Transit to Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  A new timbre arose in the din. Perhaps the slaves were not being dismissed so easily. I chanced a peek around a block and saw the sunshine lying athwart the jetty, with the guards and the Rapa slaves battling in a savage and unholy conflict. Iron chains whirled with reckless and desperate courage make fearsome weapons.

  I saw three men bundling a woman into a small low skiff by the jetty wall. Evidently they had been caught by the slaves’ first onslaught and were unable to escape. Now the canal was their only chance. The skiff cast off and swung and collided with the first wherry and a flung chain fairly took the head from the man at the oars so that he lolled all dripping and bloody over the side. The woman screamed. The second man seized the oars; but the body cumbered him. The skiff bounced down the side of the wherry. Now a group of slaves seized their chance.

  With shrill vulturine shrieks they leaped onto the marble blocks of the wherry, bounded to the stern and leaped down into the skiff. It plunged wildly in the water. The two men, and their dead companion, were tipped overboard without ceremony. Two Rapas seized the oars. Another pair sprawled in the sternsheets, their chains still whirling in reflexive violence. A fifth jumped forward and seized the woman about the waist and pressed her to him, twisting and holding her up so that she could be clearly seen from the jetty.

  His intentions were plain.

  “Let us go!” he shrilled. “Or the woman dies!”

  A confused shouting rose above the battle din.

  The woman’s screams knifed through the uproar, and unsettled me. I thought of my men, waiting for me. I thought of Delia. I do not know what I thought.

  I only know I could not see a woman killed this way, so uselessly. If you ask me if it had been human slaves escaping and using the despised body of an aristocratic woman to shield them, I do not know how I would answer.

  Without a sound I jumped from the sunken wherry into the skiff. I tried not to kill. I toppled the two oarsmen overboard. The two men in the bows reared up, their chains chirring with ugly menace.

  “Slave—die!” and “Human—perish!” they shouted.

  Had they not shouted that, perhaps I would not have fought as I did. But I did fight. My chain blurred through the air and sliced a vulturine beak; the thing gargled and toppled. I ducked the second chain and then brought my own back so fast I nearly overbalanced. It looped around that incredibly thin and long neck, doubled on itself. I yanked and the Rapa staggered forward so that I could land a solid blow. He collapsed. I heard a shout behind me and ducked again and the chain smashed a huge chunk from the wooden side of the skiff. I sprang to face the last Rapa.

  He poised, the chain circling.

  His beaked face leered on me; he knew all must be over for him—and yet, could he dispose of me and row for the main canal he would be away, and with a human woman as a hostage. He had all to play for. I feinted and the chain hissed. I pulled back and he leered at me again.

  “Human offal!” His gobbling croak harsh in my ears stilled the mad thumping of my heart. I sized him up. That chain could break an arm, a leg, could throttle me, long before I could reach him. I flexed my legs, braced against the bottom boards where water slopped. He had not, perhaps, the experience in boats I had. I began to rock from side to side.

  His arms flew up. The chain circled crazily. The woman was clutching the transom in both hands I could not see her face for she wore a heavy veil of emerald silk. I rocked furiously. The Rapa staggered and lurched, recovered his balance, toppled the other way. The gunwales of the fragile skiff were slopping water at each roll.

  With a shriek of mingled fury and despair the Rapa dropped his chain and lurched down to grab at the gunwale and with a last savage rocking motion of my leg I tipped him clean out of the boat. He flew across the water and went in face first, spread-eagled. His splash was a magnificent flower of foam. I did not laugh.

  I quietened the skiff in the water and seized the oars. The Rapa drifted away. I turned to the woman.

  “Well, my girl,” I said harshly. “You’re all right. No harm has come to you.”

  I did not want her to panic, lest she upset the skiff.

  She regarded me through the eyeslits of her veil. She sat very still and straight. I towered above her, my naked chest heaving from the slight exertion of the fight, water and sweat rivuleting down my thighs where the ridged muscle shone hard, like iron.

