The suns of Scorpio dp-2

by Alan Burt Akers

  “Grab him, you fools!” screamed a voice from aft.

  I leaped and swung and my blade hewed into the side of the face of the third even as I avoided the fourth’s blow. This was more like the sword fighting to which I had been accustomed aboard Earthly ships, boarding in the battle-smoke. It was very little like the rapier and dagger work of Zenicce. I bunched my left hand into the fourth man, smashed my hilt down into his face, then I cast him from me. Now the slaves were yelling.

  They were making a hideous row, like vosks in swill, snorting and roaring and screaming. I raced aft down the gangway.

  The oar-master in his tabernacle saw what I intended.

  He leaped up, shrieking: “Bows! Strike him down!”

  I hauled myself up one-handed to the tabernacle and even as he tried to clamber out I cut him down. The drum-deldar had even less chance. The passion of my blow rolled his head down along the gangway for several yards before it toppled off into the rowing benches.

  Soldiers were milling, running down the ladders from the poop.

  So far I had not uttered a word.

  Now, as the soldiers came running, I raced before them along the gangway. The first whip-deldar lay dead, but his mates were flogging the slaves on in an attempt, a desperate attempt, to keep the rhythm of the stroke. But the rhythm had been lost with the death of the drum-deldar. Their whips were no defense against the long sword. Both whip-deldars went down, the one from amidships and the other from the bows. The mail-clad men were roaring now, pouring toward me. I lifted my voice.

  “Men!” I roared. “Galley slaves! Stop rowing! Ease oars! The day of judgment is at hand!”

  It was a melodramatic way of putting it, yet I knew the type of man I was dealing with in those whip-beaten galley slaves of Magdag. Some banks of oars faltered, the rhythm went wild, and then, because oars must of necessity swing together or they can do nothing, the larboard and the starboard wings of Grace of Grodno fluttered uncontrollably and clashed and fell silent. The looms went inboard. The slaves were now making so much noise I felt convinced the men of the pursuing galley, men and galley I had not yet seen, must hear them and take heart and know their time was near. An arrow feathered into the gangway near me. I started aft again. I had not had a sword in my fist for too long. I am no believer in the joy of battle, the uplifting surge of blood, the way some men speak of their exaltation in battle. I do not enjoy killing; that, at least, the Savanti had had no need to teach me. But now — something about my whole series of experiences since reaching this inner sea, this Eye of the World, impelled me to a stereotyped reaction. Hatred, revulsion, anger, all were there and mixed in my motives. I felt a savage exultation as my long sword bit into the heads and bodies and limbs of my opponents.

  I was young then, a sailor with a grievance, and I swung a mean sword. I roared at them, smiting and striking and lopping. It was necessary to strike with great force to cut through the mail, or so to smash it in as to pulverize what lay beneath. Mail-clad men fight slowly when they hack and slash. They must put extra weight and power behind each blow.

  Because of my galley slave training, because of that baptism in the sacred pool of lost Aphrasoe, because my arm was nerved by dark impulses of hatred and revenge, I struck each blow with swift force, smiting and smiting the enemies of Zair who had killed my friend Zorg of Felteraz. I do not know how long it went on. I only know that I felt a wave of resentment, of disappointment, when the galley lurched and rolled, the harsh grating bump from aft shocked us all forward, and men in mail with gleaming long swords poured over the poop. They wore red plumes in their helmets. They struck down with quick and cunning skill and swamped across Grace of Grodno. In the bedlam I heard the fresh and horrific screams from the galley slaves.

  I felt a treacherous lurch beneath my feet and a soggy feel of the deck. The galley was sinking. The men of Magdag had opened her sides in some way, opening them to the sea, willing all to death in their final defeat.

  Now there were no men left of Magdag between me and the men of Zair, the red-sun deity, the men from the south.

  “The galley is sinking,” I said, to one who stepped toward me, his long sword reeking, yet not so befouled with blood as mine. “The slaves must be freed — now!”

