The Suns of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #2]

by Alan Burt Akers

  The next night I was able to slip into the warrens with the pattern I had worked out for the shields. They were large, rectangular, curved into a semi-cylinder, and I insisted that they be built to withstand an arrow from the short straight bows of the overlords’ mercenary guards. If this meant they must be backed with metal, then the metal must be stolen from the building sites where it was being fashioned into masks and wall-coverings to the greater glory of Grodno. I overrode all obstacles. The weight of the shields thus produced, I said, was not important. I had in mind their use as a kind of pavise. I showed how they might be used in the testudo. I got through to my men in command.

  Susheeng was waiting for me as I climbed back in through my window.

  “I have been waiting for you all night, Drak."

  I kept my composure.

  “I was restless, Susheeng. I have been walking—to clear my head."

  “You lie!” She flamed at me then, passionately. “You lie! You have a girl out there in the city, a whore for whom you deny me! I'll kill her, I'll kill her!"

  “No, no, Princess! There is no other girl in Magdag."

  “You swear by Grodno that what you say is true?"

  I'd swear anything by Grodno; false deities mean nothing. But there was no girl—and then I thought of Holly. I said, harshly and with an acrid contempt: “I do not need to swear, Princess. There is no other girl in Magdag."

  “I do not believe you! Swear, you rast! Swear!"

  She lifted her white hand on which the green rings flashed. I caught her wrist and so for a space we stood, locked, looking into each other's eyes. Then she moaned softly and sagged against me, all the rigidity gone from her body. She leaned into me and I could feel her softness. “Tell me true, Drak. There is no other?"

  “There is no other, Princess."

  “Well, then—am I not beautiful? Am I not desirable? Am I not fair above all other women in Magdag?"

  What had Natema said, and what had I said, when I thought Delia was dead? Now I was by that span of years more mature.

  “You are indeed the finest flower of Magdag, Susheeng,” I said, and felt shame at the vicious irony of my words.

  A crisp knock at the door followed by a Vomanus who concealed his chagrin at sight of Susheeng, who was smoothing down her hair now, effectively chopped off that scene.

  When Susheeng had left with a long lingering glance at me, Vomanus said enviously: “Well, you lecherous old devil! So you managed it in the end!"

  “Not so, good Vomanus.” I looked at him, and I found he ranked favorably with those other young men who had followed me to death. “And aren't you supposed to treat a Kov with some kind of respect, hey, young lad?"

  He laughed delightedly.

  “Of course. But I told poor old Tharu not to tell you who I was, and I don't intend that you should find out now. Just take it from me, Drak, my friend, Kovs are Kovs and Kovs to me."

  I glowered at him from under lowered eyelids and he, despite that he had known me for a little while now, started back and I knew I wore that corrosive look of pure authority and domination on my ugly face that I despair so much of.

  “And are you going to tell me you aspire to the Princess Delia yourself, good Vomanus? That I am a rival?"

  “Drak—Dray! What are you saying?"

  I never apologize. I turned from him. Then: “Vomanus—I thank you for your help and comradeship. But I fancy that she-leem Susheeng will set spies on me. I am going to have to disappear."

  “What!"

  “There is work waiting for my hand. I love the Princess Delia as no man ever loved a woman before in all this world of Kregen, aye! and all of Earth—” He stared then, thinking me going off my head, I shouldn't wonder. “But before I can return to her and clasp her in my arms again I must discharge the obligations laid on me. A Vallian ship was signaled last night—you did not know?” For he had started and his face had lighted up. “Listen carefully, Vomanus. I take a great comfort from your comradeship and your ready wit and help—now, hear me out! I want you to return on the ship, go to Delia, and tell her I am well and dying for her and that I shall return just as soon as certain business has been conducted here. She will understand, I know. I know she will!"

  “But, Drak—I dare not return without you!"

  “Dare not? When your Princess Majestrix awaits news of me, thinking me dead, perchance, suffering. Go back to Vallia, good Vomanus. Give the good news to your princess. Tell her I shall return just as soon as I am allowed. She will understand."

