The Suns of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #2]

by Alan Burt Akers

  So I did not have the slightest desire to consult a doctor when I began to feel a little of that impatient drive to go to Vallia making me feverish. Since that dip in the sacred pool of baptism in the River Zelph in far Aphrasöe I had never had a day's illness. I did not intend to succumb now.

  Pulling into Magdag was, as you may readily imagine, a disorienting experience for me, ex-Magdag galley slave.

  My first impression was that the walls did not rear as I remembered them. This came because of the low freeboard, a necessity on an efficient galley, bringing my oarsman's viewpoint down much below that where I now stood on the quarterdeck.

  Magdag reared her piles of stone heavily into the bright air. Gulls wheeled and shrieked, but with all my Krozair training I heard them only as croaking magbirds against the tuneful sounds of our own gulls in Sanurkazz. Flags and banners floated on the breeze. The twin suns shone mingled upon the smooth water. My Lady of Garles pulled steadily in past the outer breakwater, past the forts with their bristling varters, past the inner breakwater with the forts where always a Sacred Guard, composed on five days of the week of Chuliks and on the sixth of young and high-spirited Magdag nobles, were ready to vent their warrior-like high spirits on anything weak and unable to resist that might come their way. Many a fisherman went back to his quarters with a broken head and his fish baskets full of holes and cuts, having been used by the Magdag nobles for sword targets in their fun.

  We rounded to in an inner basin, one of the many harbors of Magdag into which I had never previously been.

  Vallia kept no consuls in the cities of the inner sea, presumably, I thought at the time, so as not to become embroiled in the politics of the area. The Vallians are above all, even above their warlike proclivities, a trading nation. But Tharu was quickly able to arrange accommodation for us, through a contact, in what I regarded as a senselessly luxurious palace.

  His comment was frosty.

  “You are now moving in areas somewhat removed from your usual purlieus.” I liked that word even when he used it, but I had gone past the period of wanting to bait this Tharu for all he said in his pompous aristocratic way. If all the nobles of Vallia were like him I was in for a boring or headily exciting time, depending on how much I was prepared to put up with them. “I am a Kov of Vallia—as are you, for my sins—and we demand style in our living. Anything less than this would be unthinkable; in itself it is barely good enough, as I have told Glycas in no uncertain terms."

  “Glycas?"

  We slaves of Magdag knew little of the upper crust “A most powerful force, a man who has the king's ear. We are renting this palace from him—” If he was about to say words to the effect that I should be careful how I comported myself in case I damaged the furnishings, he thought better of it.

  Vomanus had taken off his buff coat with a sigh of relief and now wore only a white silk shirt with his breeches and black boots, a shirt, however, whose overlong sleeves were wristed by a mass of ruffles which he liked to flourish up and down his brown and muscular arms as he gesticulated in his talk.

  “The place is well enough, Tharu,” he said. Tharu glared at him, but let the matter drop. We were all anxious to leave and return to Vallia, and soon news came that a Vallian ship had been signaled. I guessed the Todalpheme of Akhram would have a hand in that business.

  We passed the days in walking about the city, patronizing wineshops and taverns in the evening, watching the dancing girls and the various varieties of sports available. The girls were slaves, dancing girls clad in bangles, beads, and precious little else. They were totally unlike the girls who danced so gaily for us among the wagon circles of my Clansmen.

  I was back in the snuffle of slavery, with beasts half-human, half-animal for guards, and I didn't like any of it.

  I scarcely used the suite of rooms assigned to me in the palace rented from Glycas. When I had been taken unconscious aboard My Lady of Garles with a glib explanation, Tharu, with his accustomed harsh authority, had quickly persuaded the Magdag captain to take aboard our baggage also. Tharu's own iron-bound chests stood in his rooms. So it was that, with the exception of deviced clothing, I had all that I had brought from Sanurkazz—silks and furs, jewels, coins, weapons, my own long sword, and the coat of mail Mayfwy had had made for me. I could clearly see the danger these represented. They were soaked with the traditions of Zair. They would make me a marked man if discovered.

