Prince of Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  But, equally, I am not your simpleminded if quick-witted barbarian, like my good friend Wulk of the northern hills.

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

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

  I must!

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

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

  We saw no more headless zorcamen and two days of hard pulling with many locks to bite into the actual distance traversed of our eighty-lock-miles-a-day travel, we came down into Vomansoir.

  I had expected just another town, perhaps a city, something like Therminsax. What I saw enchanted me. Vallia is full of strange and exotic places and out-of-the-way retreats. Vomansoir straddled the Great River and six canals joined here in a wide stretch of hectically busy waterways. We trudged in and got our berthing ticket and tied up at the hoffiburs wharf run by a Company of Friends with whom Yelker usually dealt.

  Every canal ran in through a series of lock flights, for Vomansoir is situated in a great natural bowl. As we descended we could see the surrounding slopes terraced and cultivated so that not a square inch of space was wasted. Colors rioted everywhere. Trees and bushes and flowers all blended into an enormous patchwork quilt of dizzying splendor. The river, She of Fecundity, ran in and out of the bowl through colossal canyons. Along the banks were moored vessels of surprising size. Beyond them the quays hummed with throngs of people busy about the everyday tasks of living. Zorca chariots clattered and whirred here and there, quoffas dragged carts of humbler duties, men and women rode saddle zorcas, and I saw again the half-voves I had last seen in Zenicce. Vallia, however, has no voves in the natural state, although there are small herds here and there bred up by men.

  Everything was magnificent. The women wore flowing free gowns of myriads of colors; the men in their Vallian gear were not content thus to be left in the shade and their wide-shouldered tunics and jerkins were also brilliantly colored. I saw many of the men working on the quays and at the warehouses, as in the factories and the streets that dealt in various items of merchandise, wore the shirts with the banded sleeves, and while many of these banded colors were gray and yellow, the colors of Vomansoir, there were many also of other colors, sometimes three colors banded together. The red and black of the guards were in evidence, and I saw, with a bunching of my jaw muscles, gangs of slave haulers at work. Also, I saw men with black and white sleeves.

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

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

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

  I was profoundly shocked.

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

  Rafee let rip with his coarse cackle at this. I could see their point. But I was annoyed. I am never violent — at least, not stupidly so, not unthinkingly, not when it will hurt people for whom I cherish affection. At least, so I hope.

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

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

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

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

  “You must be in a mighty hurry, dom.”

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

  Strange words, those, for Dray Prescot on Kregen!

  In the event I hired a zorca and left a whacking deposit as a guarantee of my honesty. Vallia has a functioning banking system, as must any country which trades at such a high intensity, and I could collect the deposit when the zorca was either returned or unsaddled at the Vondium stables. I bought some food, and with a few silver coins left clanking rather dismally in the lesten-hide bag, I set off.

  Vallian roads are foul. They are better now, but I speak of the time when I rode south through the sun-drenched land seeking an interview with my prospective father-in-law. The zorca made good time, considering, and I wended my way south through towns and cities, crossing the canals, watching the lazy progress of the narrow boats, spurring on harshly when I saw a gang of hauler slaves dragging an Emperor’s barge, giving a quick sailor eye to the boats sailing on the Mother of Waters. I passed huge cornfields that took a day to traverse, immense dark forests, where twice I fought off footpads. This made me frown, for I had taken Vallia to be civilized. I would not allow myself to become fatigued. The zorca held up wonderfully well, and I fancy he recognized he had a zorcaman on his back.

  The twin Suns of Scorpio chased in jade and crimson across the sky each day, the nightly procession of moons cast down their pinkish light, and I hurried on.

  I reached Vondium.

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

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

  CHAPTER TEN

  From Delphond to the Blue Mountains

  Delphond is a delightful, charming, cozy land of small fields and secluded hamlets, of winding brooks and gentle undulations of ground clad in the brilliant green of Kregan grass speckled with the prodigious abundance of Kregan flowers. It is a warm land, a soft and safe country, a place for lazy retirement and idle amusements, happy and carefree and going the old ways of its people. Tucked away in a so
uthern bend of the coastline of the main island of Vallia, it receives all the benefit of the Zim Stream, that warm current sweeping up through the Cyphren Sea from the unknown southwestern oceans. From Delphond comes the finest vintage claret in all Kregen, or so I believe. Also there are apples, pears, gregarians, and squishes, and the people there rear a kind of ponsho whose fleece, besides being as soft and silky as any in two worlds, provides chops and shoulders and legs of a succulence not to be believed until eaten, fresh, crisp, and savory, with liberal helpings of mint sauce and with the small round yellow momolams, a tuber that Zair put on Kregen in holy wedlock with roast ponsho.

