All in all, as I sweated at my oar with seven oarsmen around me, I fancied the swordships were as good a bargain a navy might get from the always unsatisfactory attempt to oar a sailing vessel, or sail a galley.
Their underwater lines were nowhere as fine as a swifter's and they were deeper in draft, which made them sea cows to row. But they were still long, lean, low, and they were cranky and dangerous and wet and hideously uncomfortable.
Every time I hauled the oar I cursed King Nemo. To liken him to a zhantil was a ludicrous slander on a noble beast; if anything, Nemo was a leem—or a cramph.
This swordship Nemo boasted three masts, unlike most of the pirate galleys I had previously encountered, and the captain seemed to me to be as unhandy a sailor as any I had shipped with and always preferred to use his oars. This made life hard. We sailed north and west up along the island chain, calling in at various of the port fortresses Tomboram maintained there. We did not sight a single pirate swordship.
We saw three scraps of sail on a bright day of fine visibility; but we sheered away and later the buzz went around the slave deck that the swordships had been from The Bloody Menaham. They would have been a relief to me. Mind you, I was well aware of the horror and the shambles of the rowing benches during a fight, but my mood was black and vicious and by this time I was ready to tear the throat out of a leem with my bare hands.
Nemo Zhantil Faril Opaz got her comeuppance at last in a way that was so ridiculous that every time I thought about it afterward I cursed in delighted wonder.
We had touched in at an island that Valka, a captured Vallian and a man who appealed to me and to whom I had been closest drawn of all those oar comrades, said was deserted. A party was about to go ashore for water when, peering through the oar-port I saw a sight that created, at once, a great shout of surprise and admiration and lust all over the swordship.
Onto the beach dashed a horde of half-naked girls.
They danced down to the water's edge and they held out their hands to the swordship in supplication. Many and various were the oaths that floated fruitily into the hot air.
“By Likshu the Treacherous!” said a yellow Chulik farther along on our oar. “Were I not held by these chains!"
We mocked him. “Were any of us not held by these chains, oh mighty Chulik!"
“Mother Zinzu the Blessed!” rang a clear call from somewhere farther along the rowing deck, at which I felt all that old pang of remembrance. Many and varied, the oaths, fruity and blasphemous and calling on gods and demons and heroes from a score or more of different cultures. But we were slaves, naked and chained, filthy and mop-beaded, bristling with hair and vermin. That rout of beautiful naked girls was not for us.
The captain and the crew brought not water from the island but rich wine in great round-bellied amphorae. The girls, clad in their strings of flowers and feathers, laughed and came out to the swordship as the twin suns sank in an opaz glory. We slaves crouched on our rowing benches and glowered and fed on crusts, an onion each, and a strip of old cheese like lenk. The Maiden with the Many Smiles rose before the suns had gone. A weird clashing of colors poured over the swordship. We slaves could imagine what was happening in the aftercastle and the forecastle now; we could hear the peals of silvery laughter and the great gusts of sailor mirth.
And then, gradually, the sounds quieted down. We heard a shrill scream, and then another, fainter. Silence dropped on the swordship. We did not even hear the watch calling the turning of the sandglass.
Valka said to me, “Something is amiss.” He roused the Gon who was nearest the gangway, an unpopular position as he was nearest the lash of the whip-deldar. “Hey, dom. What's afoot?"
The Gon's great bristling, malodorous thatch of bone-white hair lifted. Gons habitually shave their heads skull bare. If that is because they feel shame over a mop of white hair, one must sympathize with their own foolish beliefs. As it was, this Gon experienced deep shame over his unshaven head.
“Let be, Valka. I want to sleep, and dream of those women."
“Look aft, you hairy nit! Is the watch by the lamp?"
The Gon stretched. “The lamp is not lit."
“By Vox!” Valka galvanized himself into instant action. “This is the one night...” He began to tear at his chains, desperately, until his nails tore and the blood poured forth.
So far I had found no implement with which to file through the iron chains, as we had done in Grace of Grodno when Zorg, Nath, Zolta, and I planned escape. Yet Valka was right. This one night was our chance! But, through the most simple and elementary precautions of the crew, nothing convenient for a slave to rub through his chains lay handily about the deck. We might all have lost our reason, then, tearing at our fetters and trying to keep silent besides. Already the unlit lamp proved the routine of the swordship had been altered, and when we were not hosed down for the night we knew beyond doubt that the crew was otherwise engaged—and in our lascivious dreams how wrong we were!
For—in the lambent pink floods of moonlight a girl stepped up onto the central gangway. Every head turned to look—but there were no cries of admiration or lust or, even, of wonder.
In absolute silence that slip of a girl walked all the way along the central gangway, from aft forward, half-naked, her limbs gleaming pink in the moonglow, swinging her burden lightly from one little fist. She held that burden by its hair. Sightless eyes glared out upon the rowing benches.
From the severed neck from which still strips of gristle and flesh dangled dropped the dark blood. Drop by drop as she walked the blood fell upon the gangway.
No chance guided her choice of head thus to parade.
Every oar-slave recognized that hated face.
