Transit to Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  “I have watched you, Dray, many and many a time! Oh, yes! I have struggled against my desires, against my passion for you. It has torn my heart. But I cannot resist any longer.” She crawled after me, begging. “Please, Dray, please!”

  Could I believe her? Her words sounded like rote, like phrases learned against a need, as though she repeated them with a set purpose. And yet—naked, jewel-entwined, her rosy flesh glowing, she lay there at my feet in supplication. I did not know if this was one more damnable trick, or if she truly fancied she loved me.

  She rose to her feet, her arms outstretched, her breast rising and falling with the tumult of her passion, her red lips shining, her eyes ardent with love, all her emotions rich and full and aroused—

  The door smashed open and a Chulik staggered through with a thick and clumsy spear transfixing his body from which the bright blood spouted.

  Natema screamed like one caught in red-hot pincers.

  I leaped. I snatched up the Chulik’s fallen rapier in my right hand and scooped up in the same movement his dagger in my left. I sprang before Natema and faced the broken door.

  Another Chulik collapsed inward, trying to hold together the slit edges of his throat. Men and half-men boiled outside.

  “Quick!” Natema grabbed my arm. Naked, she raced to the alcove where the steel-meshed warrior had once stood. A panel slid aside. We passed through and Natema gave a quick and vicious laugh of vengeful triumph at our escape—and a spear lanced through to embed itself quivering in the wood and block the closure of the secret panel.

  The sound of fierce yells and the clash of steel spurred us on and we ran bounding down stone stairs in dim lamplight until we reached a landing from which many doors opened. Feet clattered down the stone stairs after us. Before one of the doors lay the body of the man in mail. He had simply been battered to death with clubs. His body was broken and pulped within the mesh. Around him lay piled bodies of slaves, both men and beast. He had died well. A door had banged as we descended and I surmised the slaves trying to pass the mailed man had heard us descending and thought we were guards come to reinforce this lone warrior. I saluted him as he deserved.

  Then I bent and took off his broad leather belt with its plain steel buckle. On the belt were hung his rapier and dagger scabbards. Those two superb weapons I picked up—one from the body of an Och slave, the other from a plug-ugly with black hair all over him and a nose ten degrees to port.

  “Hurry, you fool!” screamed Natema.

  I ran after her, clutching my arsenal of weapons.

  We passed through a door and along passageways within the palace dimly-lit with oil lamps. Shadows swung wildly about us. I heard the noise of feet ahead and halted. Natema clung to me, soft and firm and panting, her hair dangling before her face. Angrily she thrust it back. I took the opportunity to buckle the warrior’s broad leather belt about my waist. The fancy clothes came in useful to wipe the blades clean; then I wadded them and tossed them aside and stood only in my breechclout.

  “Nijni will not be pleased,” I whispered.

  “What?” She was startled.

  “His white silk gloves are ruined.”

  “You idiot!” Her nostrils whitened. “There are killers ahead of us, and you prate of white silk gloves!”

  Natema still wore emerald earrings and a single chain of gems about her neck, depending to her waist. These I took in my fingers and removed, and she stared at me with her blue eyes wide and drugged with the emotions of the moment. I threw the stones away.

  “Come,” I said. I looked at her. I bent, rubbed my hand in the dust of the floor and then smeared that filth all over her face and hair and body as she struggled and twisted, cursing. “Remember,” I said hrashly. “You are slave.”

  She slew me with her eyes. Then we padded on, furtively, toward the sounds of conflict and killing, and I made very sure that the Princess Natema hung her head and dragged her heels as a docile slave should.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The fight in the passage

  There were five of them in a narrow passageway that led between the slave’s domestic workrooms and the noble portion of the palace on the floor immediately below that containing the princess’ private boudoir. They had three slave girls for their sport and they wanted another. Natema and I had worked our way through the chaos of the palace, passing furious isolated fights, dodging aside as slaves ran and were killed by Ochs or Chuliks, and as guards ran and were slain by slaves. I had picked up a gray breechclout for Natema, and she had grimaced at the filth and bloodstains upon it; but I had spanked her where it stung and she donned the dismal garment. We insinuated ourselves through the slave-dominated areas, ever-watchful for guards; but it would have been madness to have declared Natema for who she was here; to my satisfaction, I must admit, the slaying of guards was far more in evidence than the killing of slaves and we must, perforce, wait. Although I itched to get into the fight and battle alongside my fellow slaves, I felt a curious inverted responsibility for Natema.

  She could not be all evil; she might truly love me, as she said, and that at once placed a responsibility in my hands. And, even if she did not, I did not relish the thought of her radiant loveliness despoiled by the frantic army of carousing, slaying, singing slaves everywhere on the rampage.

  So we worked our way through to where she promised me there would be safety, and here we were, our way barred by five Chuliks with three human girls for their sport, not joining the fighting as, being paid mercenaries, they should.

  They saw Natema and laughed, their tusks gleaming, and called out.

  “Let her go, slave, and you can return.” And: “Give her to us and you will not be killed.” And: “By Likshu the Treacherous! She is a beauty!”

  I put Natema behind me. We must go ahead, to the safety of the noble apartments. The Chuliks stopped laughing. They looked puzzled. Three of them drew their rapiers and daggers.

  “What, slave, would you dispute an order from your masters?”

  I said softly: “You may not have this girl. She is mine.”

  I heard a low gasp from Natema.

  The three huddled slave girls scarcely merited a glance; all my attention was on the mercenaries. Had they been Ochs the odds would have been more even. I advanced a foot and brandished the rapier and dagger as my old Spanish master had taught me so long ago.