  “But what keeps you here? Not Susheeng of a surety."

  “Not Susheeng, nor any other girl. I cannot explain. But you will return to Vallia and give my message and my undying love to Delia of the Blue Mountains."

  Besides, I wanted him well out of the way when my slave army struck. I didn't want his head stuck on a pike and paraded along the harbor wall.

  He shook his handsome head, and thrust his fist down on his rapier hilt so that the scabbard stuck up into the air, arrogantly. “But, Drak, to return without you!"

  “Go! For the sake of Zair, go now! Tell Delia I long to clasp her in my arms—and I will, I will, but go, now, before it is too late!"

  He stared at me as though, at last, I had taken leave of my senses.

  I calmed myself. “All will be explained. And, too, you could return with an airboat to Proconia. I know Vallia does not like using the airboats in the inner sea. I can join you there."

  He frowned. Then: “Very well, Kov Drak. I will do as you ask."

  We made the final arrangements and then I said “Remberee” to Vomanus and went back to my room that evening to collect all that I might need. I was about to leap onto the windowsill when Susheeng called. It was weak of me, I know. But I felt I could not leave without a kind of warning. After all, she was acting of her nature, like them all. So I went to the door and let her in.

  She was magnificent.

  She was dressed as barbaric murals showed Gyphimedes, the divine mistress of the beloved of Grodno, to be dressed in the old legends. Kregen is a maze of myth and legend, some of it beautiful, some horrible, all of absorbing interest. Storytellers weave their fantasies in every marketplace and on favorite street corners beneath the sturm trees. The very air of the world breathes a scented miasma of romance and wonder. Now Susheeng stood gracefully before me dressed as a living mistress from one of those old legends.

  Her hair was coifed and ablaze with jewels. A thick rope of it had been left free and this hung down, coiling lushly over one rounded shoulder. Her body was clad in strings and ropes of emeralds. A priceless fortune glowed against her white skin. The rosy hue in her cheeks was not entirely artificial. Her eyes gleamed and sparkled from lotions. Barbarically bedecked, more nude than if she had been naked, she glided toward me, the golden ankle bells chiming. The breath clogged in my throat.

  “Drak—my Prince—do I not find favor in your sight?"

  It was a rote question, as old as man and woman.

  “You are exceedingly beautiful, Susheeng."

  She swayed toward me. My mind was a jumbled amalgam of Holly, and Natema, and Mayfwy—and then, swamping them all and clearing my head and setting my whole being blazing, came the vivid memory of my Delia of the Blue Mountains stepping so lithely down the rocks clad in those magnificent white ling furs, her figure perfection, her eyes glowing on me, her every aspect so far more beautiful—so—words fail me here. I thrust Susheeng from me so that she staggered.

  She dropped to her knees. She amazed me even more. In one hand she had hidden a crumpled gray cloth. Now, moving with a frenzy I found fascinating and appalling, she stripped the emeralds from her so that the strings broke and the gems rolled and scattered wildly about the room. Stark naked she stood, her hair down and the jewels shaken from it. Then—then she wrapped the gray cloth about her thighs, drew it up between her legs, and knelt before me clad in the gray breechclout of the slave!

  I didn't want to touch her.

  Bu
t I didn't want her crouching there at my feet, dressed up as a slave girl, demanding from me what she must know I would not give.

  “Get up, Susheeng!” I said. I made my voice harsh and she jumped and flinched, and her naked shoulders shook. “You look ridiculous!"

  It was, of course, the end.

  Slowly, she stood up. Her breast heaved and she gulped to control herself. She succeeded. Calm, icy, deadly, she stood before me, naked in the gray breechclout.

  “I have offered you everything, Kov Drak of Delphond. You have seen fit in your folly to refuse me. Now—” Her eyes glowed molten on me in the lamplight. She was incredibly beautiful and evil now that her pretensions had been stripped away. On Kregen there is an expression which means roughly what “my dear” means on Earth, with all the sinister, hating, murderous connotations involved. She used that now, as she turned like a she-leem and glided toward the door.

