“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 acknowledged 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. 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 Aphrasoe 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 Susheeng 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.
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