Nath chewed reflectively on a chicken bone. He belched. "You may not be worthy, Dray. I will not pretend the decision was easy."
Zolta frowned. "No, Dray. We have served the Krozairs of Zy long and faithfully. And we have not seen your face for many seasons."
Then they both chuckled and drank wine. Spluttering, Nath said: "But we hold you in our ibs and, anyway, you are an oar comrade. That is what counts."
"Also," said Zolta, and I glanced swiftly at him. He had the grace to smile as he spoke. "Also, we spoke to your lady."
"Ah!" said Nath.
My heart leaped. I made them tell me everything. I licked every honey drop I could as they spoke to me of Delia. She had waited in the fortress of Zy, quartered in the lay apartments on the outer face of the rock, unwelcome in many senses, yet in a peculiar and delicate position. When my two odd comrades had discovered what had happened they had seen her at once; without anything definite being said, the compact had been made.
"Now, Dray," said Zolta, "I understand why you left the Eye of the World. I would stride the Stratemsk for such a lady."
Nath belched again. "I would never touch another drop."
When we turned to other matters, after a time, I discovered we were on a small island near the western end of the Eye of the World in an area I had seldom visited previously. This was a small and secret watering place used by the Zairians. The Grodnims had at last achieved a significant ascendancy over the red southern shore. They had actually established outposts and brought troops across. They had won battles. Now they were pushing along the southern shore, from west to east. Nothing could stop them.
"That is when the Call went out. The Krozairs fought but they lost. The Zair-forsaken Grodnims strut on our southern shore and advance steadily eastward. Soon immortal Zy will be besieged."
"Aye! And then it will be the turn of Holy Sanurkazz."
We remained silent for a while, contemplating the impossible.
Nath took up a jug and upended it. The glugging did not stop until the jug was empty. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips.
"By Mother Zinzu the Blessed! I needed that!"
I chilled at his words. The lightheartedness had gone. The euphoria of my escape was fled.
I roused myself as Nath said they would have to be leaving.
"No suspicion attaches to you over the escape?"
Zolta shook his head. They were a pair of ruffians, with the black curly hair of Zairians, with the mahogany brown faces of sailors, with the merry eyes and reckless ways of those of Sanurkazz. But I marked them. The defeats were wearing them down.
"No, Dray. I am a chief varterist, and Nath, for his potbelly, is in charge of stores. We have a certain leeway."
"And a missing slave?"
Nath made a face and Zolta looked fierce.
"Slaves die. Slaves are replaced. We brought up a spare from below. They are mostly Magdaggians, criminals—"
"Criminals — like me!"
"Aye," they both said equably and went out. I saw them off. Their plans might work. They bid me remberee, but they would be back later on, either the next day or the following night. A boat was hidden in that curve of water. They had brought provisions. We would sail out and carve a fresh life for ourselves. I knew that my future, for all its darkness and somber brooding, could go only two ways.
There was much to brood on the following day and I took the same precautions when Nath and Zolta reappeared. They carried further provisions. This time I had taken a longsword into the trees with me.
"The swifter is due to sail tomorrow night, Dray. There are four of them and they plan a descent on a Grodnim convoy. News was brought in by a scout, a dinky little three-twenty swifter. It will be a notable blow."
They were still caught up in the struggle against the green here in the inner sea.
We sat and drank companionably. If they came with me my course seemed marked out. I welcomed them. I would shake off the whole world of the inner sea, forget it, drive from my mind any remembrance that once I had been a Krozair of Zy.
I said: "Did Delia tell you anything of what I’ve been up to in the outer world since I left here?"
They looked at me oddly.
Nath drank and wiped his mouth and declared roundly: "The Lady Delia is a princess! By Buzro’s Magic Staff! She is a princess from the top of her head to the tips of her feet, and she says you are a prince — the Prince Majister of Vallia, no less."
"For my sins, Nath, old comrade."
"Aye," said Zolta, putting a finger to his beak of a nose. "And she says you are a king of some place called Djanduin. If that is to be believed."