  “You will be sorry, ma faril Drak. Oh, so sorry!"

  I knew I had less than a handful of murs to get clear. The mailed men she was even now whistling up would not know I had a sectrix saddled and waiting; and so I stood a chance. But it was a near thing. As I clattered out of that secret court where a sleepy slave padded his way back to his quarters, I heard the sounds of the hunt rising behind me.

  As it was, I got clear away. I belted hard for the warrens and, with the die cast, felt a great lightening of my spirits. Susheeng would no longer enter my calculations to ruin all that I was attempting. So I thought as I reentered the ghetto.

  The first person I met as I ducked into the familiar hovel was Holly.

  She stood up as I went in and her slight figure in the rustling light from the candle sent a quick pulse of futile anger through me. She smiled. We had scarcely seen each other alone since that first greeting. Now she came toward me shyly, but with the firmness of character and resolve I knew she possessed.

  “You've been avoiding me, Stylor!"

  The incongruity of it all hit me. I gaped at her.

  “Stylor! What—?"

  “Holly, dear Holly. I have work to do here. The plans must go on—"

  “Oh, fiddle the plans! Can't you see—” She stopped herself. The direct approach was not, in general, Holly's way.

  Then, thankfully, Genal, Pugnarses, and Bolan stalked in. They were annoyed because a good smith had been whipped since his production of iron nails was down—because he had been forging pike heads for us.

  “We will have to spread the load,” I said. “There are, after all, enough slaves to make production light enough—"

  “But he was good!"

  “All the more reason to use him carefully, Pugnarses!” I spoke sharply. Pugnarses gave me an ugly look, but I stared him down. “We are a band of brothers, Pugnarses. We must fight together, or go to the galleys together!"

  “We will never do that!” flared Genal.

  “Very well, then. Now, listen. We come now to the single most important weapon in our armory.” I held their attention; even Holly stood, her hands pressed into her breast, listening.

  I told them, then, what the sleeting hail of the arrow storm could do.

  “We have a few archers,” Pugnarses said. “But few men know the bow. We can make them easily enough, and arrows."

  “That is the small straight bow,” I said. And I laughed. You who listen to these tapes will know I do not laugh lightly.

  It is not exactly true to say that the long English yew bow is the peasants’ weapon. Of the famous longbows, only about one in five were made from yew, the others being mostly ash or elm or witch hazel, and only the best and most experienced archers were issued with yew bows. I wished I had the men to use those bows. Their deadly accuracy, their armor-piercing piles, would have laid low the overlords in great droves. As it was, I must make do with what a slave economy could provide.

  “It takes years and years of training to make a longbow-man. You must start almost before you can walk to pull a bow, to draw it to the ear, to attain that instinctive accuracy and that uncanny speed. Do not think of the longbow, my friends, unless there are men of Loh among you."

  “We have a few—some are redheaded, most are not."

  “Good, Bolan. We will make longbows for them. But for the main archery strength I shall use crossbows."

  My wild Clansmen with their own curved compound reflex bows had some respect for the powerful crossbows of the citizens of Zenicce. I would not be making bows quite like that, not yet, here in the slave warrens of Magdag. I had handled and used the crossbows of Zenicce many times. I knew their virtues and their weaknesses.

  “Crossbows?” said Bolan, wonderingly.

  “Crossbows,” I said. I spoke firmly, decisively. “We will make crossbows and with them we will smash the overlords of Magdag into the dust!"

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Of pikes and crossbows

  The mere manufacture of crossbows and the quarrels they would shoot would not, of course, as with any other weapon, settle the overlords of Magdag.

  The men who would use them must be trained.

  I insisted that the training be carried out with a great deal of the efficiency and spirit of emulation and success, if without the rewards for failure, that I had applied training my guns’ crews aboard the seventy-fours and frigates that sailed other seas four hundred light-years away from Kregen. Volley shooting would be a necessity. Sufficient accuracy should be obtained from individual marksmen so that a wide swathe of the bolts would fall upon the charging overlords’ cavalry.

