Obediently I arose and filled the crystal goblet with a golden, light wine I did not recognize, from the great amber flask. It did not smell particularly good to me. She did not offer me any to drink; I did not care.
“My father,” she said, as though her mind had turned ninety degrees into the wind, “has a mind I should marry the Prince Pracek, of the House of Ponthieu.” I did not answer. “The Houses of Esztercari and of Ponthieu are at the moment aligned and in control of the Great Assembly. I speak of these matters to you, dolt, so that you may realize I am not just a beautiful woman.” Still I did not reply. She went on, dreamily: “Between us we have fifty seats. With the other Houses, both Noble and Lay, who are aligned with us, we form a powerful enough party to control all that matters. I shall be the most powerful woman in all Zenicce.”
If she expected a reply she received none.
“My father,” she said, sitting up and propping her rounded chin on her fist and regarding me with those luminous cornflower blue eyes. “My father, because he holds the power of the alignment, is the city’s Kodifex, its emperor. You should feel extremely fortunate, Dray Prescot, to be slave in the Noble House of Esztercari.”
I lowered my head.
“I think,” she said, in that dreamy voice, “I will have you hung from a beam and whipped. Discipline is a good item in the agenda for you to learn.”
I said: “May I speak, Princess?”
She lifted her breast in a sudden deep intake of breath. Her eyes glowed molten on me. Then: “Speak, slave!”
“I have not been a slave long. I am growing uncomfortable in this ridiculous position. If you do not allow me to stand up I shall probably fall over.”
She flinched back, her brows drawing down, her lips trembling. I am not sure, even now, even after all these long years, if she truly realized she was being made fun of. Such a thing had never happened to her before—so how could she know? But she knew I had not responded as a slave should. In that disastrous moment for her she lost the semblance of a haughty princess beneath whose jeweled feet all men were a rasts. Her silver vest crinkled with the violence of her breathing. Then she snatched up her green gown and swathed it carelessly about her body and struck with her polished fingernails upon a golden gong hung on cords within arm’s reach of the chaise longue.
At once Nijni and the slave girls and Gloag and his men entered.
“Take the slave back to his room.”
Nijni cringed, making the half-incline.
“Is he to be punished, oh Princess?”
I waited.
“No, no—take him back. I will call for him again.”
Gloag, as it seemed to me, very roughly bundled me out.
The three slave girls in their scanty strings of pearls were laughing and giggling and looking at me slyly from the corners of their slanting blue eyes. I wondered what the devil they were finding to chatter about; and then bethought me of my ludicrous clothing. I thought what Rov Kovno, or Loku, or Hap Loder, would make of them, on the backs of voves riding into the red sunset of Antares on the great plains of Segesthes.
Gloag clapped me on the back.
“At least, you still live, Dray Prescot.”
We left that scented powdered corridor where Nijni removed the silken gloves from my hands. The wine had stained my right thumb. He looked up, crowing, chewing his cham-cud.
“One stroke of the rattan!” he said, annoyed it was not more. A slave girl in the drab gray breechclout of all slave menials walked around the corner before us carrying a huge earthenware jar of water. A lamp swung from golden chains beyond her head suddenly aureoled her hair and shone into my eyes. I turned my face away, glowering at Nijni.
I heard a desperate gasp. I heard the jar of water smash into a thousand pieces and the water splash and leap in that hidden corridor of a decadent palace. I looked up, moving my eyes away from the light so I could see.
Clad in the gray breechclout, her head high and face frozen, her eyes filled with tears, Delia of the Blue Mountains looked hard and long at me, Dray Prescot, clad in those foolish and betraying clothes.
Then, with a sob of anger and despair, she rushed from my sight.
Chapter Twelve
The Jiktar and the Hikdar
Was it truly Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains?