  So I had them hidden away beneath my bed, the three bronze-bound chests of lenken planks a nail in thickness. Then I took pains to explain to my Magdaggian hosts how I had picked up a long sword and a coat of mail as mementoes of a pleasant visit to their city, and when comments were made that the hauberk was unmistakably of Sanurkazzian cut I forced myself to laugh and said that no doubt this was the booty of a prize made to the greater glory of Grodno. That pleased those men of the green sun.

  Mind you, it was refreshing once more to stroll about with a long rapier at my side.

  Glycas was a dark-visaged man on the threshold of middle age, which on Kregen meant he must be turning a hundred or so, and his black hair was still crisp and fashionably cut, his hands and arms white, his fingers loaded with rings. But he was not a fop. His long sword was hilted plainly, with a bone grip that I, personally, would not have tolerated but which I knew was much favored on the inner sea. He was short and squarely built and he possessed a temper that had made him notorious. He was, truly, a dangerous man.

  His sister, the princess Susheeng—plus a score of other pretentious names denoting her exalted rank and the broad acres of her estates, the thousands of slaves she owned—was lithe, lovely, and dark-haired, with eyes that tried to devour me with amorous glances from the moment we met. I was forced to contrast her with the gay reckless simplicity of Mayfwy, and had to acknowledge the animal vitality of this woman, her burning gaze, the intensity of the passion with which she took anything she wanted. All her noble honorifics amused me, through their pomposity. I realized afresh how lightly my Delia carried all the ringing brave titles to which she was heir, how subtly and how surely, with what courtesy and quiet gravity—shot through with her own elfin irony at life—she fitted the role of Princess Majestrix of Vallia.

  The Princess Susheeng made a dead set at me. I was aware of this, and it annoyed me, through the complications that inevitably must ensue. Vomanus openly envied what he called my good fortune. Tharu, with a darker vision, contained his own resentment and annoyance.

  I told her, one day as we stood on the third-level ramparts overlooking one of the harbors that opened out below the palace in which we were lodging, that I was looking forward earnestly to returning home.

  “But, my Kov of Delphond, what has your vaulted Vallia to offer you that you cannot find in far greater quantity and quality here in Sacred Magdag?"

  I winced, covered that lapse, and said: “I am homesick, Susheeng. Surely you understand that?"

  With incongruous pride, she said: “I have traveled not for one single mur outside the lands of Magdag!"

  I made some empty reply. That a person would boast of that kind of chauvinism appalled me.

  “Well, Princess,” I said, and saying it realized how incautious I was, “I intend to return home as soon as possible."

  The woman nauseated me.

  I had my mind on other women. Put this Princess Susheeng in the starkness of the gray slave breechclout, teach her the humility that is the only sure path to serenity, and she would turn out well. Slaves had no chance to reach to anything beyond their slavery, except those who escaped physically, by running or by death, and the humility a slave learns is corrosive and corrupting; but this girl might profit from it, if she knew she was to learn by her experience.

  I wanted to travel to Vallia—and at once.

  She saw all that in me; she saw my utter rejection of her.

  The next day Vomanus and I were wandering through one of the high-class jewelry streets, a kind of open-air market, when we bumped into the Princess Sushee
ng with her body of retainers, blank-faced Chulik guards and a group of swaggering popinjay show-off Magdag nobility all fawning on her. She treated them all like dirt, of course.

  “And what is that trinket you are buying, Kov Drak?"

  She used the familiar tone of address to infuriate her attendants, of course.

  I held up the jewelry. It was a beautiful piece of cut chemzite, blazing in the suns’ light. It was work of Sanurkazz style and skill.

  “I think it a pleasant piece,” I said.

  “It is of Zair,” she said, her mouth drawn down. “It and all like it should be broken up and refashioned into more seemly work of Grodno."

  “Maybe. But it is here.” I forced myself to go on. “No doubt it is the booty of some successful swifter captain."