  She wore a long gown of emerald green, unrelieved by ornament. Above the green veil she wore a tricorne hat of black silk, with a curled emerald green feather. Her hands were cased in white gloves, and on three of her fingers, outside the gloves, she wore rings: one emerald, one ruby and one sapphire.

  I began to pull back to the jetty.

  A story to account for my broken slave chains rose into my mind.

  The woman had not said anything. She sat so still, so silent, that I thought she must be in shock.

  When we reached the jetty she stood up and held out a foot in its jeweled strappings. I reached out my palm and she put her foot in that brown and powerful hand and I lifted her up onto the jetty as an elevator lifts one up through the giant trunks of the plant-houses in distant Aphrasöe.

  A certain concern was removed from my mind as I saw floating in the water the form of a Rapa guard with a slave chain wrapped around his neck, his great beaked face twisted sideways and loose from his trunk. He was a Deldar, a commander of ten, and he had been the sixth guard aboard our wherry.

  Slowly I climbed onto the jetty.

  The woman was surrounded by a clamoring mob of guards and nobles in gaudy finery. Of slaves there was no sign save the blood that stained the stones beneath their feet.

  “Princess!” they were calling. And: “We thought your precious light had been removed from us!” And: “Praise be to mighty Zim and to thrice-powerful Genodras that you are safe!”

  She turned to face me, her head high, her gown stiff and tent-like about her, her jeweled feet invisible. She lifted a white-gloved hand and the babble fell silent.

  “Dray Prescot,” she said, and, saying, astonished me beyond words. “You may incline to me.”

  I stood there in the light of the twin suns, a reddish shadow from my heels lying north-northwest and a greenish shadow lying northwest by north, give or take a point. Nowadays, of course, a ship can be steered to a degree; it is wonderful what a difference steam and diesel and nuclear power have made to navigation of the oceans—I gaped at her.

  The man I remembered as Galna thrust forward. His face was at once ugly and vengeful and gloating. His all-over green leathers glistened in that Antarean sunshine.

  “I shall run him through now, my Princess, as you desire.”

  He drew a rapier from a velvet lined sheath. I hardly noticed the thing. I stared at the woman. Incline to her? I did not want to die. I bowed, a stiffly formal making of a leg, my right hand elegantly waving in the air before my breast and then finishing up, fingers gracefully curled; before me, my leg stuck forward, the other back, my left arm outstretched behind me, my head bowed over low—low!

  If this absurd posture, so carefully taught in the scented drawing rooms of Europe, should be taken as an insult—I heard a light laugh.

  “Do not kill the rast now, Galna. He will make better sport—later.”

  I straightened up. “I was freed from my chains by the Rapa guard so as to help better with the marble—” I began to say. Galna struck me viciously across the face with the flat of his rapier. At least, he would have done, had I not jerked my head back. Men jumped forward.

  “Down, rast, when the princess addresses you.”

  An arm laid across my back, a foot twitched my ankles, and I was down, spine bent, rear high, nose thrust painfully into the stones of the jetty where marble dust irritated my eyes and nostrils. Four men held me.

  “Incline, rast!”

  Perforce, I inclined. I had learned something a slave of the Esztercari Household must know in order to stay alive.

  Even then, as my nose
bumped painfully in the marble dust of the jetty, I contrasted this barbarous posture with the graceful gestures of the ceremony of obi.

  I knew that death was very near.

  Princess Natema Cydones stirred me with her jeweled foot. Her toes were lacquered that same brilliant green.

  “You may crouch, slave.”

  Assuming this meant exactly what it sounded like I sat up in a crouching position, like a fawning dog. No one struck me, so I guessed I had learned a little more. There had been some sharp words, and muttering, and acid commands from the group and now I heard the clink of chains. A short stout man clad in a pale gray tunic-like garment bound with emerald green borders, and with two large green key-shaped devices stitched to his breast and back, now strutted forward. Under the fuming eyes and pointed rapiers of Galna and the other nobles, this man loaded me with chains. He snapped an iron ring about my neck, an iron band about my waist, wristlets and anklets, and from loops on all of these weighty objects he strung what seemed to me more than a cable’s length of harsh iron chain.