How could it be? A slave, in the gray breechclout, was that my Delia? I was back in my little wooden room behind the ornate facade lining one of the tilting roofs of Princess Natema’s opal palace. I groaned. Delia, Delia, Delia…
It must have been a girl who in that sudden lamplit illumination had reminded me of Delia. Then why had she turned from me with tear-filled eyes, why had she run from me, sobbing with anguish—or choking back her anger and scorn? In truth I did not know, so tumbled were my thoughts, just how this girl had reacted.
An over-man-size statue of a Talu, one of those mythical, as I thought, eight-armed people of the sloe-eyes and the bangles and the dances, carved all in the ivory of the mastodon trunk, had been standing on the corner beyond the lamp. It had gleamed palely ivory at me as I leaped forward. I collided with the thing and, instinctively catching it and supporting it, its eight arms a wagon wheel of wanton display about me, fingertips touching in erotic meaning, I lost sight of the girl who vanished between the mazes of colored pillars supporting the roof. A giant gong note sounded.
Nijni was puffing and chewing furiously.
“She will not escape!” he shouted, gobbling the words, beside himself. “I shall have her whipped on that fair skin—”
I took his gray tunic between my fingers, and gripped, and lifted him until the curled toes of his slippers left the carpet and he dangled in my fist. I thrust my ugly face into his.
“Rast!” I roared at him. “If you so much as have one hair of her head injured I shall break your back!”
He gobbled to speak, and could not, although his meaning was plain.
“Though you flog me a thousand and a thousand times,” I snarled at him, shaking him, “I shall break your back.”
I dumped him down onto the carpet where he staggered back into the arms of the slave girls who had huddled, staring at me in terror. I noticed how slowly Gloag and his men had come to the assistance of the slave-master. Now they stepped forward, whistling their rattans about their heads, and I was prepared to be taken back to my room. Here Gloag administered the single stroke I had earned by spilling wine on my silk glove. I thought his stroke oddly fierce. He whispered to me as they left.
“The time is not yet. Do not arouse their suspicions, or by Father Mehzta-Makku I’ll break your back myself!”
Then he was gone.
Of course I tried to find out about the slave who had smashed and spilled the water jar; but no one would tell me anything and I fumed and fretted in that stifling room. Occasionally, wearing those infernally idiotic clothes, I would be taken out into a tree-shaded courtyard for exercise, and twice I saw the green-gowned and veiled form of a woman I surmised to be Natema watching me. No noble woman of Zenicce would venture beyond the confines of her enclave unveiled.
There were three more interviews with her, as unsatisfactory as the first, and on the last occasion she made me strip for her, a proceeding I found extraordinarily unpleasant and degrading; but necessary in light of the swordsman in the alcove and the rattans of the beings of Mehzta on guard outside the door. I gathered from the laughing comments of the pearl-strung slave girls that the princess was sizing me up and taking stock of my points as she might a zorca or a half-vove. The half-voves were the smaller and lighter and far less-fierce animals, like small voves, these people used.
Her contempt blazed on me, her scorn dripped on me, her complete disregard of me as a human being showed me how utterly she despised me. I did not care. I craved news of Delia. How Natema loved to flaunt her insolent rosy curves in my face! I sensed she was attempting to arouse me to some grand act of folly. I was not to be so lightly gulled.
Once she
had Gloag and his men flog me with their rattans for no reason other, I supposed, than a girlish desire to impress me with her power. This time Gloag took it easy on me, and my skin was not broken, although it hurt damnably enough. All the time Natema stood with her lower lip caught between her teeth, her cornflower blue eyes enormous and shining, her hands clasped convulsively to her breast.
“Understand, rast, that I am your mistress, your divine lord and master! You are as nothing beneath my feet!” She stamped her jeweled foot at me, her breast heaving with the tumult of her passion. I did not smile at her, although it would have been treacherously easy a thing to do, for I thought the gesture meaningless. Nevertheless, I did say: “I trust you sleep well tonight, Princess.”
She stepped forward and struck me with her dainty white hand. A blow across the face I scarcely felt, so intense were the pains from my back. I looked at her, brows lowered, chin lifted, broodingly.