  She smiled at me. Her mouth was ripely red, a trifle too large, soft, and rapacious with overfed passion.

  “And is it for me, a parting gift, Kov Drak?"

  “No,” I said. I spoke too sharply. “I intend to take it to Vallia as a keepsake of the Eye of the World.” That was half of the truth, as you will readily perceive.

  She pouted, and laughed gaily, as at a joke, and made some flighty and, in truth, slighting, remark, so as to retain her composure before her toadies. Then she walked swiftly from the market to her sectrix, which she rode well enough, I grant you.

  I know, now, that that scene saved my life.

  That evening the Vallian ship was sighted rounding the point. She would tie up in Magdag this night. So far I had not set eyes on a ship of Vallia, for they were rare enough in the inner sea, tending to make armadas of their voyages to take advantage of the prevailing seasonal winds, and I had always been raiding when they had called at Sanurkazz. I had once tried to set course to intercept a Vallian I knew to be due off Isteria; however, for a reason that I did not then comprehend, I missed her.

  I looked forward to the encounter.

  Vomanus took himself off to the harbor to greet the Vallian captain, and then he was back cursing and swearing, to saddle up a sectrix and ride off to a more distant anchorage to which the Vallian vessel had unaccountably been assigned by the port captain. I shouted some jovial remark after him. I had wanted to ride myself, but Tharu had sternly vetoed that.

  “A Kov does not ride down to the jetty to greet the mere captain of a ship,” he said, and that was that.

  I had gathered that a Kov was what we on this Earth would call a duke; the information depressed me. I had often found that empty titles mean nothing, and that intermediary ranks are stifling and frustrating.

  There is a board game played a great deal on Kregen called Jikaida. As the name implies it has to do with combat. The squared board is, in shape, like an elongated chessboard, and with a touch of Halma about the moves, as one army of Jikaida men clash with the others. If you expect the colors of the men to be red and green, you are wrong. They are blue and yellow, or white and black. The red and the green, it seems, are reserved for real battle. So to take my mind off waiting, Tharu and I settled to a game of Jikaida.

  I make it a practice whenever it is practicable never to sit with my back to a door.

  When the door to our room smashed open and the mailed men burst in, their faces covered with red scarves, I jumped up. Tharu, whose back was to the door, was knocked flying across the table. Jikaida men went flying in a shower of blue and yellow. The table tangled my legs. My rapier was lying on the floor at my side, casually in reach but scabbarded—for this was a great city and who would expect attack within a palace?—and by the time I had the blade free a poniard stuck its tip into my throat and a single move would mean my instant death.

  At that moment I felt that I was growing old—I, Dray Prescot, who had bathed in the sacred pool of Aphrasöe and would live a thousand years!

  I was trussed up like a vosk and between two of the burly thugs was carried like a roll of carpet out and through a secret passage behind a full-length portrait of some arrogant Magdag swifter captain in the midst of a hypothetical destruction of a Sanurkazz fleet. Naturally, I had had no idea of the passage's existence. Far below I was carried out and flung into a dung cart which reminded me of the galley slaves’ benches. We bumped along cobbles. I had had no sight of my attackers. I could hear no sound from them. I was gagged, and so I did not expect to hear from Tharu.

  They threw me down in a stone cellar where green slime ran on the walls. I looked at their red scarves concealing their faces. Only their eyes, bright and quick, like rasts', shining at me over the red cloths, were visible.

  Afterward I learned I spent five days in that cellar, bound loosely but sufficiently to prevent escape, fed on slops, without exercise and with a bucket for toilet purposes, and with two men on guard at all times. Tharu was not with me.

  On the sixth day I was rescued. My guards stood up with a casual air as mailed men entered; then they stiffened and although I could not see their faces I could imagine the sudden terror there as they scrabbled to draw their weapons. The newcomers cut them down without mercy, even though the last man attempted to surrender. As he sank onto the floor, his blood oozing from the deep gash smashed through his mail, his killer snatched up the red scarf.