  “It will be done,” he said. He looked at me. He stood as tall as I did, broad and limber, with a bronzed open face with that same set of arrogance to his beak of a nose that my friend Zorg had possessed. His thick dark moustache was brushed upward. The men of Magdag wore down-drooping, hangdog moustaches.

  “I am Pur Zenkiren of Sanurkazz, captain of Lilac Bird.” On the white loose garment he wore over his mail a great blazing device coruscated in my eyes. A circle, it seemed, a hubless spoked wheel within the circle, embroidered with silks of brilliant orange, yellow, and blue. “And you, a galley slave, I assume?”

  “Yes,” I said. I remembered things I had almost forgotten. “A galley slave. I am the Lord of Strombor.”

  He looked at me keenly. “Strombor. It seems, I think, I have heard — but no matter. It is not of the Eye of the World.”

  “No. It is not.”

  Slaves were being cut free from their shackles, were leaping up, screaming and weeping in their joy, scrambling over the ornate poop to the beak of Lilac Bird. Pur Zenkiren made a motion with his long sword, all bloody as it was, a kind of salute.

  “You, the Lord of Strombor, a stranger. How is it you came to be fighting the heretics of Magdag, and taking their galley?”

  The twin suns of Antares were less hot now, the emerald and the ruby, sinking to the sea horizon. I looked at the long sword, at the blood, at the dead men, at the slaves in all their wretched nakedness leaping for joy as they scrambled across the poop.

  “I had a friend,” I said. “Zorg of Felteraz.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A blow makes and breaks

  If I seem to you to have passed somewhat lightly over my experiences working in the building complexes of Magdag or to have been less than open in what I have said about my life as a galley slave on the swifters of Magdag, I feel I owe no explanation. Of misery and pain and despair we all know there is enough and to spare, both on our own Earth and on the world of Kregen that I made my own. The long periods I spent under duress passed. That is all. Like black clouds passing away before the face of Zim, the times of agony and humiliation passed.

  The hatred I bore the men of Magdag was perfectly natural, given the circumstances of my birth and upbringing, for the Navy does not tolerate weaklings and my training had been harsh and uncompromising. Only in later years have I attained to any little maturity of outlook I may possess, and this, I confess freely, has been brought about in large measure by the liberating influences breaking out on this Earth, for Kregen remains as savage, demanding, and merciless as always. I have experienced great joy in my life, and Delia of Delphond has been my great and consoling power of the spirit; I owe most of what humanity I possess to her. Now, released from mind-killing and body-exhausting toil, I was free once again and I can remember with what wonder and the light of fresh eyes I looked about me on the deck of Lilac Bird as Grace of Grodno sank, bubbling, beneath the blue waters of the Eye of the World.

  No, it is not necessary to detail my feelings about the men of Magdag, the men of Grodno. If I say that little Wincie, a cherry-lipped, impish-eyed, tousle-headed slip of a girl of whom I was very fond, had been killed in a most barbarous fashion, it conveys little. Her task was to bring the skins of water for the brick making and to slake our thirsts; the mailed men on one of their sporting sorties had caught her and had, as you twentieth century moralists would phrase it, gang-raped her. These are words. The reality in agony, blood, and filth is a part of the mosaic of life. It does not need to be dwelled on to make my position — the young man I then was, harsh, relentless, vicious to those I hated, malignant in my cherished feelings of injustice — clear enough to the dullest of minds. Now they had flogged to death my friend, Zorg of Felteraz.

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nbsp; Not all the slaves had come weeping with joy aboard the swifter from Holy Sanurkazz. Some had wailed and resisted. These were prisoners of Magdag, men sentenced to the galleys for some crime and with the eventual prospect of freedom before them. Now they would become the galley slaves of their hereditary enemies. Life was stark and brutal on the inner sea.

  Lilac Bird interested me. She was a larger galley than Grace of Grodno, although not of the largest size that plowed these waters. I gathered her speed had given her captain, Pur Zenkiren, some concern, as she was new and he had had high hopes of her. She was a seven-six-hundred swifter. Simply, this means she had a hundred oars, arranged in two banks with seven men on the upper bank at each oar and six on the lower, two banks of twenty-five oars a side. I thought her length insufficient in proportion to her beam, given the ridiculous shapes of galleys, anyway; her draft was still too deep, caused by the weights, than was desirable for the swiftest of galleys. I caught myself. Here I was, starting to think like a sailor again.

