Armada of Antares

by Alan Burt Akers

  The closeness of the room, although it was large, and the sound-deadening effects of the draperies, meant that only one with keen hearing might pick up the racket bouncing from the Great Hall. They’d started on The Bowmen of Loh down there, and Seg licked his lips, picking up a fresh goblet of Gremivoh.

  A very great deal of power, wealth, and majesty was packed into the Chavonth Chamber that night. I knew most of those there, and many of them you have already met in these tapes. There were others who were to figure in my story at a later date, but I will confine myself to talking only about those who affected me in the immediate dealings with which we were engaged.

  The chief of these, of course, was Lykon Crimahan, the Kov of Forli.

  “Let me fill your glass with this excellent Gremivoh, Kov,” I said, very friendly. We wanted no servants with flapping ears when we talked high state business. And I wanted to let this damned Kov think I was something less than he expected. Here I believe something of my double-dealings in Havilfar came to me and, despite the lessons I had learned there, I admit I took a nasty little pleasure from the thought of fooling this Kov Lykon.

  Now Gremivoh is a wine of Vallia much favored in the Vallian Air Service.

  This Lykon, despite my manner, took the point.

  “I would prefer a more subtle Pastale,” he said, very — smooth.

  I took that point, also. For Pastale — and I admit it is a reasonable vintage — is the export monopoly of the House of Operhalen, whose colors are blue, green, and ivory. And the Operhalens, a noble house of the enclave city of Zenicce, were at that time allied with the Ponthieu and against my own noble house of Strombor. The ruler of Operhalen was a little frog-like man with a stoop and a leer, and a reputation for inspecting his own consignments of Pastale too lovingly and too frequently.

  This damned Lykon Crimahan would know I was Lord of Strombor and that the Operhalens would like to see me dead, so he asked for a glass of their Opaz-forsaken wine.

  I smiled.

  “Certainly, Kov. As it happens, I was able to board and take a ship of the Operhalens. Their wine is yours, freely given as it came to me, free.”

  Seg laughed and then turned away, drinking.

  Tharu did not laugh, but his fierce old whiskers bristled up a little more.

  The Emperor spoke and everyone stopped talking.

  “We are here to discuss serious matters,” he began. “I have said I am not happy with you, Dray Prescot, you whom I made Prince Majister. I would like an accounting of what you have done with the treasures we have poured out for you.”

  The damned old scoundrel! He’d lent me a parcel of fliers, which he had got back, and some of his Crimson Bowmen of Loh, almost all of whom he had got back. As for hard cash, that had been conspicuous by its absence.

  I said, “You found your journey here pleasant, Emperor?”

  He didn’t like me calling him by title, and he knew I knew it.

  “Yes, it was comfortable. The voller you presented me is a fine craft.”

  “It should be. It was taken by the Kov of Falinur and his friends from Hyrklana, and is a first-class voller.”

  “That is as may be. Where are the fliers you promised me? There was much fine talk, I remember,” and here he waxed most sarcastic, “of bringing to us the secrets and the methods of the contraptions inside fliers. We should build our own, you promised me. Well, Dray Prescot? Where are these secrets?”

  Mind you, the old devil had the right of it, for all that he over dramatized his part. I had signally failed to gain all I had dreamed of. But I did know a very great deal now.

  “The wise men are still laboring to reproduce the silver boxes. For reasons I will not go into now, the full secrets did not come my way.”

  That was the signal for the dowager Kovneva Natyzha to thrust up her lower lip and let go one of her famous barking laughs, like the blow of an ax striking a tree.

  “I warrant you do not wish to go into the reasons, Prince! I warrant you enjoyed yourself in Hamal.”

