The Suns of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #2]

by Alan Burt Akers

  “A message must be got back to Vallia as soon as is practicable,” said Tharu. “Then the Princess Majestrix may graciously consent to recalling all the hundreds of other envoys she has sent chasing all over the world in search of you."

  I didn't much care for his tone.

  I saw Vomanus casting an anxious look between us, and as I was conscious of my position vis-à-vis Vallia, I thought it expedient to say nothing. I told Nath and Zolta to take care of Vomanus: I thought he was a friend.

  The coldness of Tharu of Vindelka's attitude quickly made itself understandable as I talked with the Vallians. There, as everywhere, it seemed, intrigues flourished. There were parties of various shades of political opinion, for religion in Vallia was undergoing some kind of psychic upheaval and no one seemed anxious to talk on the subject, and the emperor was acting with his usual autocratic hauteur. I would have to face that man, Delia's father, and tell him that I intended to marry his daughter no matter what he said or did. Tharu raged with anger that his party had not made the vital match with Delia, and he was forced to bottle all that frustrated resentment, for he acted under the orders, as he put it, of the Majestrix that no man may disobey. At that Vomanus pointed out that many men did disobey, and Tharu retired into that hard cold shell. He didn't like me. He considered not only had he lost the chance to marry off his favorite son or nephew to Delia but that Delia was marrying far below her station.

  He was right, of course.

  A broad ship had been found by Shallan, my agent, that was sailing to Pattelonia with supplies for the upcoming expedition. I had a nasty interview with Zo, the king, and quite unable to explain why I was suddenly leaving my command, Sanurkazz, and him, I went out in what was in reality disgrace. It did not matter. I was shaking the water of the inner sea from my boots.

  I will not dwell on the interview with Mayfwy. She had heard the news and had been crying, but she dried her tears and put up a brave front. I kissed her gently, kissed Fwymay, who was turning into a beauty like her mother, clasped hands with young Zorg.

  The problem of Harknel of High Heysh I must, perforce, leave unfinished. My natural inclinations after his last attempt to kill me on the jetty had been to take my men, march to his villa and burn it to the ground, and to hell with the high admiral and Zo, the king. Those jolly fat men of the mobiles would no doubt have gathered round, bottles in hand, and might conceivably have helped toss a torch or two.

  But I could not do it. I could not risk a vile retribution from Harknel upon Felteraz. Felteraz was important. Very. I had to leave all this ferment in mid-boil. But I was glad to go. I understood what canker had been eating away at me as I went corsairing on the Eye of the World.

  Nath and Zolta were a problem—a pair of problems.

  I asked them to stay with Mayfwy. She would have need of their long swords.

  “What, Stylor? Leave you now, our oar comrade! Never!"

  Tharu of Vindelka grumbled, but agreed that there would be room on the airboat for the two. Vomanus was openly delighted.

  “Anyway,” said Zolta, “the Krozairs will never let harm befall Felteraz. And the king will also protect the citadel, for it holds his eastern flank. Do not fret, old vosk head."

  My good-bye to Pur Zazz, the Grand Archbold of the Krozairs of Zy was formal, and then warmly fraternal. He did not seem at all perturbed that I was traveling better than a thousand dwaburs away.

  “When the Krozairs have need of you, Pur Dray, and the brothers receive the summons, no matter where you are, I know you will come."

  I gripped the hilt of my long sword. I nodded. It was true.

  “You will be traveling beyond Proconia, which commands all the eastern seaboard of the Eye of the World and extends her varied powers as far to the east as The Stratemsk. Those mountains are said to have no summits, they extend clear to the orange glory of Zim, and form a pathway for the spirit to the majesty of Zair.” He smiled and poured me more wine. “That is nonsense, of course, Pur Dray. But it tells eloquently of the fear and veneration in which men hold the Mountains of The Stratemsk."

  I was aware, of course, that educated men knew that both the green and the red suns were suns and not thinking beings. But many of the illiterate folk of all shades of opinion held that the suns in their majesties were entities in their own rights quite apart from being the abode of the deities of Grodno and Zair. Astronomy was a strange art, on Kregen, twisted by its special circumstances into byways unknown to astronomers on Earth. The astrological lore and amazingly accurate predictions achieved by the wizards of Loh astonished even me at a later date.

