, Pando, your mother is a Kovneva.”

He screwed his face up to me. He was jigging up and down now, as all small boys do, being compounded of spring wire and rubber. “A Kovneva? So I’m a Kov, then?”

I tried to laugh. I did laugh, after a fashion.

“And I am the captain of a swordship!”

He laughed, then, and we were friends again; but it had been a near squeak. I sensed that Pando, young as he was, perhaps because of the insights of that youth, felt in me a secret that I could not utter, something vast and portentous that might move mountains. That it was in truth merely the love of an ordinary mortal man for his princess might have seemed far too commonplace for him. Because of the action we had seen together, and my rescue of his mother, and the swordplay I was teaching him, Pando had come in his boyish way to hero-worship me. I had tried to choke this off, being not so much embarrassed as aware of the dangers; but had had little success. Now I felt I had succeeded, violently, and at a stroke.

The days passed and we bore on southeastward, the weather remained fine with a moderate breeze generally from a few points north of east, so we were continually on the larboard tack. Two alternatives now lay before the admiral of the armada.

He might choose to swing to the east and so outside the long chain of islands stretching down to Pandahem. This choice would offer attack opportunities to privateers from Vallia, scouring across the Sunset Sea. Or, he could run down between the islands and the mainland of Loh, which was here the homeland of Walfarg, progenitor of a once-mighty empire. This choice would lay him open to attacks from all the swordships which lay in wait in their festering pirate nests among the islands. If he took the latter course, however, he would have to swing due east when he reached the last of the islands and run clear across the northern coast of Pandahem and the countries having their seaboards there before he could reach Tomboram in the east. Also, to figure into the calculations, there was over twice as much sea room outside as inside the island chain. To me, a fighting sailor, sea room is vital. The admiral hoisted his flags and Captain Alkers, not without a fitting comment on the importance of the occasion, put his telescope to his eye. He nodded his head with satisfaction. He lowered the glass and turned to the helmsman.

“Make it east!”

So we were to run clear of the islands, and then turn southeast for Tomboram directly — and to the Ice Floes of Sicce with the rasts of Vallia!

Every sixth day Captain Alkers conducted a short religious ceremony on the open quarterdeck. Most of the passengers attended and all the crew, both human and halfling. Tolly, I noticed, was particularly devout. In the inner sea the green of Grodno and the red of Zair hate and detest each other. In Zenicce they used to say: “The sky colors are ever in mortal combat.” The people of Pandahem and Vallia had progressed some way along the path of a more live religion, for they held the view that the red and the green, Zim and Genodras, were a pair. They both shone down upon the one world, the twin suns mingling their light into an opal glory. They regarded their deity as an invisible pair, the invisible twins with which Tilda so often threatened Pando, and upon whom she called in time of trouble. The name often given to this twinned deity of invisible godhead was Opaz: a name conjoined from the light streaming and mingled from the Suns of Scorpio.

Despite my vows to the Krozairs of Zy, and my own half thoughtless swearing by Zair, I was happy to join the others in their worship, feeling no true blasphemy to my own God, feeling, rather, that these people were nearer to Him than many and many another I had known.

So we beat on east and then turned southeast and aimed for a quick run to Tomboram. The easting had cost us time, for we had had to make to windward by a long series of boards. But that weary tacking was paying off now. The spume flew, and the last of the gulls left us, and we were alone on the shining sea.

The lookouts were alert, and a most careful watch was kept at all times toward the east and northeast, from which we might expect the lean galleons of Vallia to pounce upon us. As the days winged by and the weather remained fine we began to congratulate ourselves. Not a single speck of sail showed on the horizon rim. The galleons of Vallia had missed us, or were not at sea. The reason we discovered, to our disaster, when black clouds began to build up all along the eastern horizon. The twin suns shone down with a light I found uncomfortable. This was rashoon weather. When the blow came I discovered the difference between a rashoon of the inner sea and a hurricane of the outer oceans. I have lived through many a hurricane and tempest, many a typhoon — on two worlds — but that was a bad one. We were driven helplessly toward the west. Our masts went by the board. We lost crewmen swept overboard. The blackness, the wind, the rain, and the violence of the waves battered at our physical bodies and smashed with a more awful punishment against our psyches. We suffered. We went careering past islands, seeing the fanged rocks spouting ghostly white, to see that spray ripped and splattered away in an instant. Onward we surged, a wreck, our seams opening, our timbers splintered, lost, it seemed, in the turmoil of the seas.

When the storm at last blew itself out and we poor souls, numbed and drenched, could crawl on deck and discover to our surprise that Zim and Genodras still smiled down upon us from a clear sky, the dreaded cry went up.

“Swordships! Swordships!”

The deck was in a frightful mess, cumbered with wreckage, raffles of cordage, splintered timbers, everything that had not been washed overboard. We rushed to the rail. There they came, long lean shapes spurring through the sea. With deadly intent they closed in on us. Helplessly, we wallowed in the sea as those sea-leem ringed us.

“Swordships! Swordships!”