  I stared at her with a cool expression on my face, I hope, my eyebrows raised. This old biddy, this Vallia-renowned Natyzha Famphreon, the dowager Kovneva of Falkerdrin, was a noble woman with whom I had always tried not to cross swords. Her face held that nut-brown, cracker-barrel, experienced look of iron authority exercised over many seasons. Her mouth curved down at the corners, and grooves alongside her chin extended the arc. Her chin thrust forward so that her lower lip was habitually upthrust, giving her a scornful, arrogant look of power. She was well past her one hundred and fortieth year, I knew, and her face showed something of that, although on Kregen people change little from their coming of age to the time when they are battened down for the last journey to the Ice Floes of Sicce. But her body! She had pampered that body of hers, so that it remained firm and pliant, soft and supple. She was known to say that a man couldn’t care less about a pretty face, but no man could stomach an ugly body. She was generally right about it, too, if many of the men surrounding the Emperor at this time counted.

  She wore a bright red gingerish wig, which gave her a comical appearance as well as a great and horrific presence. In addition, her eyebrows, a fierce and wiry black, jagged upward like black wings over her dark eyes.

  “You have heard of the Heavenly Mines?” I asked.

  “Some stories,” she said offhandedly. “Answer the Emperor. Where are the fliers and their secrets?”

  “Yes,” chipped in her son, the Kov of Falkerdrin. “Answer the Emperor.” He was a product of bad breeding: chinless, weak-eyed, pimply faced. That was not his fault, of course, but the fault of near-incestuous parents greedily grasping each other in lust that did not consider the consequences. The result had made him a straw in the hands of his mother, who ran him and his official position as Pallan of the Armory.

  Delia put a hand to her breast. She knew me. She half rose, and, on a breath, said, “You would not go back to the Heavenly Mines?”

  “No one but a fool who wished to commit suicide in the most painful of ways would go back there.”

  The unspoken thought lay between us. She knew just how much of a fool, a true onker, I am in these matters.

  The door opened and San Evold Scavander put his head in, his brown eyes mad and snapping, glee written all over his crusty old face.

  “My Prince!” he tried to bellow, sneezed, and wiped his nose, gurgling with laughter. “My Prince! The cayferm is true cayferm! A residue is left — I do not know how. The boiling has been a success! Come, my Prince, and let us test the gift of Oolie Opaz.”

  I rose. “Then let us go to the laboratory,” I said, not without a sneaky feeling of satisfaction. “And see if Opaz shines upon Vallia.”

  Chapter 5

  Cayferm?

  The vaol boxes and the paol boxes lay nearby.

  I said, “Majister, if you would push this box toward this other box . . .”

  He did so.

  We all clustered around the scarred lenken table in Scavander’s chemical-smelling room, where the wreckage of Lish’s airboat, the silver boxes, and the supplies of minerals Ornol had brought were piled. Two new boxes awaited the imperial blessing.

  A brass vessel still bubbled on a dying fire, and the sweet scent of squishes hung in the air. Samphron-oil lamps had been lighted, but through the high windows She of the Veils smiled in from the night sky of Kregen.

  The Emperor, most tentatively, pushed one box toward the other.

  They reached that particular distance from each other and they both sprang into the air!

  We all let out our breaths. I was enchanted. Delia hugged me and everyone was one beaming smile.

  The boxes rose straight up. They struck the ceiling among the cobwebs, parted, and so fell down again with a great clatter. Everyone laughed. I say everyone — even in my mood of great euphoria I noticed that Lykon and the dowager Kovneva Natyzha did not laugh, did not even smile.

  “And this can be repeated?” asked the Emperor.

>   “Oh, yes, Majister,” piped up Scavander. He wiped a hand across his forehead. “Indeed, it is a mere matter of—” And here he launched into a description which made me frown. It was recondite and extraordinarily complex, filled with arcane words, and made little sense even to me, who ought in the nature of things to have known what he was talking about. I felt the whisper of unease. The Emperor waved all that aside brusquely.

  “Suffice it that my son-in-law has succeeded in his task. I will have sums set aside for the building of fliers. Indeed, if all we hear out of Hamal is half true, we shall have need of them.”

  “I do not believe it, Majister,” spoke Kov Lykon. “I am not at all persuaded that Hamal means us mischief. Their quarrel is with the countries of Pandahem. And we of Vallia should welcome anyone who can ruin the Pandahem.”