  Production was begun as soon as the first crossbow I had designed and seen through its development stages, helped by the slave and worker craftsmen without whom the venture would have been impossible, had been tested and had passed. We began with a simple hand-spanned bow. Once those whom we selected for training had grasped its essential principles, and could put a group of bolts into the targets set up in the alleys of the warrens, we progressed at a jump to bows spanned by windlasses. As a sailor I could handle the simple calculations necessary to arrive at a satisfactory ratio series. The biggest innovation, and one I felt some pride in developing, was what I called the sextet.

  One of the main problems with the crossbow is its slow rate of discharge. I have previously mentioned that bows do not fire their arrows or bolts. In every respect the crossbow is inferior to the expertly handled longbow. So men believe. I had so to arrange my crossbowmen as to nullify as many of the disadvantages as possible. We would be fighting from behind barricades. That was essential, as I saw it. So I took a group of six people. The sharp end was the shooter, he who actually loosed the bolt at the foe. To his rear stood or knelt the hander. He took the discharged bow from the shooter and handed him a loaded bow. To his rear were stationed two loaders. They took the spanned bows and loaded them with the bolts, ready for the hander, alternately. Finally, in the rear, were placed the spanners whose task it was to hook on the windlasses and wind like fury until the bows were spanned, when they would hand them to the loaders.

  Six men would use six crossbows—and the end result of their labors would be the discharge of a single quarrel. The big difference between that and having the whole six discharge at once was that the rate of discharge could be kept up. And I would naturally place the best shots as shooters. When necessary, say at the final moment of a charge, the entire six could rise and shoot what would be a devastating broadside.

  I say men—there were women and girls and young boys in the ranks of handers, loaders, and spanners. Holly, with her tenacious obduracy, insisted on being taught how to handle a bow through all its phases, and she turned into a fine shot.

  With the arme blanche I felt we could not expect even a solid phalanx of pikemen to meet and beat down an overlord charge. But once the slaves and workers understood the problems they insisted that they be trained as though they would have to face the overlords in the open. Accordingly, in the inner squares and plazas of the warrens, where overlords and beast guards ven
tured only in overwhelming mailed strength, and that only when they chased runaway slaves, we drilled and marched and pointed and lifted pikes. The front ranks contained halberdiers on the Swiss model. When I first saw that forest of eighteen-foot long pikes moving steadily across the square I own to a pang of pride and despair and choked affection.

  Those men out there, marching with a swing and a tramp through the dust, their throats parched, their lips dry, were slaves and workers, beaten men, whipped cramphs, despised and derided by the scented overlords of Magdag. And here they were marching in ranks and columns together, brothers in arms, shoulder to shoulder, disciplined and dedicated to a freedom that depended on their discipline. And once they had obtained their freedom—what of their so hardly-won and proudly-vaunted discipline then?

  That was a problem for revolution, not rebellion. It must come later.

  It would come—I had vowed myself that—quite apart from the duty I conceived the Star Lords demanded from me.

  We forged a weapon, there in the miasmic odors and the odoriferous mud of the ghetto. We drilled and trained. We built barricades from which we practiced hurling a sleeting storm of crossbow bolts. We devised tricks and traps, things like loops of rope hung between houses, balks of timber to be thrust hock-high across from door to door—for I believed we would have to call down the wrath of the overlords upon us and meet them in the confines of our warrens.

  In this, I found to my surprise, I stood alone.

  “Soon,” said Genal with the lust for battle kindling unpleasantly in his eyes, “Genodras will disappear. The accursed Zim will, for a short space, prevent us seeing the true light of the sky."

  I had to stand and take all this without a murmur.

  “The overlords retire into their great halls during this time of the Great Death as they await the Great Birth. We workers must grovel in our shacks and hovels, condemned to the warrens. We are not permitted in the halls during their times of use, when all they stand for becomes revealed."