  Also in Delphond are fat cattle, very like our Earthly bulls and cows, and the cream they make there . . . it is of a triple consistency, rich and thick and fit for Opaz himself.

  Such a meal I ate in a pleasant raftered alehouse, with the twin suns slanting in at the open window and the bees busy about the mauve and white loomin flowers in a pottery jar of Pandahem ware on the windowsill. The good-natured innkeeper’s wife bustled, bringing me her best, and I ate well, for the journey had been swift and eating of secondary importance. My booted feet stuck out across the polished sturm-wood floor and in other circumstances I would have been content. I munched a handful of palines after the meal was finished, considering.

  In my lesten-hide bag there now reposed but three copper obs . . . I had squandered all my slender resources on this last meal. The people of Delphond are jolly, given to laughter, happy, tucked away in their corner of Vallia, secure in the knowledge that they own fealty to Delia of Delphond as their suzerain, than whom there is no more fair or perfect a girl in all their world — and, as I know, in two worlds.

  But I was not pleased.

  The Emperor had indeed visited Delphond and been received with the pomp and ceremony fitting to his exalted majesty. He had come by water, as was fitting, in a long train of narrow boats, traveling with a full thousand of his personal bodyguard, the Bowmen of Loh, and with many retainers, servitors, and slaves. Delia, like myself, recognizes that in certain circumstances slaves can be economical, but that in many areas of the economy they are not; effective or otherwise, slaves are not for Delia of Delphond. There had been trouble when she had emancipated the whole of Delphond, as soon as the gift of the estate had been received from her grandmother, as there had been trouble of a different kind when she had emancipated the slaves of the Blue Mountains. Now the country was in apple-pie order. The colors worn banded on the shirt sleeves of Delia’s retainers were lavender and laypom — the laypom is a fruit rather like a peach but of a pale subtle yellow color, delicate and exquisite — and her servitors moved with the springy step and open shoulders and frank faces of free men and women.

  But this could not charm me now, for the Emperor had not found Delia in Delphond. She had gone, and so he had followed her, I was told, to the Blue Mountains.

  The Emperor could simply wave a hand and the haulers would take up their ropes and away would glide his whole caravan. I must fend for myself. Well, I had done that often enough before, and was like to do it often enough again. So with a good meal of the products of Delphond inside me I stirred up my faithful zorca and set off westward for the Blue Mountains.

  There was in the character of the folk of Delphond a gentleness and a happy laughter, too, that I knew would serve Delia well in times of peace. I had grave doubts that I could raise an army here that would fight. In that, as you will hear, I did the Delphondi an injustice. But then, in my black, dispirited mood, I canceled them from my evil calculations. Even so, I could understand that I had no right to bring war and bloodshed to this pleasant estate, that I would truly be the evil man I know myself to be if I forced these gentle folk to take up the sword, and carried fire and slaughter through their comfortable country.

  Delia had told me that Delphond, willed to her by her grandmother, was a tiny estate. It took me two full days to reach the western border from the port city of Delphond. Truly, the ideas of size of the Kregan people, with the much greater landmass of the planet, are of a different scale from those of Earth. Even their methods of travel have no significant influence on their conceptions of distance, for whereas the canal boats travel so leisurely, the fliers cover vast distances very rapidly.

  Astride my zorca I bid Remberee to Delphond, which her people call Delphond the Blessed, and rode on into Thadelm, the neighboring country, owing allegiance to Vad Selnix. That land shared much of Delphond’s rural beauty on its southeastern borders, but gradually changed in character as I wended northwestward, until the land sprawled gray and featureless beneath the glare of the suns, a wild expanse of moorland and rolling downland. A Vad is one of the intermediate ranks between a Kov and a Strom. I rode on and passed a pleasant “Llahal” with the few people I saw. I was able to catch a few rabbits — very much like Terrestrial rabbits, a meat of which I am not over-fond — and the ever-present palines worked their usual magic.