  The growl of assent saddened me. Vallia and Pandahem were rivals on the outer oceans of Kregen. That rivalry seemed stupid, wasteful, and altogether ugly to me. I had friends in Bormark, a Kovnate of Tomboram, a kingdom in Pandahem.

  “You may stake out a ponsho for a leem,” I said, somewhat heavily. “That does not prevent the leem from eating you after he has finished the ponsho.”

  Seg at my elbow quaffed off his Gremivoh. I knew what he was thinking: by the time the leem was halfway through crunching up the ponsho Seg’s superb longbow would have feathered the devil of a leem like a pincushion. But they all took my meaning. I was finding the importance of talking at an oblique angle to the direct statement, in dealing with these people around the Emperor. As a one-time first lieutenant of a seventy-four on the oceans of Earth I had been used to belting out my orders and seeing that the hands jumped to it, or there’d be a few red-checked shirts at the gratings. Now, as I had discovered, the soft approach often worked better at this level of statecraft. Not that either Lykon Crimahan or Natyzha Famphreon much cared for the soft approach; they employed it in the same fashion I did.

  These two eyed the Emperor. They no doubt fancied themselves laboring under the enormous disadvantage of not being related to the Emperor or his daughter, whereas I was the old devil’s son-in-law. Little did they know of the true situation at that time if they thought my marriage to his daughter had softened him to me! He tolerated me — was indeed more than a little afraid of me, as I well knew — yet the affection he could give was stunted and could only flower where his grandchildren were involved.

  There was a great deal of further conversation, in which I caught the anger against me more clearly than ever. The fact that I was a barbarian clansman from the Great Plains of Segesthes, as well as being Lord of Strombor, was held against me with as much venom as my marriage to the Emperor’s daughter and my schemes to create friendship with Pandahem. Crimahan and the dowager Kovneva argued vehemently against squandering money on my crazy fliers. Since Hamal had begun her war against Pandahem they had refused to sell us vollers. Hyrklana was even selling vollers to Hamal. Queen Fahia of Hyrklana, that fat and evil lady, had trouble with her flier factories, and I knew there were men in Hyrklana who burned her manufactories and sought to topple her from the throne. Yet Hamal insisted she sell to them. No, we had to go on as I had planned. The only nit in the fleece was this puzzling attitude of San Evold. What in the name of Zair was he up to?

  The answer came like a thunderbolt when I got him alone in the laboratory after all the others went back to the Chavonth Chamber to carry on the drinking and the discussions.

  “My Prince! I am desolate!”

  I saw — or thought I saw.

  “You fixed it, Evold! The squish steam was not true cayferm so you used another silver box — a genuine one from Hamal!”

  He shook his head, holding out his hands, palm up, and then he sneezed. Spluttering, he said, “Not so, Prince, not so.”

  “Well, spit it out, Evold!”

  “When the steam condensed I began to wonder if the water could have anything to do with the secret at all. What was left in the box apart from water? Air!”

  “Ordinary air, from this damned laboratory of yours.”

  He beckoned me over to an apparatus on a low lenken table.

  Ornol, his assistant, hobbled in. Ornol had fallen into a Valkan canal and before they’d fished him out he’d drunk some of the canal water. He had not died, but he’d never be able to walk properly again. His left leg, in some mysterious reaction to the poison in the canal water, had shrunk and become almost useless. Now Ornol, a cheerful fellow with a shock of lank yellow hair that was pulled back from his forehead and streamed down over his shoulders, limped forward and set up the amphora, boxes, and tubing.

  “See, Prince! With this tube I draw off what was left in the box after the steam condensed . . .”

  I knew of this strange non-substance called vacuum, but I hesitated to mention it. I had an idea that the box would collapse, for it was of exceedingly thin metal, tinned, as I have said. I grunted and Evold went on, excited by his work.

  “The next time I collected the steam in this amphora, inverted it, and drew off what was there through this pipe. It must, my Prince, be the true cayferm!”

  In that he was wrong, but we were both engrossed now and so I sniffed. There was the scent of ripe squishes. He had been unable to get to me through all the ceremony and knowing the urgency of the work had gone ahead alone. I did not fault him in this. Instead I said, “So it does work!”