“You would make an interesting slave,” I said.
She whirled away, shaking with a passion that Gloag, for one, did not want to try. He and his men hustled me out and a crone with a withered face and one eye doctored my back. I’d been used to flogging as part of naval discipline and four days, with the help of ointments and rest, saw me completely recovered. Gloag had proved a friend.
“Can you use a spear?” he asked me as the crone worked on my back.
“Yes.”
“Will you use one, when the time is here?”
“Yes.”
He bent down to me as I lay face down on the bed of my room. His blunt, square, powerful face studied mine quizzically. Then he nodded, as though finding something that satisfied him.
“Good,” he said.
The Noble House of Esztercari employed no Rapa slaves. According to the other slaves it was because the Rapas stank in the nostrils of their mistress. This would be true. They employed no Rapa guards. There were Ochs, and the Mehztas, who were slaves but with petty powers involving the use of the rattan, and other fearsome creatures I occasionally glimpsed about the opal palace. And still I could find no word of Delia—or the girl who might be Delia of Delphond.
The palace was a warren in the manner of these immense structures built by slave-labor and accreting through the years under the varying whims of successive dynasties. I had a limited run of those corridors and halls beneath the roof; but all exits were guarded by strong detachments of Chuliks, who were born with two arms and two legs like men and who possessed faces which, apart from the three-inch long upward-reaching tusks, might have been human; but who in all else knew nothing of humanity. Their skin was a smooth oily yellow and their skulls were shaved except for a green-dyed rope of hair that fell to their waists. Their eyes were small and round and black and habitually fixed in a gaze of hypnotic rigidity. They were strong, bodies well-fleshed with fat, and they were quick. The House of Esztercari uniformed them in a dove-gray tunic with emerald green bands. Their weapons were the same as gentlemen and nobles of Zenicce—the rapier and the dagger.
The rapier is known generally as the Jiktar—commander of a thousand—and its inseparable companion the dagger as the Hikdar—commander of a hundred. Of the throwing knife men will often say, dismissingly, that it is the Deldar—the commander of ten. In this I think they make a mistake. For some strange reason the men—and the quasi-human beasts—of Segesthes are absolutely contemptuous of the shield. It is known and scorned. They seem to regard the shield as a weakling’s weapon, as cowardly, sly, deceitful. Given their skill with arms, an undoubted skill as you shall hear, it is amazing to me that the manifold advantages of the aggressively-used shield are not obvious to them. Perhaps they are, and their code of honor forbids its use. Long have I argued the point, almost until my friends looked at me askance, and wondered if I were not like the shield myself, weak, cowardly, deceiftul—until I have thumped them a buffet and proved them wrong in friendly combat.
By now it was clear to me what my intended role would be as a pampered slave in the House of Esztercari. From hints and whispers, and forthright counsels of scorn from Gloag, I gathered that never before had the Princess Natema been faced with a man who was not overawed and unmanned by her beauty. She could make men crawl on their knees to kiss her jeweled feet. She could make me do this, too, of course, by threat of torture and flogging. But she had always gloried in her womanly power over men without need of other coercion.
More and more she grew tired that I would not break to her of my own free will. I suspected if I did the mailed swordsman would be summoned from the alcove to make an end of me and Natema would look for her next plaything.
No one, not even Nijni, knew how many slaves there were in the House of Esztercari. There were books of account, kept by slave scribes; but slaves died, were sold, fresh slaves were bought or exchanged and the accounts were never up-to-date. To add to the confusion, within the Noble House itself there were many families—that of Cydones being the Premier Family—and one might sell a slave within the House and cross him or her off the lists; but he was still slaving in the stables or she was fetching water in the kitchens of one of the palaces on the Enclave of Esztercari.
During this period the news of an encounter flew about the slave rooms and halls. The Lay House of Parang had been attacked across the canal separating its enclave from that of the Noble House of Eward. Those of Eward hotly denied their guilt, blaming others unknown. Gloag winked at me.
