The Suns of Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  “Aye, Captain,” they stuttered, and shambled off after me.

  It was hardly fair on them, but I knew they would not forgive me if I traveled to Felteraz without them. As I had explained to Zenkiren, they were oar comrades of Zorg also.

  We made the journey in a two-wheeled cart drawn by a docile ass, a somewhat different variety from that of the Plains of Segesthes but with the same patient obstinacy, and as I handled the reins those two lay in the back and groaned with every jolt of the wheels.

  “My head! Mother Zinzu the Blessed! For a little wine to moisten these cracked lips!”

  “You drank it all last night,” said Zolta disagreeably.

  “And that wench you found me! Aie! How she—”

  “You have no stomach for the finer arts, Nath, and that is the truth, by Zim-Zair.”

  “Ha! Since when have you used Krozair oaths, my fat tallowed sea snake?”

  Then we were all silent, for a space, for we remembered our friend Zorg of Felteraz, to whose widow we now traveled.

  The way was not far but we did not hurry in the warm sunshine. The weather continued fine and mild. For Zolta and Nath this was a holiday as well as a pilgrimage; for me it was a digression from my set course I had to make, a task laid on me, a task I knew without a single hesitation Delia of the Blue Mountains would approve and applaud.

  Felteraz, a town and an estate and a small fishing harbor, lay a little over three dwaburs to the east and we had to be ferried over the neck of the Sea of Marshes to pick up our asscart. The gut there was about a mile or so broad and no bridges spanned it, but the shining water was always alive with small craft, oared wherries, pulling barges, dinghies, ferries, and the occasional stately passage of a swifter, every oar in line and rising and falling as one to the beat of the drum-deldar.

  Now we ambled along the dusty path, for the suns had quickly dried the overnight dew. We passed cultivated fields, and small farms and a tiny village or two nestled into the rocks. Here there could be habitation near the shore. For the frowning walls of the citadel of Sanurkazz to the west and the much lesser citadel of Felteraz to the east provided protection and a powerful deterrent to a swift raiding descent on the coast. In general the coasts of the inner sea, the Eye of the World, lie barren beneath the suns.

  I wondered what Mayfwy would be like. Zorg had never mentioned her, save that once, when he had been unable any longer to keep bottled within him the passions of his life, for he had been dying. He had said “Krozair” and “Mayfwy” in a breath, a dying breath. I had formed an image of her, of a serene and calm grand dame, straight, with the management of the estate and the overlordship of the town and harbor and citadel a burden she was capable of bearing with dignity and composure, a charge she accepted with all the loyalty I had come to know and admire in Zorg, her husband.

  We stopped to eat in one of the villages, and Nath quickly bargained for a bottle of Zond wine, and Zolta had an apple-cheeked girl perched on his knee and screaming with laughter in almost no time at all. I ate bread, soft, fluffy bread torn in chunks from the long loaves of Kregen, and smeared with honey from the innkeeper’s hives. A heaping dish of palines in the center of the table completed Nath’s hangover cure; there is nothing as sovereign as palines to pick a man up from the floor.

  There are many things I know I have forgotten in my long life. I sincerely believe I shall never forget that ambling ride on an asscart from Sanurkazz to Felteraz along the dusty coast road of the Eye of the World with the warm sunshine golden and glorious upon us, streaming in opaline radiance upon the vineyards and orange groves, and upon the browned and smiling faces of the people we passed. It is a simple memory, but a long one. And those two lusty rogues, Nath and Zolta, rollicked and sang in the cart as we rolled creaking and lurching along the road.

  Felteraz came in sight. I shall say little about the place. The town was charming, high-banked along the terraced side of a hill, trending up to where a great dike cut off the frowning mass of the citadel. I have seen the incomparable view along the brilliant cliffs of Sorrento. Felteraz is something like that. The harbor lay cinctured by a solid granite wall and there was also a lighthouse as there was in Sanurkazz. From the high loft of the citadel I could look out and down along those cliffs which the setting suns crimsoned and opaled in breathtaking radiance, smothered in profuse vegetation, with blooms of gorgeous color and scents of delight breaking the patterns of greenery and rock.