  “You are feeling fit in yourself, my Lord of Strombor?” Pur Zenkiren spoke pleasantly as we sat in his plain after quarters, with the arms in their racks, the charts upon the table, the wine glasses and bottle between us. They did not use beckets or swinging tables; they wouldn’t venture out if a storm was brewing.

  “Fit, thank you, Pur Zenkiren. I owe you my liberty — I had some concern that you might return me, a stranger, to the benches.”

  He smiled. His face was weather-beaten, his eyes dark and penetrating, and that arrogant beak nose lifted at times so that, for a heartbreaking moment, I would catch that glimpse of Zorg. Zenkiren, like Zorg, had a mass of black curly hair, shining and oiled and remarkably romantic, I have no doubt.

  “We followers of Zair have a respect for a man, my Lord of Strombor.”

  A single chart, of remarkably poor quality, hopeless accuracy, and miniscule scale, had been found in the locker, which showed Strombor. The whole coastlines outside the inner sea were incorrect, but the names were marked down: Loh, Vallia, Pandahem, Segesthes, with Zenicce marked and, alongside in a panel, the names of the twenty-four Houses of Zenicce, both noble and lay. The fascinating thing here was that Strombor was marked and Esztercari was not, proving the map to have been drawn well over a hundred and fifty years before.

  “We have a little contact with the outside world, mainly with Vallia and Donengil, but we are an inward-looking people. The main effort to which we are all dedicated is defiance and resistance to the power of Grodno, no matter when, how, and where such a resistance shall be made.”

  I looked at him. He spoke as though out of rote. Then he smiled at me again, lifted his glass, and said:

  ‘To the ice floes of Sicce with Magdag and all her evil spawn!”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said, and did so.

  They had given me a decent white loincloth and I had washed and rubbed scented oils on my body, and I had eaten real food again. Now, sitting drinking with the captain of the swifter, I felt human once more

  — or, I reminded myself, as human as I would ever feel while the canker of Grodno and Magdag continued to exist.

  My feelings were made very plain to Zenkiren, who had sized me up to his satisfaction, as he thought. The many parallels of the red-green situation in the Eye of the World to that old battle between Esztercari and Strombor had occurred to me; although I found greater contrast and interest in the Catholic and Islamic conflicts of the late Renaissance, or the bitterness between Guelf and Ghibelline. I was aware, too, that the greater malice seemed always to exist between those whose beliefs had diverged from a single origin. The people of the sunset, the old original inhabitants of the Eye of the World, had built well and industriously to produce the Grand Canal and the Dam of Days, that terrifying structure I had not yet seen. They had also built fine cities, some ruined and lost, some ruined and partially rebuilt, now inhabited by the newer men who had split from the old red-green comradeship.

  “Those vile cramphs of Magdag,” Zenkiren said to me as we voyaged back to Sanurkazz. “We know how they build. They are obsessed by building, diseased by it.”

  “It is destroying their culture, their life,” I said.

  “Yes! They think to find favor in the sight of their evil master, the false deity Grodno the Green, by every act of building, every new construction of monstrous proportions. They bleed their countryside dry for workers and wealth. So, then they must raid and ravage us in order to replenish their stock.”

  “I saw a farm, a massive affair, very well-run and producing-”

  “Oh, yes!” Zenkiren waved a dismissive arm. “Of course! They have millions to feed; they must produce food, as we must. But they raid us continually and take our young men and our girls and children for their consuming buildings.”

  “You raid them.”

  “Yes! It is the glory of Zair laid upon us.” He looked at me and hesitated; it surprised me, for he was a fine captain and a man who knew his mind. “You were the friend of Zorg of Felteraz. I have heard from Zolta of that. You are a Lord. I think-” Again he hesitated, and then, in a slower and softer voice, asked: “Did Zorg speak to you of the Krozairs of Zy?”