“That’s the work of the Ponthieu, by Father Mehzta-Makku! They hate Eward like poison, and our House backs them.”
I remembered what Natema had said of the alignment of power.
This petty political chicanery and bravo-fighting meant nothing to me. I hungered for Delia. And yet, I had to face the unpalatable fact that I had no proof Delia cared for me. How could I aspire to her, after what had happened? Had I not interfered in Aphrasöe, she might have been cured, have been safely home with her people in far Delphond—wherever that was. The name was known—and I had thrilled to that information—but no slave could tell me where it was, or if it was a continent, an island, a city.
Undoubtedly, I reasoned, Delia had every cause to hate me.
The next evening I was sent for by Natema and instead of Gloag and his Mehztas the escort consisted of yellow-skinned Chuliks, their gray tunics bright with emerald bands, and their rapiers swinging with an insolent swagger. They wore black leather boots, that clashed on the floor. A fresh consignment of Chulik mercenaries had recently arrived in Zenicce and the House of Esztercari had taken the major proportion to serve her devious ends.
The first thing I noticed as I entered that scented room with the white silk gloves upon my hands was that the steel-meshed swordsman no longer stood half-concealed in his alcove.
Steel-mesh was a rare and valuable armor in Segesthes; men habitually wore arm and leg clasps, and breasts and backs, with dwarf pauldrons, mostly of bronze; sometimes of steel. Always, the ideal of the Segesthan fighting man was attack—always, attack.
The Princess Natema looked incredibly lovely this evening as the first Kregen’s seven moons floated into the paling topaz sky. Her long emerald gown was gone, and she wore a sparkling golden vestment that limned her form breathtakingly. She smiled on me and held out her arms.
“Dray Prescot!” She stamped her jeweled foot; but not in rage. A subtle transformation had turned her domineering ways aside, so that she seemed to me almost more lovely than she had been. She bade me rise from the incline—and amazingly she made me sit down at her side. She poured wine for me.
“You said I would prove an interesting slave,” she whispered. Her eyes lowered. Her breast moved with the violence of her breathing. I felt most uneasy. That damned swordsman was missing, and I’d come to regard him, incredible though it may sound, as a kind of chaperon.
Our relationship, Natema’s and mine, had flowered almost unnoticed by me; but clearly she believed that I was passionately drugged by her beauty and frightened only of being killed, and ready, now,
to overlook that blemish in my pure regard for her. Many men had died for her, I knew. Her seduction of me progressed with a steady sure possessiveness like that of a python swallowing down its kill. I resisted, for although she was a flower of women, and immensely subtle in her dispensation of pleasure, I could think only of Delia. I do not claim any great powers of self-control; many men would regard me as a fool not to sip the honey while the blooms are open. But the more her passionate advances continued the more she, contrariwise, repelled me.
How it would have ended I do not like to think.
Strings of emeralds twined about her white throat and draggled along her naked arms as she lay on the floor at my feet, pleading unashamedly now, turning her tear-stained face up to me. Her face was flushed, hectic, passionate.
“Dray! Dray Prescot! I cannot speak your name without trembling! I want you—only you! I would be your slave girl if I could—all you want, Dray Prescot, is yours for the mere asking!”
“There is nothing between us, Natema,” I said roughly.
Sink me, if I were to be killed for it I wanted nothing of this scented, evil, beautiful woman!
She ripped the golden tissue vestments from her glorious body and stretched up her arms to me, pleading, sobbing.
“Am I not beautiful, Dray Prescot? Is there a woman in all Zenicce so fair? I need you—I want you! I am a woman, you are a man—Dray Prescot!”
I backed away, and I knew then, I admit it, that I was weakening. All the passionate loveliness of her lay at my feet, all her contempt, her scorn, her taunting gone, and in their places only a beautiful distraught girl with disheveled hair and tear-streaked face begging me to love her. Oh, yes, I nearly succumbed—I was, still, at heart only a simple sailorman.
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