  “See that he is transferred to my opal palace, Nijni,” ordered the princess, casually, as though discussing the delivery of a new pair of gloves. No—as I was prodded along by the slave-master Nijni’s sturm-wood wand of office, I knew I was wrong. She would give more concern, much more concern, to the choosing of a new pair of gloves.

  I had escaped from one kind of slavery to that of another.

  The future loomed as dark and perilous as ever. Only one ray of hope in all this I could see—my men, my loyal clansmen, my brothers in obi, had been set free from their slavery and their chains.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Princess Natema Cydones of the Noble House of Esztercari

  How my brothers in obi would have laughed to see me now! How those fierce fanatical clansmen would have roared their mirth to see their Zorcander, their Vovedeer, dressed like a popinjay! Three days had passed since my futile attempt at escape. I knew I had been bought from the marble quarries. When the Princess Natema wanted anything men trembled for their lives until that thing was brought her. Now I strode the tiny wooden box in the attic of the opal palace I had been given as my room—strange, I had thought when a gray-clad slave girl had shown me in with a furtive, scared look—and stared at myself in contempt.

  I had refused to don the garments; but Nijni, the fat, dour, ever-cham-chewing slave-master had whistled up three immense fellows—scarcely human with their bristle bullet-heads, their massively rolling shoulders, their thick dun-colored hides mantled with muscles of near-armor thickness and toughness, their short sinewy legs and slayed feet—two to hold me and the third to strike me painfully across the back and buttocks with a thin cane. This was so remarkably like the rattans carried by our warrant officers of the King’s Ships on which I had served that I received three strokes before I had sense enough to cry out that I would don the garments, for, after all, what did foolish fancy dress signify in so much of squalor and misery?

  The man who had struck me, and I must think of him as a man although from what pot of incestuous and savage genes he sprang I do not care to contemplate, leaned close as he went out.

  “I am Gloag,” he said. “Do not despair. The day will come.” He spoke in, a voice throttled in his throat, a whisper from lungs and voice box used to a stentorian bellow as a normal method of conversation.

  I gave no sign I had heard.

  So now I looked in dissatisfaction at myself. I wore a fancy shirt of emerald and white lozenges, with scarlet embroidery. A silk pair of breeches of yellow and white, with a great embroidered cummerbund of eye-watering colors. On my head perched a great white and golden turban, ablaze with glass stones, and gay feathers, and dangling beads. I felt not only a fool, I felt a nincompoop.

  If my savage brethren of the plains of Segesthes saw me now what would they not make in jest and ribald comment of their feared and respected Vovedeer?

  Nijni came for me with Gloag and his men, and three lithe lissom young slave girls. The girls were clad in strings of pearls and precious little else. Gloag and his men were from Mehzta, one of the nine islands of Kregen. They wore the usual simple gray breechclout of the slave, but they each had an emerald green waistbelt, from which dangled the slim rattan cane. I went with them. In my naïveté I had no idea of where I was going, or of why I was dressed as I was, or even why I had been forced, not unpleasantly, to go through the baths of the nine. This was simply a process of proceeding from lukewarm water where the grime washed off me in sooty clouds into the liquid, through nine rooms where the water grew at each step hotter and hotter until the sweat rolled from me, and then colder and colder until I shouted and shivered and bounded as though from ice floes. I did feel invigorated, though.

  Nijni paused before an ornate gold and silver door set with emeralds. From a side table he took a box and from the box a paper-wrapped bundle. Carefully he pared back the tissue. Within, virginal, white, gleaming, lay a pair of incredibly thin white silk gloves.

  The slave girls with exquisite delicacy helped me don the gloves. Nijni looked at me, chewing endlessly on his wad of cham, his head cocked on one side.

  “For every rip or tear in the gloves,” he said, “you will receive three strokes of the rattan. “For every soil mark, one stroke. Do not forget.” Then he threw open the doors.

  The room was small, sumptuous, refined past elegance, decadent. It was, I suppose, what one would expect of a princess who had been brought up from birth to have every whim instantly gratified, to have every luxury heaped on her as a right, and who had never felt the restraining touch of an older or wiser hand, or the sound common sense of a person to whom everything is not possible.