  We rolled along behind our ass up to the drawbridge over the dike, and the bridge was down and a friendly man-at-arms clad in mail let us through. His white surcoat bore a symbol I was to come to know well: two galley oars, crossed, divided upright by a long sword, so that the whole looked something like the letter X with a center upright. The symbol was stitched in red and gold, surrounded by a lenk-leaf border. The man-at-arms lifted his long sword in salute as we passed, and, gravely, I acknowledged it.

  A smiling maid in a white apron, with naked flashing legs, with a sprightly eye that sized up Zolta in a moment, led us into a spacious antechamber hung with tapestry and with solid tables and chairs positioned about. She was gone only five minutes or so and I knew Zenkiren had sent a message, that we were expected.

  Mayfwy, widow to Zorg of Felteraz, entered the room.

  I knew what I had expected. A grand dame, solid, filled with the virtues of her exalted office, wearing stiff robes, brocade, girdled with a golden belt from which hung suspended bunches of iron keys of her responsibilities as chatelaine.

  Of all the inward expectation, Mayfwy possessed only the glittering golden belt.

  From the belt, the chatelaine itself, hung a silver key.

  Mayfwy danced lightly into the room, smiling, brimming over with joy and goodwill. She was young, incredibly young to be what she was. Her mass of dark and curly hair glistened with health and oils and ministrations. Her pert face with its saucy eyes appraised us. Her small and sensuous mouth broke into a smile as she advanced, more sedately, her hand extended.

  “My Lord of Strombor. I am heartily pleased to welcome you to Felteraz.” She beamed on Zolta and Nath. “And to Nath and Zolta, my dear husband’s friends, and therefore my friends. You are heartily welcome.” She laughed, rushing on, giving us no time to speak. “Come. You must be hungry — surely you must be thirsty? Nath, deny it if you can! And you, Zolta, the name of the morsel who showed you in is Sinkle.”

  She went dancing out on her satin slippers and we, like three calsanys, followed her onto a terrace from which the whole breathtaking view of the cliffs and the bay and the harbor below the town spread out below us. I could spare time later to see the view. I studied this girl, this impish sprite, this Mayfwy, who was a widow.

  She wore white, a sheer white linen dress that was held in place over her shoulders by golden pins encrusted with rubies. Her golden belt circled her waist and hung low in the front and to one side, emphasizing the long curves of her. Her figure was lithe and feminine and seductive in an artless way, as though no matter what she did she could never fail to be attractive. In her curled dark hair posies of small forget-me-nots clustered.

  I have little idea of what we talked about, there on that sun-drenched terrace over the blue sea. Nath took himself off to organize a wine delivery system, and Zolta was taken off by Sinkle, who had the grace to giggle as she led him out.

  “Zorg,” I said, and plunged brusquely and brutally into an account of our lives as slaves. She quieted down, and listened attentively. She did not cry, and as I talked and felt the response flowing so gently from her, I knew she had cried all the tears she could shed. Captivity and slavery had worn Zorg down. This elfin sprite had once been his match. Her dark days of agony had passed when news came that Zorg’s galley had been captured. “He was sent to the galleys as a punishment for breaking the heads of those evil men of Magdag. They sought to discipline him. I tell you, Mayfwy, Zorg’s spirit was never broken.” And then I told her of what Zorg had said as he died, but I did not tell her of the ma
nner of his death.

  “He was a proud man, my Lord of Strombor. Proud. I thank you for your goodness in coming to see me.” She gestured, a half helpless little movement of one slender naked arm. She wore no jewelry apart from those blazing rubies in the golden pins clasping the shoulders of her deeply-cut gown. The scent of her perfume came very sweetly as she moved.

  I thought of the Princess Natema Cydones, of the Noble House of Esztercari, in far Zenicce, and then I did not think of Natema, who must by now be married to my friend Prince Varden Wanek of the Noble House of Eward, for some considerable time.

  “You are not drinking your wine, my Lord of Strombor.”

  I reached for the crystal goblet.

  Truth to tell I always preferred the rich and fragrant Kregan tea I had become used to on the Plains of Segesthes with my Clansmen, but this Felteraz wine was light, golden, and sweet, and cloyed not unpleasantly on the tongue.