The uncanny contrast between that lithe slip of a girl, all gleaming beautiful and pink in the streaming moonlight, and that hideous severed head, dropping its blood as she walked so gracefully along, with a swing of her hips, laughing, affected every single one of us profoundly.
Not a man so much as moved. No one spoke. Every eye fixed on her and her burden, glaring like the jungle denizens stare upon their prey.
Drop by drop the blood fell upon the planks of the gangway.
Every oar-slave recognized that hated face. In a deep and scarcely comprehending silence we watched the girl carry the head along, laughing, swinging her hideous burden.
We knew that dead face.
It was the face of the chief whip-deldar.
* * *
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Viridia the Render
We were given the usual alternatives.
Given them, I do not believe a single oar-slave took the choice that would see his carcass hurled over the side and feathered with arrows in sport.
What others considered as an omen I took, also, I confess, as some kind of pointer to the future, for all the seven moons of Kregen floated in the night sky above as Viridia spoke to us.
“Never disdain the power of women,” said Viridia. “For my fighting-girls have laid the whole crew of this King's Swordship low, and have taken her, and now she is ours."
I could not see Viridia very clearly, for the stump end of a varter interposed its ratchets and its winding windlasses and loosing mechanism between, so that I caught only fragmentary glimpses of her as she moved about, gesticulating. Seeing her like that, however, meant that I immediately recognized that gaudy, pendulous, barbaric figure as the one I had seen strutting the quarterdeck of the swordship when Dram Constant had been destroyed, and when I had indulged in that pleasurable contest with the blue-feathering bowman of Erthyrdrin.
Her girls had successfully seduced the swordship's crew, poured them drugged wine, and seen them off to the Ice Floes of Sicce. To me, the masterstroke of psychology had been to parade the severed head of the man whom we slaves would recognize immediately as the instrument of our daily torture. Now we were members of the pirate band of Viridia. I hesitate, even now, and remembering her as I do, to call her a lady pirate. Viridia was no lady.
She was a woman, wild, free, gross, sudden, a woman who always—or, nearly always, as you will hear—kept herself in complete control. She knew what she wanted, she knew how to go about getting it, and she did what was necessary; and if the blood reeked along the blades of her people, both women and men, halflings and beast-men, then that was the price she was prepared to have them pay.
Her control was normally such that when she indulged in her killing frenzies and heads rolled one who knew her could almost judge to the mur when she would snap out of it.
The pirates who infested these islands where through the geography of the region there would of necessity be heavy maritime traffic did not employ slaves to tug their oars. Through this area passed the commercial traffic from Pandahem and Loh, north and south, east and west. Many armadas tried to avoid the area as the admiral of the armada in which Captain Alkers’ Dram Constant had sailed had attempted, and many ships simply avoided the islands altogether, as Tandy, the Hoboling, had so bitterly informed us; but, despite all that, the needs and demands of cities and peoples meant that ships must sail these seas. Viridia was only one of a great host of pirate chiefs. And, she was not the only woman pirate chief.
Everyone has heard of the famous women pirates of our own Earth. Lady Killigrew, Anne Bonney, and Mary Read all made the headlines of their day. Anne Bonney, who deserted her husband for John Rackam, the notorious pirate Calico Jack, was powerful enough as a lady pirate to make Calico Jack take second place in the fighting and boarding and arguments that are inseparable from a pirate's life. Mary Read, already a girl who had led an adventurous life in that she had fought as a soldier in Flanders by the side of her husband, was captured by Calico Jack. The joke was—at least by Kregen standards—that when the pirates were taken they were all drunk with the exception of the two women, who alone attempted to fight off the British warship. A ray of light does exist to alleviate the story in that both women, although sentenced to death, were not hanged and did escape Execution Dock.
“We carry no passengers,” Viridia informed us. At her back stood four immense fellows, all rolling muscle and corded thews, bull-necked, their heads jutting forward so that the two stumpy but formidable horns they carried on their foreheads could jab in with ferocious power at an opponent's eyes. They had two arms and legs, massive and bulky, it is true, and their bodies were recognizable human torsos and stomachs, plated with muscle. They wore the gaudy clothes of the pirate trade. They also carried short swords of a heavier pattern than the merely cut-down rapiers often found among the pirates.
Rapiers and daggers also swung from their belts.
These were Womoxes. As I have mentioned previously, there are many and various peoples inhabiting Kregen beneath Antares, and I give some idea of any individual people, either halfling or human, when they come onto the stage of my narrative. By this time in my sojourn on Kregen I had seen many strange and marvelous peoples of whom I have given no idea here simply because I did not personally come into contact with a representative of them. When I did—then I describe them, as I believe to the benefit of your understanding. I had not previously encountered the Womoxes. They came from one of the islands off the coast of Vallia. They are a people at once fierce, independent, not overly original—their native art is markedly copyist of another people on an adjoining island—and much given among the males to head-butting contests to decide who shall do what or who shall mate with which maidens. In all this they never, at least to me, suggested very much of the bovine.