  He held it up, and spat on it.

  “See!” he cried. “It is the work of those vile heretics of Sanurkazz! The stinking vosks of Zair have done this—"

  He bent quickly and slashed my bonds free. Others of his men helped me rise. “But now you are safe, Kov of Delphond!"

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I return to the megaliths

  “My Lord Kov,” said Glycas to me, formally. “I make the most profound apologies. It is unthinkable that such indignities should happen to an honored guest in Magdag. But—” He spread his hands. His dark eyes were most bright upon me. “These are troublous times. The vermin of the red swarm everywhere—"

  “Drak should be thankful we saved his life,” said the Princess Susheeng. She lolled in a hammock-type chair of silk and fringing tassels of gold thread; one of her arms was thrown back over her head, drawing up her body into a sensuous curve. “Those sea-leem of Sanurkazz will all be destroyed and put down one day. But I am happy that we saved you from them, Drak."

  The high balcony overlooking the harbor received a cooling breeze for which we were grateful, the heat being excessive at this time. Magdag, being north of Sanurkazz, is somewhat cooler, but neither basks in the strong bracing breezes that sweep in over the Sunset Sea to cool Zenicce, far to the east. A long and powerful warm current, the so-called Zim-Stream, sweeps up from the south past the coasts of Donengil, the southernmost portion of Turismond. Driving in an arc toward the northeast it pushes in a clearly demarcated line of differently colored water through the Cyphren Sea between Turismond and Loh and so washes all the western and southern shores of Vallia. Its southern branch retains enough energy on occasions to reach Zenicce on the western coast of Segesthes.

  “I do thank you,” I said. Then, holding myself tightly under control, I said: “It seems they took everything I possess."

  Glycas nodded. “Everything you had with you. Strange things, I have no doubt."

  “From Vallia,” said Susheeng.

  I quivered alert.

  “Hardly any,” I said, offhandedly. “I have been collecting curios from the Eye of the World, artifacts of Magdag—and of Sanurkazz."

  “Ah—of course,” said Glycas, in a silky murmur I didn't trust.

  “Had your Vallian ship captain not taken his ship to so distant a berth, no doubt your gallant companion, Vomanus, would have been here.” Vomanus had been enraged to a purple fury when he had at last seen me safe. Tharu, that harsh, stern man, Kov of Vindelka, had not been seen since the attack. Everyone considered him to be dead. I felt that if he was not dead, then he might look upon that state as something to be desired if he had been sent to the rowing benches of a Magdag galley.

  “These stupid uprisings continue to occur,” Glycas said smoothly. “The
slaves on the buildings to the greater glory of Grodno seek to invoke the vile heretical worship of Zair, the misbegotten one. We shall make inquiries and punish the guilty."

  “And meanwhile?"

  The Princess Susheeng rose like a graceful and deadly leem from the hammock-chair. She smiled on me and her red lips were moistly sensuous. “Oh, we shall, of course, accept entire responsibility for you, my dear Drak, until another Vallian ship calls."

  “It will not be wise for you to continue on in this palace, alone,” said Glycas briskly. “We hope you will do us the honor of taking apartments in our own palace—it is the Emerald Eye Palace, after all. Only the king, above whom no man dare seek to lift himself, has a finer palace in all Magdag."

  “So be it,” I said, accepting the inevitable. Then I had the wit to add: “I thank you most sincerely."

  So it was that I moved in with Glycas and his rapacious sister Susheeng into the Emerald Eye Palace. The place was large, ornate, not particularly comfortable, noisy—and it had been built with slave labor.

  At every opportunity I would clear out of the place and stroll about the city. Although Vallia was my objective, I still looked at the defenses of the city with the eye of a raiding Krozair from Sanurkazz. Glycas had insisted that I take with me an escort of half a dozen Chuliks. I had protested, but the manner of his insistence indicated that he would not have me say no. I thought of that scorpion I had seen on the rocks of the Grand Canal; that was how this man Glycas appeared to me: quick, sudden, and deadly.