"What, you great onker!" roared Nath. "Do you doubt the word of Lady Delia?"
"No, no, you great oaf of a chunkrah! I doubt that this poor fellow here, this Stylor, could ever be a king!"
Nath subsided, rumbling. By Vox! How I needed their fierce heartwarming clowning, but how hollow it all struck me as I insisted on contemplating the future I beheld.
"Yes. Yes, I am a prince and a king. They mean nothing."
I did not go on. They stared at me keenly, and then Nath slowly said: "Lady Delia told us to tell you." He stopped and glared at Zolta. "Well, you nit that crawls on a calsany’s back! You are the lady-killer, you tell Dray what’s what!"
Zolta put his jug of wine on the dirt floor. His fierce bold eyes sized me up. We did not know the history of Zolta, yet he carried the proud Z not only just in his name, but as the initial letter of his name. Much was to be known of Zolta. As for Nath, as the son of an illiterate ponsho-farmer from Zullia, which is a village to the south of Sanurkazz, his whole history was writ in his large and powerful frame, his weather-beaten face, his addiction to drink, his jovial rough-necking and his loyalty. Now both of them stared at me as though they pondered the wisdom of their deeds.
"Tell me, by Vox!"
"Vox?" said Zolta. "You have been away a long time."
I said nothing, only waited.
Zolta heaved up a sigh and fixed me with an eye like that of a fish on a slab. "Very well, then, but how you come to be married to so divine a creature . . ." Here Nath nudged him and he went on. Despite his inclinations the seriousness crept in to shadow his words. "Lady Delia has said that, in view of certain impending developments, she feels it her duty to return to — where was it? — Ester Rarok?"
"Esser Rarioch. It is my home in Valka."
"Valka. Oh, aye."
"Return home? Impending developments? Tell me, in the sweet name of Zair!"
Nath shuffled his feet. Zolta picked up his wine jug and put it down. "You saw her in some stinking fish cell in Zy?"
"Yes — yes!"
"So that’s why she is going home."
I felt stunned.
Then Zolta said, "She is so well aware of you, Dray, knows you so well. You told her you wished to reinstate yourself as a Krozair of Zy."
"Did I? I scarcely remember. And I find I do not overmuch care now—"
"That’s a lie!"
"Aye."
"So she wants you to do what you can. She believes in you. By Zair, you great fambly! If I had a wife like that . . ." And here Nath swelled his massive chest. "I’d be pretty damn careful about how I upset her, I can tell you, Makki-Grodno take me else!"
"Did I upset her?"
"It would take a very great deal," said Zolta, at last, picking up his jug, "to upset Lady Delia. She wants you to regain your rightful place as a Krozair of Zy."
"Yes, she was very particular about that. Tell him,’ she said, ’tell him I wear the Krozair badge still, and will not unpin it until he returns home to Valka and tells me to take it off with his own lips.’ That’s what she said, aye, and she meant it too!"
They both nodded like those balancing birds dipping their beaks in liquid.
"Fight back! Fight for what you believe is the right of it!"
How well I could picture my Delia saying those words, proud, chin lifted, her eyes sparkling
with a dangerous light that the uncouth might construe as unshed tears. How my Delia knew me! And yet was it so strange? I had made no secret to her of my attachment to the Krozairs of Zy, and she had sent her two sons there, without question, joying in seeing them go through the same stringent disciplines as their father had endured. She must see the good in the Krozairs. She must regard my Apushniad as a mere interruption, to be cleared up, a passing shadow.
My Delia is seldom wrong in matters of this kind.
I felt that no dramatic gesture was necessary. So I simply said, "It will not be easy. There are things I cannot explain. Things that no sane man would believe. But I will try! I will fight back."
They both beamed at me.
Nath slapped his knee and Zolta twirled his arrogant mustaches.
"Lady Delia said — well, no matter. She knew. She told us what you would say, almost word for word. You see, Dray Prescot, Lady Delia loves you as you love her."