  “Aye, my Prince. And yet there is a strange discrepancy in the action. It does not operate as the others do.”

  I heard a shout from the long hall of the images.

  “Dray! The Emperor is waiting.”

  If I did not care for my skin, Seg Segutorio, the Kov of Falinur, most certainly did.

  “Two murs, Seg, and I am with you.” Then, to Evold: “Explain!”

  “I have placed the new boxes in their correct positions in the orbits taken from a flier.” These circles of sturm-wood, their bearings of balass and bronze, revolved intricately and so carried the silver boxes into different aspects with each other. By these movements the upward and forward directions of the flier were controlled, as the backward and downward.

  “Hurry!”

  “Their reactions are different. There is no directional control . . .”

  I kept my face impassive. “You mean these boxes — our boxes — will only rise in the air? You cannot make them move forward?”

  He nodded, and his lumpy nose glowed in the samphron-oil lamps’ gleam. “That is so, my Prince.”

  “By the disgusting, worm-eaten kidneys of Makki-Grodno!” I was furious. All the work, all the pain, all the indignity — only to be rewarded with half the answer at the end!

  “Very well. Have supplies made up. I will talk with Erdgar the Shipwright. We must change the plans again.”

  “But, my Prince—”

  “Dray!”

  “Do it, Evold!”

  “Yes, my Prince.”

  I went out, my long white robe swirling, feeling thoroughly annoyed.

  All my pretty schemes were falling in ruins around my head. There were a few farsighted men of Vallia who could see what the future portended, could understand that the insane ambitions of Queen Thyllis of Hamal would not be slaked when all of Pandahem lay under the sway of her iron legions. But for every such one there were a hundred, no, a thousand, who could not see. These proud men of Vallia put store in their great galleons, in the mercenaries their gold could buy. These men would never see — let alone acknowledge — that Vallia might be threatened by any other country or empire.

  Now would not be the time to tell the Emperor the true situation. I would not tell him I could build fliers that would rise in the air but would not fly forward or backward!

  Later, when I had him alone with Delia, then would be the time to broach the subject. Such were the powers of nepotism already swaying me. I have said earlier that nepotism in theory is loathsome, but in practice it often works. Without it and its concurrent corrupt practices of selection and advancement Ne
lson would never have risen to command at Trafalgar. That it had kept me as a mere lieutenant was the reverse of the coin.

  The drinking and argument were well underway when I returned to the Chavonth Chamber, but my heart was not in them.

  And now I must tell you of an occurrence which at the time struck me as singular, and the answer to which was not vouchsafed me for many a long season. I will keep the account brief. Suffice it to say that it began with Jiktar Exand informing me that he had unearthed a certain man who swore by Diproo the Nimble-Fingered.

  Those of you who remember Nath the Thief from Zenicce, who had assisted my wonderful clansmen in the rain, and ever since swaggered a little as he remembered those golden days, will recall that Diproo the Nimble-Fingered was that saint or deity revered by the fraternity of thieves. Where there is portable property not chained down there will be thieves, I think, until the spirit in men is changed.

  Here one must draw a distinction between those of the fraternity who pocket portable property and those who reive away a whole community and those who, like Korf Aighos of the Blue Mountains, look upon legitimate loot as their property anyway. So, excusing myself and telling Delia this was to do with the stikitches and to inform her father as discreetly as possible why I absented myself from his august presence, I went down with Jiktar Exand.

  Seg Segutorio, the Kov of Falinur, accompanied me.

  He, too, had not welcomed Erithor’s rendering of The Lament for Valinur Fallen, although conceding the greatness of the song and its content, and notwithstanding that his Kovnate of Falinur lies in Vallia, whereas Valinur is a ruggedly beautiful area of northern Valka south of the stretch of ocean containing the Penal Islands. As well, further north, rises the island of Jynaratha where once I had been taken up in a blue radiance by the Scorpion,taken away from all this grandeur and pomp and power and brought to a proper understanding of my role on Kregen. And, too, north of Jynaratha lies the island of Zamra, of which I am Kov.