  “I drink to your eternal happiness, my Lady of Felteraz.”

  It was polite, a formula; it was also clumsy.

  Her face moved toward me, her eyes immense and luminous, dark with remembered pain. “Ah! My Lord of Strombor!”

  I rose and walked to the marble balustrade hanging above the tremendous view. I could see three galleys, hundred-swifters, tucked in the inner harbor, their yards and masts struck down, their awnings up, their oar ports leathered over. Gulls wheeled over the sheer drop. The perfume of the flowers was overpowering.

  We took time, Nath and Zolta and me, to make ourselves as respectable as three ruffianly fighting-men might for the lavish meal Mayfwy provided that evening. The dishes passed before us, served on platters of beaten gold — which always let the food go cold too fast for a real gourmet — and the goblets of wine consumed were beyond counting. Mayfwy laughed and my two companions roared and sang and told stories that brought a sparkle to my Lady of Felteraz’s eyes. Zorg was dead. He now sat in glory on the right hand of Zair in the paradise of Zim. He would not begrudge his old oar comrades some fun and relish from life, nor would he begrudge the girl he had loved the same human needs. We had seen Zorg’s and Mayfwy’s son and daughter: a fine, upright youngster with the features we had come to recognize in Zorg, and a winning little girl who at first was shy until Zolta perched her on his shoulders and pretended to be a sectrix, the while she belabored him with a stick, at which Nath cried out: “That’s the idea, my little darling! Beat him like a calsany! He can only improve!”

  The evening meal which in truth was more like a banquet — and I fancied, not without a twinge of shame, a banquet in our honor — passed. Also present were the guard commander and a number of the chief men of the estates and their ladies, all good kindly folk with country ways that came as refreshing as a cool westerly after days of sweltering in southerlies.

  I was left at last with Mayfwy in a small retiring room, with only three rose-colored lamps for light, with a soft sofa on which she half reclined, her linen dress changed for one in much the same style but created all from shimmering silk, with a side table on which delicate wines waited our attention.

  “Now, my Lord of Strombor,” she said to me, her smooth and elfin face serious, that sensuous little mouth trying to be firm, her hands clasped. “I want you to tell me the truth about Zorg. I can stand it. But I must know the truth!”

  I felt genuine distress.

  How could I explain to her what her man had endured?

  Such a thing was barely possible.

  I could feel my heart thumping. The wine rose to cloud my vision and coiled thickly in my head. The rosy light of the lamps shed gleams on her curled gleaming hair. Her silken dress clung here and there to her body. She half reclined and gazed at me, and her ripe red mouth trembled so that I could think of nothing save obeying her commands; and yet, to speak of what I knew of the horrors of a Magdaggian galley to this girl?

  “My Lord of Strombor,” she said softly, and now her breathing was as unsteady as mine. She leaned toward me, her lips half parted, yet clinging still, her eyelids half closed, her breast rising and falling. “Please — my Lord?”

  I leaned toward her.[3]

  * * * *

  The Magdaggian hundredswifter had turned now, reached around, her oars a smother of foam in the sea. Again a hurtling mass of rock from her aft varter skimmed over our heads. Men were yelling as arrows feathered into them. The Magdag galley turned, her oars churning, and still Zolta had not sorted out the horrible confusion on our rowing benches amidships.

  “Throw them overboard, if you have to, Zolta!” I roared at him. A man at my side screamed and started back with an arrow pierced clean through his eye. “Cut them loose! Get the oars into action!” The hundredswifter was swinging around and her ugly bronze beak was building a comb of white water as she picked up speed.

  In only minutes that bronze rostrum would smash into us, her beak would rend over our parados and men would come leaping like sea-leem down among us. My thinned crew couldn’t stop that strength in boarding.

  Zolta’s sword flashed and flashed again as he cut down the frenzied slaves. Nath was there, down from his place at our forward varters. The whip-deldars were unchaining the dead slaves. The mass of rock from the Magdaggian varter had pulped their naked bodies like nits beneath a thumbnail.

