The Suns of Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  “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 vestments, 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.

  Holy Sanurkazz stood upon the southern shore of the inner sea over toward the eastern end, at the narrow neck of one of the dependent seas that extended southward. Her hegemony stretched in somewhat different ways from her opponent’s toward the west, where cities flourished which grew steadily weaker and less assured the farther west they had been sited. All, however, owed a single burning allegiance to the red.

  It seemed clear that the strategy dominating the inner sea would be that of raiding to keep the opponent occupied, and a series of direct and violent blows against the chief hostile city. With either Magdag or Sanurkazz reduced, the other cities of the losing side would, like children deprived of parents, quickly succumb. This was a strategy that had not found favor with either the men of Magdag or Sanurkazz. The answer was obvious enough and human enough not to surprise me. Booty was for the taking upon the seas, and to strike against a smaller city was infinitely safer than any direct assault against the master citadel.

  Stretching my legs on the tiny extent of quarterdeck boasted by Lilac Bird, I saw Zolta below me thoroughly enjoying himself on the central gangway. He strode up and down, clad like myself in a clean white loincloth, flourishing a whip and every now and then laying into the galley slaves. We were bucking a nasty little wind, and I had cocked my eyes at the clouds more than once.

  “Hai, Zolta!” I called down.

  He stared back and up, his face brown and cheerful, his black eyes glittering. He cracked the whip with a snap.

  “I am collecting interest, Stylor!” he shouted up.

  The drum-deldar quickened his beat. The bass and the tenor drums boomed closer together. On the ships of Zair the drum-deldar sits forward of the rowers, in the belief, I gathered, that the sounds would carry more speedily to the oarsmen on the benches. Above the heads of this top bank of oarsmen a light, fighting platform ran around above the bulwarks of the galley where fighting-men could stand in action. Below them, the lower bank of oarsmen were tugging at their shorter and more sharply angled oars. With seven men to a loom, monstrous oars could be wielded. Zolta, with his borrowed whip, intended to see the oars were moved, and sharply. The whip-deldar, from whom Zolta had so unofficially taken over, was standing talking to the oar-master in his tabernacle just below me, and laughing at the antics of Zolta.

  So my friends who owed allegiance to the red-sun deity, Zair, used slaves too. Cou
ld I have expected anything else? I did know that slavery was practiced mostly aboard their swifters. In their cities normal citizens carried out work, in a way that made sense to an Earthman with a European heritage, and the few slaves were mostly for personal body service.

  I looked out over the larboard beam and the clouds there lowered, more black and ominous than they had been half a bur before. I had no wish to interfere with Zenkiren in his handling of his ship. Aft of us the two trailing galleys plunged heavily, and spume broke and burst from their prows. The merchantmen were riding the seas more easily and I saw they had reduced canvas.

  Zenkiren stepped out on deck.

  The oar-master popped up his little ladder from the tabernacle with its solidly-bolted door. He gestured to larboard.

  “I see, Nath,” said Zenkiren. “We must weather this out.”

  This Nath, again, was another of that common name, and not my Nath the Thief, or my oar-mate Nath, who was spending his time playing any one of the many gambling games of Kregen with the released slaves below decks.

  Lilac Bird was beginning to roll now in a devilishly uncomfortable corkscrew fashion. Long and thin galleys are no sea boats. Some of the oars faltered as white water broke. The oar-master dived back to his place as the drum-deldar thumped a slower rate, and the whip-deldar jumped along the central gangway below the parados and took the whip from Zolta.

  We were in for a blow.

  Storms, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones — gales of all descriptions are no news to me. The gale that overtook us now was such as to give me no cause for alarm at first. Why, snug aboard a seventy-four, or even a thirty-eight frigate, on blockade, we would scarcely have bothered over this blow. However, the swifters of the inland sea were primitive fighting machines, not the sophisticated sailing machines on Nelson’s Navy, and Lilac Bird behaved like a bitch of the sea. She twisted, she hogged, she sagged, she pitched and yawed and rolled and when she did roll she sent thrills through me I’d forgotten existed.

  We smashed ten oars before they were all safely inboard and stowed. That operation — I had had to carry it out myself as a galley slave — is a miserable proceeding. Then covers were dragged out by the sailors and lashed over all the openings in the upperworks. Lilac Bird stuck her nose down and heaved like a rooting ferret. I snatched a glance aft and saw the two galleys like matchsticks in the sea, foaming up and down, great spouts of white water crashing upward from their slim bows.

  The merchantmen were out of sight. The clouds lowered down and the sky grew black; rain began to fall. That cheered me up a little, but the way this broomstick of a craft was behaving was enough to alarm any sailor. And I had considered she should be longer!

  The two rudder-deldars were yelling for help and reliefs rushed high upon the poop to grasp the rudder handles, to control the two paddle-shaped rudders, one on each quarter. Even as they reached the poop the galley rolled and squiggled in her snakelike fashion. To a groaning of timbers and sheets of spray flying inboard the starboard rudder snapped across.

  Lilac Bird lurched to starboard, her larboard rudder almost out of the water. She spun around and water and wind smote her without mercy. Zenkiren had been standing near me, shouting to his men. As his ship lurched it caught him unexpectedly so that he staggered, tottered across the deck, and hit his head hard against the break of the poop. He dropped to the deck, senseless.

  His second in command, a certain Rophren, jumped up, his face an unhealthy color. He stood shaking.