  “Over the mountains you are going where no man can say.” Pur Zazz was as cultured and refined and intelligent a man as the inner sea might produce. Now he said: “Men say that beyond the mountains, in the hostile territory, there are whole tribes who fly on the backs of great beasts of the air.” He smiled at me again, not ironically, but with the seriousness these subjects merited in an oar-powered geography. “I would welcome news, Pur Dray, of your adventures, and the sights you encounter."

  “I will regard that as a first charge upon me, Pur Zazz."

  When I left him, straight and commanding in his white tunic and apron, with that blazing emblem of the hubless wheel within the circle upon his breast, and the long sword belted in the fighting-man's way at his side, I half knew, then, I would never see him again.

  “Remberee, Pur Dray."

  “Remberee, Pur Zazz."

  Saying good-bye to Zenkiren was not as easy. But I told him that a message to Strombor would always find me, and my vows to return would remain for as long as I lived.

  I did not say that if the Star Lords or the Savanti decided otherwise I might not be in a position to return.

  “Remberee, Pur Dray, Lord of Strombor."

  “Remberee, Pur Zenkiren."

  We clasped hands the final time, and I went down to my barge.

  Nath and Zolta, very subdued, saw to getting us under way.

  The hurt looks on the faces of my friends, looks they had tried to conceal, would haunt me for a very long time to come.

  Two men had arrived from another world, another place across the outer oceans, mysterious and strange and with nothing to do with the Eye of the World, and I had upped and run panting like a dog running to its master. Who was this strange remote Princess Majestrix who called the foremost corsair captain of the inner sea? This is what they were saying.

  But—they did not know Delia, my Delia of Delphond.

  * * * *

  The broad ship sailed like a bathtub. I endured. I would far rather have preferred to make this little voyage into seas I had never scoured before aboard a swifter, but I was no longer in the employment of the king, no longer in his service.

  The Magdaggian caught us as the twin suns, very close together, were sinking in the west and setting long shadows across the placid sea. She pulled toward us, all oars in neat parallel lines, churning the sea, and we could not escape.

  “By Zantristar!” I yelled, hauling out my long sword. “They won't take us without a fight!"

  The sailors were running, milling. Nath and Zolta, their long swords flaming brands in the dying light, tried to beat them into a resistance. But the merchantman stood no chance. She carried perhaps thirty crew, with little stomach for a fight they knew they could not win. They were launching a longboat and clearly they anticipated rowing to a nearby island, where we had intended to lay up for the night, and from which the Magdag corsair, lying in wait, had pulled with such sudden ferocity.

  “My orders, from the Princess Majestrix herself,” Tharu told me in his flat voice, “are to bring you safely back to Vallia. Put up your sword."

  “You fool!” I said. “I am Pur Dray, the Lord of Strombor, the man the heretics from Magdag will give most to have in their clutches. There is no captivity for me!"

  “It is a fight you cannot win,” said Vomanus. He was fingering his rapier, and the look on his lean reckless face told me he woul
d dearly love to join in.

  “We are neutral.” Tharu spoke impatiently, abruptly. “The barbarians from Magdag would not dare to harm us. They may kill all their enemies from Sanurkazz, but they will not touch me, nor Vomanus here—nor you, Dray Prescot."

  “Why?"

  The galley's long bronze ram curled the seas away in a long creaming bow wave that roiled down her sides where her oars flashed down and up, down and up, like the white wings of a gull. She was a hundred-and-twentyswifter, double-banked, fast. I could see the men on her beak ready to board us and others at her bow varters. Her sails had been furled, but her single mast had not been struck.

  Tharu of Vindelka moved to the rail so that I turned to face him. Nath and Zolta below were frantic in their despairing efforts to rouse the crew. Vomanus walked quietly aft. The longboat was in the water and an oar splintered against the broad ship's side in the panicky haste.

  “They will not take you, Dray Prescot."

  “Why? What will it matter to them that I know the Princess Delia of Delphond? That my every thought is of her? I have never seen Delphond, Tharu, nor the Blue Mountains. But I regard them as my home."

  He let that square, hard face of his relax. I did not think he was smiling.