Perhaps I could mention here that I believe that the many differing races and peoples of Kregen are not distributed over that marvelous globe by any laws of nature that are easily discernible as they are on our own Earth. I believe, further, that the races of Kregen have been arbitrarily placed in the locations of their origin. If this be the work of the Star Lords, as I have more than half a mind it is, then more remains to be learned of their dark and secret purposes than I, even now, fully comprehend. I do not think the Savanti had a hand in the locations of the populations of Kregen; but their task, as I know, is the amelioration of the lot of all peoples.
There have been many ups and downs in my life and in this present situation, because for the moment there was nothing else to do, I flung myself into the business of being a pirate aboard a swordship plundering along the Hoboling islands. We took Pandahem ships and ships of Loh. Sorry as I was for the people who suffered, I had worked out a theory that of the Pandahemic nations none could be construed as friendly to me except Tomboram, and of that country only, really, could I look for real friendship from Pando and Bormark. I was worried over that imp's handling of his people. I hoped Tilda and Inch would be able to hold in check his very natural desires to go for a fight and cut a fine figure and make a name for himself. War, as I have learned, is not a game.
The nations of Pandahem, always at loggerheads, were driven in part by economic rivalries, partly by the ambitions of their kings to become emperors of all Pandahem. They had the bitter example of Vallia to spur them on. Vallia might make a treaty of friendship with one nation of Pandahem, and another would ignore that and raid Vallian shipping, with the consequence that Vallia quickly lost patience with all Pandahem.
I had to make a stand against casual killing of captives.
“You are throwing money away!” I said to Viridia. I stood with my hands on my hips on the deck of a fine argenter of Walfarg we had just finished sacking. The frightened people left of her huddled by the break of the quarterdeck. I wore a loincloth of that brave scarlet I favor, and a rapier and dagger taken from a prize swung at my sides. Viridia came to the quarterdeck rail and leaned on it and looked down on me.
“Stand aside, Dray Prescot!"
So she knew my name. I thought that odd, among so many new recruits to the render's trade. A render is a pirate, and yet the name carries overtones associated closely with the swordships. She was looking down on me as I glared up. An odd expression crossed her face. She was a large woman, bulky, with muscles that could swing an ax with the best, and I had always thought of her as coarse, bloated, careless as to her dress and manners, oafish, almost. She looked different, now, as we glared at each other, eye to eye.
“Listen, Viridia. You intend to kill these wretched people and burn the argenter. How foolish!"
A murmur of surprise and shock went up from the gathered pirates. I motioned to them, calculatingly.
“By killing and burning you deprive your fellow renders of their fair share of the prize!"
She roared down, her dark hair flapping about her face, her blue eyes fairly blazing with wrath. “Have a care how you speak, Prescot! I am Viridia!"
“Aye! And you cheat your comrades!"
Viridia put out a hand to stay the automatic charging response of her chief Womox. He was a veritable giant, a good seven feet tall, and a formidable antagonist.
“Explain yourself, rast, before you die."
“If I am a rast, then what are you, Viridia the Render? Send the ship into port, sell her for good silver dhems, claim a ransom for these people in our power. They are cash and they stand upon cash! Can you not see that, Viridia the Render?"
Some of the men at my back set up a yell supporting me, seeing the cash in their hands already, and chief among them was Valka, my oar comrade from Vallia.
“Silence!” shouted Viridia. Once she had fought her way up to captaincy she had not experienced resistance to her slightest whim or order. The experience came as a novel one to her. She frowned. I could sympathize with her. The problems she had overcome were capable of being overcome, as she, no less than Anne Bonney and Mary Read, had demonstrated. Birth control is well-understood on Kregen where beliefs are taught that teach it is better to have two or three fine healthy children for whom parents can give what of food and clothing and shelter is necessary, than it is to have a whole squalling brood of poor, undernourished, half-naked infants for whom there is not sustenance enough. Ignorant and wrong-headed religious feeling receives short shrift
in these matters on Kregen, where what can clearly be seen to be so is taken as a guide. Because there are two suns in the sky images tend toward a dualism. Because unthought-out parenthood, selfish and cruel, can result in a family of misery, compassion and sympathy tend toward families of sizes where the children may receive all that is their due.
Now, no virgin but capable of love, unhampered, totally in command of her swordships, Viridia glared down on me and her knuckles whitened into skulls as she gripped the quarterdeck rail. In a second she could order me to be run through and tossed overboard. I would fight, of course, but there would be little of joy in that fight.
I had the impression that Valka, and one or two others, would fight with me.
“Why do you resist my wishes, Dray Prescot?"
“Because I know I am right and you are wrong."
Her broad face, tanned and strong, flinched with a muscle tremor beneath those blue eyes. “I do not take kindly to—"
“Do you want the value of this argenter and the ransoms of these prisoners, or do you want a heap of corpses and a pile of ashes, Viridia the Render?"
Valka shouted, “Dray Prescot speaks good sense."
The tenseness of the moment showed in the ridges muscling on the faces of the men gathered about, the way the Chuliks kept polishing their tusks, the Ochs twined their four upper limbs together, the Fristles kept stroking their fur. Viridia looked down on us and who of us could say how that mercurial brain of hers would decide to go—up or down in the scales of our judgment?
Swordships of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #4] Page 14