Chapter fourteen
The fight in the clearing
Soon the Zairian swifter Zulfirian Avenger would weigh and make for the sea in company with three others of her kind, long, low sea-leems of the Eye of the World, ready to fall on a Grodnim convoy and joy in battle and slaughter and destruction. As responsible Zimen, men devoted as lay brothers to the care and comfort of the Krozairs of Zy, my two oar comrades Nath and Zolta should sail in her.
They had aided me to escape from the rowing benches. So far they were above suspicion, or so they claimed.
One of the courses that had been open to me before they told me of Delia’s words had been to take them back with me to the outer oceans, back to Valka, where I would heap honors on them and shower them with chunkrah herds and mineral wealth and broad kools of land and drown them in gold.
As Zair is my witness I did not then really know if that kind of life would suit them well or ill. They were rough, tough sailors, accustomed to the hardships of life afloat in swifters in the inner sea. How would they take to the ways of life of Vallia and Valka, of Djanduin and Strombor?
Then I reassured myself. They were adaptable. They would do more than survive. And with some of the pretty girls out there Zolta could be very happy, and Nath, I felt sure, would pronounce a good Jholaix as fine as his best Zond.
Well?
The truth was I did not intend to leave the Eye of the World until I was once more dubbed a Krozair of Zy.
The issue was perfectly plain.
I could not ask them to come with me on a mission of so much peril and of importance only to me. They would throw everything for which they had worked away, abandon their careers, which I now knew had brought them to the ranks of zan-Deldars, ready to make the all-important leap across to ob-Hikdars. One was a chief varterist, the other a Palinter, a purser of the lower rank. No. No, it would be foully cruel of me to snatch them away from their own lives into lives filled with cruelty and danger and death, merely to serve my own selfish ends.
I valued them far too much to do that to them.
So I thought then, as I sat in the miserable hut and planned what I would do.
They had told me that Pur Zenkiren, who had known them too well for their own comfort, had been passed over when old Pur Zazz had at last died and gone to sit in glory on the right hand of Zair in the paradise of Zim. The battles he had fought up along the eastern shores had slid and slipped away so that gradually Proconia had been lost to the allies of Magdag. Nath had said, with a round Makki-Grodno oath, that the Grodnims he called Yoggur-cramphs had rolled down from the north with huge armies of diffs. Chuliks, Rapas, Katakis — at which my eyebrows had lifted — Ochs and Naor’vils like clouds driven before the winds of heaven, rampaging down with their mercenary ibs uplifted by the gold promised by the Overlords of Yoggur, following the green banners.
"We stopped ’em, in the end. The place was a defile, a good defensive position." Zolta licked his lips. "I was told by a Deldar who lost an eye. The place was called Appar, from which the battle takes its name. This Deldar did not relish the telling. But Pur Zenkiren marshaled his forces and we fought and we stopped them, the rasts of Grodno and their Zair-forsaken beast-men allies."
This was a thing I had long noted, how the men of the red southern shore seldom employed diffs, and how very few of the myriads of marvelous halfling races of Kregen made their homes along the southern shore of the inner sea of Turismond. How important a factor in my life — aye! and the destiny of Kregen — this proved to be you shall hear.
Appar is situated south of Pattelonia, which is the capital of Proconia. We had lost much ground then. And because of this, with no thought given to his final heroic stand, Pur Zenkiren had not been elected to be Grand Archbold of the Krzy.
His presence on the Ombor Throne in the Hall of Judgment would have made no difference to the sentence passed on me. I had been tried in my absence and found guilty; the Krzy merely gave me the outward show, as my right as a Krozair, to witness my own condemnation. Zenkiren could scarcely have subverted justice. So I must see him. There were one or two plans I had in that direction. When I say the Krozairs have no mercy I must qualify the bald statement as, clearly, you will already have realized is necessary. I had been granted the boon of a short meeting with my wife. For this the Krozairs showed the compassion which made them human. Without this Zair-inspired gift I doubt if my allegiance to the Krzy and my willingness to place the education of my sons in their care could have existed.