  “My duty is clear, Dray Prescot, who is intended to be Prince of Delphond.” A grimace clouded his face with his inner resentments. “Rather, I think you had best be a Chuktar—no, on reflection, the dignity of a Kov is better suited. It will impress the Magdaggians more. I am, you should know, a Kov myself, although of a somewhat more ancient lineage."

  I stared at him. I as yet did not know quite what he was talking about or where he was driving. Then I heard a light scrape of foot on the deck to my rear. I am quick. The blow almost missed. But it sledged down on the back of my head and dazed me and drove me down, and the second blow put out the lights.

  When I regained consciousness I was aboard a Magdag swifter and I was dressed in the buff coat and black boots of a Vallian, a rapier swinging at my side was complemented by a dagger, and I was, so I gathered, an honored guest of Magdag. My name, I was told by Tharu, was Drak, the Kov of Delphond.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Princess Susheeng meets Drak, Kov of Delphond

  Because the vessels of the inner sea almost invariably put either into port or were dragged up onto a convenient beach at night they were seldom provided with bunks or hammocks. I was lying on a kind of hard wooden settle covered with a ponsho fleece dyed green.

  Green.

  It is difficult for me, even now, to recollect anything coherent out of my thoughts then.

  Suffice it to say that I simply lay there for a space while the whirling thoughts crowded, mocking and vicious, through my still-dazed head. My skull rang with the blow.

  Tharu, Kov of Vindelka, leaned over me so that his stiff beard bristled against my cheek.

  “Remember who you are, Drak, Kov of Delphond! It is our heads as well as yours that depend on your memory."

  “I have a good memory,” I said. I spoke dryly. I was thinking of Nath and Zolta. “I remember faces and names and what people say."

  “Good."

  He straightened up and I could see a little of the cabin, that of the first lieutenant as I judged, having some skill in reading the infinitesimal touches that mark rank from rank upon the sea—any sea—and despising the lot of them.

  “Wait.” I caught his sleeve. He thought I wanted assistance to rise and began to draw haughtily away, but I looked him in the eye. Vomanus came into view, his lively face now sadly apprehensive. “Tharu—Delphond I understand, and Kov, because you told me. But Drak? Where did that come from?"

  Tharu's square face darkened and he cast a malevolent glance up toward Vomanus.

  Vomanus said: “I called you that, Dray—ah, Drak—as the first name that popped into my head."

  “Once this young fool had named you, I could do nothing less than accept it. The Magdaggians are not fools."

  It seemed that Vomanus was lying, judging by his face.

  Tharu went on speaking as I let him go and levered myself up. My head rang like those bells of Beng-Kishi.

  “Drak was the name of the emperor's father when he ascended the throne. Also it is the name of a being half-legendary, half-historical, part human, part god, that we may read of in the old myths, those from the Canticles of the Rose City, at least three thousand years old.” He spoke impatiently, a cultured man telling a peasant.

  Well, and wasn't he right?

  I stood up.

  Beng-Kishi clanged a trifle less discordantly.

  “You've done it now,” I told them. “If these devils from Magdag find out who I am, they'll fry you over a fire, chip you into kindling, and feed you to the chanks.” Vomanus looked a trifle sick. Mention of the chanks, the sharks of the seas of Kregen, made me think of Nath and Zolta again.

  “We saw them pulling for the shore in the longboat,” said Vomanus, swallowing.

  “They either drowned or were saved,” said Tharu. “It is no matter. They were unimportant."

  He made a mistake, saying that to me, their oar comrade.

  I brushed past him and, ducking my head, went out onto the deck. We were drawn up in the lee of the island; fires blazed as the watches kept a vigilant lookout. The stars of the Kregan night sky blazed down, forming those convoluted patterns the wizards of Loh can read and understand, or so they say. A cooling breeze blew and stirred the leaves ashore. Sentries stood on the quarterdeck and I caught the flash of gold as an officer moved. Only two of the lesser moons were up, and they would soon be gone in their helter-skelter hurtling around the planet.

