The Suns of Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  We pulled into it, keeping time, hauling the heavy looms through their prescribed arcs as delimited by the rowing frames guiding and controlling the movements of the extreme inboard ends of the looms. As the inboard man I had the most space to move through, and we were graded downward and outward as to size, where Zolta, the smallest, perched almost over the water on the projecting deck-platform behind the parados.

  Soon it became clear, from the way in which the officers, soldiers, and sailors were continually looking aft, that we were being pursued. There would therefore be little chance of the ram being brought into action. As though confirming that, a party of sailors appeared on the low foredeck — it was too small to be called a forecastle — and began to rig the forward extension of the beak. I heard shouting from the aftercastle at the extreme aft end of the poop. Soon an officer ran forward and the sailors began to unship the extension, amid a great deal of acrid comment.

  Nath, his eyes upturned, his lungs pumping, spat out:

  “So the Grodno-gasta thinks he’ll fight! Ha!”

  Grodno-gasta, I knew, was a blasphemous and extremely indelicate remark.

  “Zair rot him!” snarled out Zolta, pulling.

  We were now pulling at a back-breaking pace and still the drum-deldar stepped up the rate. Zorg was heaving now, not using his body as a good oarsman, but trying to do the work with his biceps. His face was a color that appalled me, slatey blue-green, something like the hide of a sectrix. He was gasping with a convulsive effort at each stroke.

  “Sink me, Zorg!” I said viciously. “Roll with the stroke, you stupid man of Zair!”

  He choked and did not have the spittle to hawk. His eyes rolled. He managed to croak out words: “I will never yield! Krozair! My vows — I am — Zorg! Zorg of — of Felteraz. Krozair!” He was rambling now, his body going up and down with the oar, hardly pulling a quarter of his weight. Then he used another name I had not heard before, and I knew that he was no longer with us aboard this foul galley of Magdag but far away: in delirium, yes, but not here with us. “Mayfwy,” he said and, again, in a long sobbing groan: “Mayfwy.”

  He could not escape the observation of the whip-deldar much longer. Nath, Zolta, and I were pulling now with all the dead weight of Zorg hanging on the oar. Sweat reeked down our naked bodies. Then the green conical straw hat fell from Zorg’s head and tumbled down.

  Bareheaded, Zorg was the object of instant attention.

  The whip-deldar lashed him. He laid the whip unerringly across my friend Zorg’s back. Old snake talked to him.

  Zorg’s tanned skin split and blood oozed, then spouted out as the whip fell again and again. I, alongside, was splattered with the blood of my friend as the whip-deldar of Magdag flogged him to death.

  “Get back to your oar!” roared the whip-deldar. “Pull!”

  But Zorg of Felteraz was past all the pulling he would ever do in this life on this world of Kregan beneath Antares.

  The confusion attendant upon freeing a dead slave from his shackles and throwing him overboard and replacing him with one of the oarsmen at the moment luxuriating in a spare capacity and chained deep in the hold, a luxury we all tasted in turn, was as nothing compared with the confusion evident on the poop. As the body of my friend Zorg, all naked and limp, with the blood dripping from his butchered back, was dragged out from the bench and hefted up to be thrown overboard, soldiers ran up to the aftercastle carrying bows. Others manned the ballistae. The sailors were readying their cutlasses. The confusion was abhorrent to me, as a man trained aboard a king’s ship, but all my attention was required for the eternal rowing. Pull, pull, pull — and continue to pull. Once again the drum-deldar, under the shrilled commands from the poop, upped the rate.

  I did not see Zorg consigned to the deep.

  I did not see the splash his mutilated body made as it broke the surface of the water and vanished from mortal men’s sight. I knew he believed that, after his death, he would go up to Zim to sit at the right hand of Zair, in all his glory. Suicides did not achieve this resurrection, either to the green or to the red, otherwise many of my fellow galley slaves would have found that shortcut to paradise.

  I acted, I believe, out of pure animal instinct, out of hatred, out of sheer lust to kill and kill yet more of those wolves of Magdag. Yet I was a trained seaman, accustomed to handling ships, cunning in the use of wind and weather, and I knew that wolves of greater power than those of Magdag chased Grace of Grodno. If I say that instincts impelled me to foolhardy action that professional expertise would approve, that will perhaps best sum up what I then did.

  As Zorg was taken from me, his shackles released, I put all my strength into breaking the last web of metal still joining the rubbed-through link. I surged up with such force that the loom of the oar cracked against the rowing frame. Nath and Zolta looked at me with numb faces, their bodies and arms going through the rowing motions that were ingrained into their muscles.

  I felt stiff, tight about muscles abruptly trying to perform some different series of actions from those they had been forced into for hour after hour. The whip-deldar heard the crack of loom against rowing frame and came running, his whip high, his face vicious. I caught the lash in my left hand and jerked it and with my right hand I choked him around the throat. I threw him down among the slaves at the oars.

  Then I was on the gangway.

  So quick, so sudden, I stood there. I had once before seen a slave break from his oar. He had tried to dive overboard and sailors had caught him and held him, so that, later, the whip-deldar could cut him up with old snake.

  I moved to the side, above the gawking faces of the slaves.

  Four soldiers, in mail, their long swords swinging free, ran down the gangway toward me. My movement to the side convinced them I was going to dive and they hesitated, ready to let me go, willing to be rid of a fool slave who might, just might, be picked up by the following ship. Or so I read their hesitation. If I was picked up, the pursuer would have to slow his pursuit. I think they came to the decision that the pursuer would not stop, would not be fobbed off by a screaming face in the water. They started toward me again — and I was on them. My balled fist smashed in the face of the first. He had no time to scream. I grasped his long sword. It hissed in the air. I clove the second through his ventail and he toppled backward, horror on his face, blood staining the mesh.

  “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. “G
alley 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 Aphrasöe, 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.

  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 d
ark 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.