  She reclined on a chaise longue beneath a golden lamp carved in the semblance of one of the graceful flightless birds of the plains of Segesthes the clansmen love to hunt and catch to give their bright feathers to the girls of the vast chunkrah herds. She wore a short gown of emerald green—that eternal hateful color—relieved by a silken vest of silver tissue. Her arms were bare, round and rosy in the light. Her ankles were neat, her calves fine, but I thought her thighs a fraction heavy, firm and round and delightful; but that infinitesimal fraction too thick for a man of my finicky tastes. Her lush yellow hair was piled atop her head and held in place by pins with emerald gems. The sweetness of her mouth shone red and warm and inviting.

  Beyond her, in an alcove, I could see the lower body and feet of a gigantic man clad in mesh steel. His chest and head were hidden from view by two carved ivory swing doors. By his side, its point resting on the floor, he held a long rapier. I did not need to be told that a single command from the Princess Natema would bring him in a single bound into the room, that deadly point at my throat or buried in my heart.

  “You may incline,” she said.

  I did so. She had not called me a rast. A rast, I knew now, was a disgusting six-legged rodent that infested dunghills. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe, apart from my four limbs and my larger size I, in this palace, was no better than a rast in his dunghill. At least, that was his nature.

  “You may crouch.”

  I did so.

  “Look at me.”

  I did so. In all truth, that was not a hard command to obey.

  Slowly, languorously, she rose from the couch. Her white arms, rounded and rosy in the lamplight, reached up and, artfully, lasciviously, she pulled the emerald pins from her hair so that it fell in a glory around her. She moved about the room, lightly, gracefully, scarcely seeming to touch the scented rugs of far Pandahem with those pink feet with their emerald-lacquered toenails that shone so wantonly. The green gown drooped about her shoulders and I caught my breath as those two firm rounds appeared beneath the silk; lower down her arms dropped the gown, lower, sliding with a kind of breathless hiss, so that at last she stood before me clad only in the white tissue vest that ended in a scalloped edge across her thighs. Silver threads glittered through the tissue. Her form glowed within like some sacred fla
me within the holy precincts of a temple.

  She stared down on me, insolently, taunting me, knowing full well the power and the drug of her body. Her red lips pouted at me, and the lamplight caught on them and shot a dazzling star of lust into my eyes.

  “Am I not a woman, Dray Prescot?”

  “Aye,” I said. “You are a woman.”

  “Am I of all women not the most fair?”

  She had not touched me—yet.

  I considered.

  Her face tightened on me. Her breathing came, sharper, with a gasp. She stood before me, head thrown back, hair a shining curtain about her, her whole body instinct with all the weapons of a woman.

  “Dray Prescot! I said—am I of all women not the most fair?”

  “You are fair,” I said.

  She drew in her breath. Her small white hands clenched.

  She stared down on me and I became closely aware of that grim mailed swordsman half-hidden in the alcove.

  Now her contempt flowed over me like sweetened honey.

  “You, perhaps, know one who is fairer than I?”

  I stared up at her, levelly, eye to eye. “Aye. I did, once. But she, I think, is dead.”

  She laughed, cruelly, mockingly, hatefully. “Of what use a dead woman to a live man, Dray Prescot! I pardon your offense—” She halted herself, and put one hand to her heart, pressing. “I pardon you,” she said, again, wonderingly. Then: “Of all women living, am I not the most fair?”

  I acknowledged that. I saw no reason to get myself killed for the sake of a spoiled brat’s pride. My Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains—I thought of her then and a pang of agony touched me so that I nearly forgot where I was and groaned aloud. Could Delia be dead? Or could she have been taken by the Savanti back to Aphrasöe? There was no way I could find that out except by finding the City of the Savanti—and that seemed impossible even if I were free.

  As though suddenly wearying of this petty taunting, although, heaven knew, she was prideful enough of her beauty, she flung herself wantonly on the chaise longue, her head back, her arms flung casually out, her golden hair cascading down to the rugs from far Pandahem. “Bring me wine,” she said, indolently, pointing with her jeweled foot.