  If necessary, I would beg.

  By this time you must realize that I didn’t care what I did just so long as I reached my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond.

  By this means and that, and, I am relieved to be able to say, without doing anything of which I was truly ashamed, I traversed the country in a northwesterly direction, passing through Stromnates and Kovnates and Vadvars, and through a number of wide estates, as big as states in themselves, owned by the Emperor. When the mountains began to loft on the horizon I knew I was approaching my goal. I had sold one of the daggers, but I kept the rapier and remaining main-gauche, for I felt I might have need of them above the usual need a man has for weapons on Kregen. I fell in with a caravan of calsanys, with preysany-litters, and with a guard of zorcamen. The servants wore shirts with sleeves banded in bold and black.

  A zorcaman wearing a close-fitting helmet of iron, with a nasal and a high flaunting plume of gold and black feathers, hauled across my path. He had no lance. His quiver of javelins was unstrapped and he balanced one of the long casting shafts in his right hand as he eyed me.

  I said, as civilly as I could: “Llahal.”

  “Llahal,” he replied. Then: “Who are you and whence do you travel?”

  I knew what to say.

  “I am Drak ti Valkanium, and I go to High Zorcady in the Blue Mountains.”

  “Your business?”

  He was a big fellow, and beyond him the rest of his company jogged along escorting the caravan. There were fifty of them, a sizable little squadron, and judging from the bulging sacks and panniers of the calsanys, they were extremely careful with what they carried. They were not a mere merchant’s caravan, like that of Naghan the Paunch on far Turismond — or even of Xoltemb, in Segesthes, as far in the opposite direction.

  “Who are you?”

  The lifted javelin quivered. “I am asking the questions, dom.”

  “By what right?”

  His laugh was intended to be scornful, but I detected a note of uncertainty.

  “You travel alone, Kr. Drak. I am Hikdar Stovang, and I travel on the business of the Kov of Aduimbrev. We are about to enter the Blue Mountains, and I want no secret enemy at my back.”

  “You are one of Vektor of Aduimbrev’s men!” I relished this. “That is good. If you will, I would like to travel with you. I, too, have no wish for unseen enemies at my back through the Blue Mountains.”

  He spat. He had shown his authority, had sized me up as a simple Koter, a gentleman, and was prepared now to let me join his caravan. “The Blue Mountains,” he said. “When the Kov marries the Princess Majestrix I hope to Opaz I am not stuck out here on duty. The place is a death trap.”

  I was fascinatedly interested, but my questions must be of such a kind, and in such an order, as not to arouse his suspicions. We turned our zorcas together and rode knee to knee. He sheathed the javelin. He was a soldier, doing a job, and not much caring for it.

  The retainers of Vektor were heartily sick of the whole business. The quicker their master marr
ied the Princess Majestrix and had a brood of children to carry on the imperial line, the better. Then perhaps they could all return to their old ways and all this chasing about, first here, then there, seeking to make Delia of the Blue Mountains make up her mind, could finish. “I’ve saddle sores on my saddle sores, Kr. Drak!” declared Hikdar Stovang. “By Vox, I’m black and blue where I sit down.”

  I smothered my chuckle. I can always react like a normal man where my Delia is concerned. She had been leading them a dance. Impudently refusing to marry the man of her father’s choice, then arrogantly refusing to marry at all, she had held them all off, going from one of her estates to another, staying with friends — I felt my senses quicken at that — she had kept them all at bay ever since her mysterious arrival back in Vallia.

  “But all the nonsense is going to stop, now, Kr. Drak. We carry the wedding gifts. The Emperor is in High Zorcady. The Princess Majestrix is there, also. So is Kov Vektor.” Hikdar Stovang sounded like a man well-pleased that a difficult and unpleasant job is finished. “Where the Emperor is, then that is where the wedding will take place. And right glad, to the glory of the Invisible Twins, am I that it will soon be over.”

  Aduimbrev lay to the north midlands, and Stovang couldn’t wait to return home. The Vomansoir Cut had not gone through Vektor’s Kovnate, and I guessed we had flown over it in the ice airboat. Now I set my face forward. Oh, yes, I relished the irony of thus riding in with the very wedding gifts of my rival, but that rival held all the aces.