  “No,” I said. “He used the word Krozair when he was dying. He seemed — proud, then.”

  Zenkiren changed the flow of conversation, then, and we spoke of many things as Lilac Bird rowed steadily toward the south. She was followed by two other swifters, smaller galleys in this swift raiding squadron under Zenkiren’s command. They had snapped up three plump merchantmen as well sinking Grace of Grodno, and the merchantmen wallowed along aft.

  In all honesty I must admit I did not even think it strange that Zenkiren should take my word that I was the Lord of Strombor. I was beginning to adopt the attitudes of mind of the leader of a House of Zenicce, and my years as Vovedeer and Zorcander with the Clansmen had given me the air of habitual authority. But I believe Zenkiren would not have cared had I been the lowliest of foot soldiers, for he did everything merely because he knew that I had been the friend of Zorg of Felteraz and had avenged his death. I was convinced the word Krozair linked these attitudes. I had seen, as Grace of Grodno finally sank, the air bubbling out and the timbers breaking free and shooting up, a white dove circling Lilac Bird. That dove heartened me. Could it be, I wondered, that the Savanti were taking a hand again? Could they be confirming my continued existence on Kregen even though I had been forced away from Magdag? I looked for the Gdoinye, the scarlet and golden raptor; I did not see it. Zenkiren had been taking a considerable risk in sailing so close to the northern shore. He had been on the lookout for choice tidbits in the way of Magdaggian merchantmen and the fortyswifter had been a delectable item to snap up. We did not know why she had been en route to Gansk, and perhaps we never would learn. Zenkiren’s concern had been for Lilac Bird ’s disturbing lack of speed. Only my intervention with the consequent interruption in the pulling of the fortyswifter had given him the chance to overhaul her, and then the Sanurkazzan galley had reached up so swiftly there had been no need to use the ballistae mounted in her bows.

  The ballista used on the ships of the Eye of the World was called a varter, and it was a true ballista, in that its propulsive energy came from two half-bows whose butts were clamped in perpendicular thongs twisted many times. The cord was drawn by a simple windlass. The varter could be adapted to shoot arrows, or bolts, large iron-tipped monstrous balks of timber, or to hurl stones. It could achieve a considerable degree of accuracy.

  Every sixth day on ships of Sanurkazz the religious observances connected with Zair were solemnly undertaken with due rites and prayers. Religion, I had thought, was the sop for the masses, along with bloodthirsty broadsheets detailing the latest murders and hangings, cockfights, prizefights, and the occasional tankard of ale at the local alehouse. Religion kept the masses in order. These men of Sanurkazz, however, well though I might mock them in the privacy of my own thoughts, were very splendid in their best clothes, the ship-priest in his ves
tments, the silver and gold vessels, the blazing embroidery of the banners and flags, the shrilling notes of the silver and ebony trumpets, all conspiring to seduce any solid man into an euphoric haze of belief.

  Naturally, the day on which the rites of Zair were performed was not the same day as that on which Grodno was similarly honored.

  I say similarly; I had seen the religious services of the men of Magdag, and they were different in a way that, looking back, I can see was no different at all. Then, I considered them depraved and evil. It seems obvious that there was only one color which the men of Magdag could paint the hulls of their swifters. The ancient pirates of Greece, who roamed the Aegean, used to paint their hulls green. The men of Sanurkazz had struck a compromise. Green was of some use as a camouflage color; not much, a little. Red would have been some degrees more visible, so the galleys of the men of Zair of the southern shore of the inner sea were painted blue.

  They carried three sets of sails in more or less regular use: white for daytime cruising, black for night sailing, and blue for raiding.

  On this voyage back to Holy Sanurkazz, a voyage which was something in the nature of a victory triumph, we wore white sails.

  Magdag stood upon the northern shore of the inner sea over to the western end; her power and law ran for many dwaburs toward the east until it tended to diminish a little as cities with their own marine wished to flex their own muscles of independence. All, however, were in some way tributary to Magdag, and all, naturally, were partisans of the green.