  Slaves toppled over the sides. The splashes as they hit were lost in the uproar. As in the many fights I had been in, some of which I have mentioned, on the Eye of the World, once again I was struck by the absence of the smashing concussion of gunfire, the choking clouds of smoke. I could see, all right. I could hear. Both senses brought me tales of destruction.

  Now our after varter could come into action and the men there let fly and at once began their frenzied efforts to wind up the windlass. The ballista was cocked again. The hundred-swifter was bearing down on us now, gathering speed, the bronze ram cutting the water, the metal gleaming and bright. Where the strengthening wales along the sides met forward at the proembolion the Magdaggian usually covered the junction with a sectrix head of bronze. Above that and beneath the beak the wales met in a bronze risslaca-head, a mythical lizard monster. After the ram had pierced and crushed us below water, the proembolion would push us back off the ram and upright so that the boarders could leap down from their gangways along the beak.

  “Hurry it up, Zolta!” I roared.

  My decks were covered with dead men. Arrows stood everywhere. My own archers were shooting, but I could not see the results of their handiwork past the erected palisade across the low foredeck of the hundredswifter. Her twin banks of oars rose and fell now in a quicker beat. Each blade hit the water as one, in two straight and parallel lines, churning her forward like a runaway train on tracks. I yelled at Nath again and he charged back up to the forward varter and hounded his men there into making a final fling.

  My sword was in my fist.

  If we were captured it would be the galleys of Magdag for us. I had tasted the freedom of the inner sea. I would not willingly go back to slavery again.

  Zolta was beating all the fresh slaves we had up from the hold, herding them onto the benches. Here was one time when a single-banked swifter had advantages. Four slaves to an oar, then huddled down, lifting the looms, preparing for the stroke.

  Even then the whip-deldars were chaining them down. I nodded. That was good. The oarsmen must respond at once to every order. If they were unchained they would be unsettled, thinking of seizing the chance to jump overboard. More of my men fell on the gangways as arrows flew down.

  Zolta waved his sword. His face was as wrathful as a whiter storm.

  “Clear,” he bellowed. “Clear, Captain!”

  I yelled down to the oar-master, but old Rizil was up to the job and at once his silver whistle shrilled, the drum-deldar smashed out the first booming beat, the bass and the tenor drumming in turn. The oars swooped down, hauled water, feathered and lifted in that short but incredibly powerful motion of oars arranged alla scaloccio. I felt Zorg leap through the water.r />
  All our artillery was shooting as we turned, and then the after varter fell silent and it was up to Nath as we swung around, bringing our bow against that of the green galley.

  Bronze ram against bronze ram, now, we hurtled across the narrowing space of water.

  The foe was a hundredswifter, two banked with probably five or six men to an oar. Zorg was a sixtyswifter, single-banked, with four men to an oar. We would be slugged solidly backward at the point of impact.

  Both captains, that man I fought and I, knew what to do in this situation.

  Amid the shrill of wounded men, the clang of the ballistae, and the plunging swoop of the iron birds of the air, we both stood as I stood, on the quarterdeck, waiting, judging, estimating, ready to choose the exact time.

  But — which way would he go?

  He would surely try to ram. As surely he would know I would seek to avoid collision and seek to shave down his side, smashing his cat head, rend away his whole double-bank of oars. But — which side, larboard or starboard?

  I found my face twisting and realized I must be smiling at that Magdaggian captain’s dilemma. He wished to strike me; then he must make the decision. I must needs turn first; he would think. Yes, he surely must think that.

  Zolta was at my side, his sword bloody, panting.

  “If they set foot aboard, Captain, they’ll have to wade over my blood!”

  “Yes, Zolta,” I said.

  My men were crowding forward now, their white surcoats with that brave blazon of Felteraz heartening us all, their long swords ready. They crouched like leems, ready. I spoke quietly to the rudder-deldars.

  I had observed a slight incline in our passage, a slender movement with some current and the gentle breeze.

  “When I give the order,” I told the rudder-deldars, hard-voiced, “turn instantly to starboard. To starboard. When you hear my order. Understood?”

  “Yes, Captain,” they said, sturdily handling their rudders with a skill I had thrashed into them. “We hear.”

  “Come on, Zolta,” I said. I spoke with a false cheeriness. “Let us go forward. Our blades are dry and thirsty.”