  Now, through the sleeting smash of the spray and the whine of the wind, we could hear, clear and close and ominous, the roaring sound of great waves battering rocks.

  “It is all finished!” shouted Rophren. “We must jump for it — we must abandon the swifter!”

  I went up to him quickly. I hit him alongside the jaw and I did not bother to catch him as he fell.

  The galley heaved up and down beneath me as I ran back.

  “Keep on that rudder!” I shouted at the deldars there. “Hold her when she comes around.”

  Then I ran forward, pushing past the spray-drenched whip-deldars who stared upon me with frightened, puzzled faces. At the main mast I collared some of the sailors skulking there and kicked them into hoisting a scrap of the sail, the yard braced hard up diagonally across the deck. Wind filled that bit of sail at once, pouting it out, hard and drumming. But the galley responded, impossible sea boat though she was. The foremast yard I had likewise braced hard around. We were drifting away to leeward like a bit of driftwood. Down there, iron-fanged rocks awaited us. Now, through the gloom, I could just make out the spout and leap of spray.

  I had a moment of doubt that we could weather that fanged pile of rock.

  We were being carried broadside on downwind.

  “Keep that rudder hard down!” I bellowed into the wind.

  Slowly, slowly, we were forereaching on the rocks. But, I thought, too slowly, too slowly.

  Spray stung my eyes and I brushed it impatiently away.

  I dared not hoist any more canvas; the galley would simply spring away like an arrow and impale herself on the rocks if she did not simply roll over in the first few moments before her head came around. Water broke over her in torrential sheets.

  I clung on and hoped.

  Rophren had regained consciousness. He had a group of officers with him as he approached me. Their faces showed the fear of the sea corroding within them, the hatred of me.

  “You — the Lord of Strombor! You are under arrest!” Rophren spoke flatly, his fear shrieking at the end into his words so that he stammered over them. “We are all doomed — because you stopped me giving the order! We could all have jumped when I said and been saved — now we are too close to the rocks! Cramph! You have killed us all!”

  A youngster with a florid face and close-set eyes whipped out his long sword.

  “He won’t go under arrest! For I shall cut him down — now!”

  The long sword glimmered silver in the spray, high over my head. It slashed down.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nath, Zolta, and I carouse in Sanurkazz

  I moved sideways and I kicked that florid-faced young man where I had kicked Cydones Esztercari, neatly, making him double up and retch all over the sea-wet deck. I took the long sword away. I held it so that Rophren and his friends could see it.

  “Countermand a single order I have given,” I said, “and you die.”

  Their hands bunched on their sword hilts. They were proud, arrogant men, used to command. They lurched on the decks as the galley surged and bucked and fought the sea. I stood there, limber and straight, balanced, and the sword in my fist maintained a steady arc upon them.

  Whether they would have charged me, desperate in their ill-founded belief that I was consigning them all to a watery grave, whether they would have remained, like chained leems, snarling and impotent, I do not know. I rather suspect the latter, for I have been told that when I, Dray Prescot, challenge a man with a sword in my fist I present a most daunting and unhealthy spectacle.

  As they stood there, wet, miserable, and frightened, facing the boiling sea or the bright menace of my sword, a sharp hail lifted from the bows.

  Up there Nath, my Nath of the galley bench, perched. He pointed and waved a dripping arm.

  “Clear, Stylor!” he screamed. “We’re clear!”

  We looked, those men like chained leems, and I. The rocks were moving astern of us, their spouting white-fanged venom dropping astern as we pulled away. Slowly, struggling for every inch, Lilac Bird labored her way past that cruel point of rock and so weathered the cape and we could run more comfortably into the gulf beyond.

  After that it was merely a matter of a routine court of inquiry when Zenkiren regained consciousness. Rophren was placed under arrest. The florid-faced young man, Hezron of High Heysh, also was placed under arrest; but in his presence I spoke for him, knowing this had been his first cruise as an officer aboard a swifter and this his first storm.

  “
The dangers of the sea vary in proportion as one comes to know them,” I said. “I do not hold it against Hezron that his untutored fear impelled him to seek to kill me. Perhaps he may hold it against me that I kicked him between wind and water.”

  Zenkiren did not smile; but I was watching his face as he sat in the seat of judgment at his table, with the other officers present and the glowering, pasty-faced Rophren between two men-at-arms, and I thought he might have smiled at another time. Zenkiren was a jolly man who loved a good belly laugh despite his ascetic brilliance.

  “What do you say to that, Hezron?”

  Hezron of High Heysh lifted his head. He was a boy who was used to throwing his weight about, that was clear, a member of a rich and powerful family in Sanurkazz.

  “I do not forget an injury,” he said, and his words splintered in the cabin as Lilac Bird pulled toward the harbor. “I shall hold it against you that you demeaned me, that you dared lay a hand on me. I, Hezron of High Heysh. You will not forget that lightly, barbarian.”

  I looked at him. I had heard the opprobrious epithet barbarian applied to me, as a stranger from the outer seas, more than once, but never like this, never with so much venom. I thought of the galleys of the inner sea, I thought of their fighting qualities, and I wondered. Those ships of Zenicce, which city was not popular on the outer oceans, and the wide-ranging fleets of Vallia, were they fashioned by barbarians? Was the gorgeous enclave city of Zenicce barbarous? If it was, it was of a form and style of barbarity these swifter-men of the Eye of the World could not understand.

  “If you wish to make an issue of that,” I said, and I know I spoke in a harsh and barbaric voice, “you are welcome to meet me at any time with weapons in our hands.”