The day passed slowly. I drank sparingly and ate well and sharpened up the best of the longswords my rogues had brought. They were not Krozair longswords, being of that pattern issued to the men who fought in the swifters. For all that, they were fine weapons. Naghan the Gnat would have sniffed at them, no doubt, as would Wil of the Bellows in far Djanduin, but they would serve.
As I had done before, I slipped out before the last of the glow of the Suns of Scorpio faded from the sky. From my leafy point of observation I awaited either Nath and Zolta, a party from the swifters intent on retaking me, or simply no one at all.
I saw the leaves moving alongside the trail and I frowned.
Whoever approached the hut was coming up from the other direction. I took a grip on the sword. This looked promising.
The last of that glorious streaming mingled light of Antares fell on the edge of the little clearing past the corner of the hut. It sparkled on the strip of water curving in and shone on the loose camouflaging cover of the boat hidden there.
A warrior stepped out onto the path, tensed, head high, his weapons ready.
He was a Chulik.
I did not need the green badges, the embroideries and studding of his uniform to know him. A mercenary Chulik in the employ of Grodnim yetches, he stood there alertly while he was joined by two of his fellows. I marked them well.
All wore their heads shaved beneath the helmets, with the long tails dangling down their backs, all dyed green, bright and ominous in the last emerald fires of Genodras.
Chuliks are born with two arms and two legs and possess faces which, apart from the three-inch, upward-reaching tusks, might have been human, except that they know nothing of humanity. Their skin is oily yellow and their black eyes are small, round and habitually fixed in gazes of hypnotic rigidity. They are strong, with bodies well-fleshed with fat, and they are quick. They are superb weapon-masters.
These three quite clearly were a scout party, sniffing out the secrets of the Zairians on this small island. Once they saw the four swifters they would report back. The projected attack by the men of Zair would be betrayed — betrayed and doomed.
No doubt the swifter from which they had come lurked on the opposite shore, ready to race back to the main fleet with news.
Well, I had been dishonored and condemned by the men of Zair. I had been rejected, considered fit for the fight only to pull an oar. I was a Valkan, a Vallian, Lord of Strombor, King of Djanduin. What were the petty squabbles of red and green to such a mighty man as I? These sarcastic thoughts passed throug
h my head and were gone like swallows at evening. Surely this was a test, sent by Zair himself.
Slowly, comfortably, I stood up and stepped out into the clearing. The last shards of emerald light fell across the trees, turning them into jeweled marvels. The air sang with the sound of evening insects. The grass glittered with dew.
The Chuliks saw me.
I was still hairy although washed clean. I wore a brave old scarlet breechclout. They knew, as I knew, that we could not allow a survivor. They must slay me or I must slay them. The destinies of Grodno and Zair demanded nothing less.
With an absolute confidence that might have shaken less of a maniac than I am they advanced, their longswords ready.
The first Chulik surprised me.
"Cramph! Lay down your sword and yield, lest we slay you."
I overcame my surprise. This was not mercy. This was a mere device to take a prisoner and extract information.
I said: "You three are dead men."
Chuliks and I, we do not laugh often. A diff of another race might have thrown his head back and guffawed his scorn and merriment. These three spread out and came on, silently.
The green light would soon be all gone. The sword glimmered like ice in my fists. I did not use the cunning Krozair grip. I have spoken a little of this Krozair longsword grip, but there is much more to it than the mere spacing out of the hands on the handle, much more, including the angle of the hands, the placing of the thumbs, the delicate and yet brutal over- and underhand play — yes, much more. The Chuliks would know about Krozairs. They came on with sure purpose. After that first exchange it was all silent and deadly there beneath the dying green sun.
I leaped.
I did not wait for them.
The sword chirred. In the moment of leaping, before I landed and gripped the bulk of Kregen beneath my feet and struck, I had shifted grips. The full force of the longsword flung by the cunning, twisting motion of the Krozair grip ripped the head from the first Chulik’s shoulders.
Stupid! Wasteful! This was not the professional fighting man-killer Dray Prescot; this was the old savage and barbaric Dray Prescot of bygone years.
The Tides of Kregen Page 13