  The thought of conversation with a man of Magdag was nauseating to me. I looked hungrily out to the shore. Perhaps Nath and Zolta were out there, waiting to pounce. But what chance would we stand, three against a swifter crew? I knew an arrow would feather into me if I dived overboard; I decided that I would chance that. I would dive and swim to the island, and the devil take the chanks. If I was to walk the length of the central gangway and try to jump down to the beach I would be stopped. I knew the habits of Magdag captains, as I knew those of Sanurkazz. I knew what I would do were I the swifter captain.

  Vomanus joined me, and then a Magdaggian Hikdar, who turned out to be the man whose cabin we had taken. He didn't seem to show his annoyance. I made an excuse, and went below again. The stink of the slaves and their eternal and infernal moaning and clanking of shackles and fetters made me irritable.

  I believe, now, looking back, that I had not lost my nerve. There have been times in my life when I have followed a course of action that the casual onlooker would feel smacks of cowardice. I answer to no one, of course, for my actions—except to Delia. If I got myself killed, Delia would be alone, and more and more I was coming to the conclusion that she would need me by her side in the days to come. There were great forces moving implacably and with incredible cunning, somewhere...

  We sailed with the rising sun and headed west.

  The news was bad. Pattelonia, the city of the Proconia where the flier had been left, had been raided and left in flames. The men of Sanurkazz had suffered a defeat. This swifter, My Lady of Garles, a five-five-hundred-and-twentyswifter, had sustained some damage and lost some oarsmen. She had been entrusted with dispatches for the admiralty in Magdag and her smart capture of the old broad ship on which we had been traveling had come as a pleasant diversionary tidbit. Tharu, bowing to the inevitable, had consented to be taken back to Magdag. Without a flier, travel across The Stratemsk and over the hostile lands beyond to the place where we could pick up a ship for Vallia, Port Tavetus, was impossible. Ergo, we must go to Magdag and wait for a ship from Vallia, which was due, so Tharu told me, sometime soon.

  The impression I gained was that Tharu, Kov or not, was mighty grateful not to have to fly back over The Stratemsk and that weary length of hostile territory to the Vallian empire port city. The realization made me tremble. I ackn
owledged something I had not even allowed myself to think from the moment I had arrived, naked and despairing, on the beach of that Portuguese shore.

  I felt a profound sense of thankfulness and gratitude. My Delia still loved me! How often I had almost allowed myself to think that she had forgotten me! I knew how unworthy I was, and how I had dismayed and disappointed her in our brief dealings. But she had not forgotten me. She had summoned the strength of her island empire, the only important area of land on this planet that was under the sway of one government, to search for me and seek me out and bring me home to her. Also I felt a strange kind of humbleness in my pride. How puffed up I was, how vaunting in my ambitions, how comical in my aspirations!

  Delia's orders had sent this harsh, proud noble, the Kov of Vindelka, to seek me, had caused him to fly over uncharted realms of savages and mythical beings, to risk a neck he must consider the next most-important neck in the whole world. I had him summed up now. He was a king's man. In this case, an emperor's man. For the emperor of Vallia he had an obsessive drive to duty, and that extended to the emperor's daughter, and, faute de mieux, to the daughter's betrothed, much though he might dislike and feel contempt for her choice.

  If I had been a vain man, a proud man in the evil sense of pride, how I would have rocked with glee!

  As it was, and I would ask you to believe me in this, I felt like falling to my knees and thanking the god of my childhood, and also throw in a kind word or two to Zair, the red-sun deity, just to be on the safe side. With that comically impious thought I knew that I was finding my old self again.

  While medicine and surgery and knowledge of the proper care for the sick were in a state far advanced of what I had been used to on Earth, the doctors of Kregen were a bunch one did well to give a wide berth to. They had not, and still have not, reached anywhere near the recent achievements of Earthly medicine and surgery—in the matter of heart transplants, for instance. They leaned heavily on herbal drugs, which could obtain seemingly miraculous cures, and their surgery also had developed techniques of acupuncture I found nothing short of miraculous. It was nothing for a patient undergoing a serious operation with his head, or his insides, exposed to the knife—his earlobes or the web between his thumb and first finger quilted with needles—to be given a mouthful of palines to munch, and to keep up a bright conversation with the surgeon. I admit, the first time I saw that, I had a vivid mental picture of the cockpits I was used to, with the aprons caked with blood, their saws, their tubs of boiling tar.