  “The French system is neat and precise,” he had said. “And the Italian, also.” He had taught me fine arts of fencing with the small sword, often erroneously called a rapier. With that nimble little sticker one can thrust and parry with the same blade. With the heavier, stiffer Elizabethan rapier, such a blade as I now grasped, one needed to dodge or duck a thrust, or to interpose the dagger, the rapier’s lieutenant, the Hikdar to the Jiktar. Even so, I could fence well with the rapier without a main gauche. I hold no great pride in this thing; it was all of a oneness with my ability to run out along the topgallant yard in a storm, or to swim incredible distances underwater without coming to the surface for a breath. One is what one is, what is in one’s nature.

  Nowadays, that is in the twentieth century, foil fencing, foil-play, such as one learns at a university, is a far removed from the art of sword fighting to kill as is Earth from Kregen. La jeu du terrain also bears little relation to the ferocious and deadly sword combats of Kregen. Given the featherweight lightness of modern foils, the parry which avoids an electric light and bell recording a hit would be passed scarcely noticed by the rapier wielded by a duelist of Zenicce. No young cockscomb who foil-plays at a university could hope to survive on savage Kregen without a sharp and salutary alteration of his ways.

  At the time of which I speak, however, most of my sword fighting had been done with cutlass aboard ship and with the broadsword or shortsword from the backs of zorca or vove. I had not fenced or used a rapier in years. All sword fighting tends from the complicated to the simple. These Chuliks because of the narrowness of the corridor, further narrowed in one place by an e
normous Pandahem jar, could come at me only two at a time. Very well, then. They could die two at a time.

  The blades clashed and rang between the walls. I took the first one on my dagger, twirled, twisted at the same time the second Chulik’s rapier on my own, rolled my wrist, thrust, drew out the stained blade and immediately took the renewed first’s attack once more on the dagger. It was all very slow. Slow, yes—but deadly.

  My rapier was caught on the third opponent’s blade—he stepped most gallantly over the twitching body of his companion to get at me—but before he could fairly engage I had spitted the first one through the throat, and then, springing aside, let the long lunge of the new antagonist go swishing past my side. I closed in rapidly, inside his guard, and thrust my dagger into his belly. Instantly I dragged my blades clear and sprang to meet the last two—and at the first onset my captured Chulik rapier snapped clean across with a devastating pinging.

  I heard the women screaming.

  Blood made the floor slippery. I hurled the broken hilt at a Chulik, who dodged nimbly. His yellow face slicked under the lamplight. The fray was close and deadly for a moment as my dagger held them at bay, and then I had drawn the rapier I had taken from the mailed warrior—he who had fought so nobly and died so well.

  Indeed, and his blade was a marvel! The balance, the deftness of it, the suppleness as the gleaming steel whickered between the ribs of the penultimate antagonist!

  The last one stared in appalled horror on the four dead bodies of his carousing-companions. He tried to escape. I would have let him go. I stepped aside for him in the corridor and raised my blood-stained blade in ironic salute. My eye caught a movement to the side and I glanced quickly to see the three slave girls rising. Two were still partly draped in strings of pearls. Trust these mercenary ruffians to select the prettiest and most pleasure-skilled of slave girls. Then I saw the third—naked, trembling, but with eyes filled with a fire I knew and remembered and loved—Delia, my Delia…

  Natema shouted, shrilly, her voice filled with terror.

  I flicked my glance back. The Chulik whom I had been about to let go, with the honors of battle, had seen my involuntary look toward the girls, and he had stepped in and was in the act of thrusting his rapier between my ribs. My opinion of him as a fighting man went down. He should, in those close quarters, have used his dagger. Had he done so I would not now be telling you this. I flicked the long blade away with my own dagger and sank my rapier into his belly. He writhed for a moment on the brand; then I withdrew it and he slumped, vomiting, to the floor.

  Natema rushed to me and clasped me, shaking and sobbing.

  “Oh, Dray! Dray! A true fighting man of Zenicce, worthy of the Noble House of Esztercari!”

  I tried to shake her off.

  I stared at Delia of the Blue Mountains, who drew herself up, naked and grimed, her hair dusty and bedraggled, her body taut and firm in the lamplight. She looked at me with those limpid brown eyes and—was it anguish, I saw? Or was it contempt, and anger, and a sudden cold indifference?

  I was standing by that great jar of Pandahem porcelain.

  We were abruptly surrounded by green clad nobles who surged into the corridor, chief among them Galna, whose hard white face ridged and planed as he saw Natema. He cried out in horror and whisked a fellow-noble’s gaudy cape about her glowing nakedness. The slave girls were hustled back with the rest of us as the princess was placed within a solid palisade of noble living flesh. There was some confusion.

  Galna saw me.

  His eyes were always mean; but now they narrowed and the hardness and meanness drilled me. He lifted his rapier.

  “Galna! Dray Prescot is—” Natema stopped. Her voice lifted again, once more arrogant, once more assured, the mistress of the utmost marvels of Kregen. “He is to be treated well, Galna. See to it.”

  “Yes, my Princess.” Galna swung back to me. “Give me your sword.”

  Obediently I handed across the nearest Chulik sword I had already picked up against this moment. I also handed across the Chulik dagger that had not, like its Jiktar, failed me. Now my breechclout concealed the broad belt, and the scabbard flapped against my legs, empty, Galna let me keep those, as he supposed, tawdry souvenirs of my struggle.

  I tried to hurry after Delia; but there was much coming and going in the barricaded nobles’ quarters as arrogant young men, gentlemen, officers, bravos, from Esztercari and from Ponthieu and many of the Houses who were aligned with those two Houses’ axis, congregated for the great hunt and slaying of slaves that was to ensue. I lost Delia. I was ordered by Natema to take the baths of nine and then to go to my room. As though I were some infant midshipman caught in a childish prank, banished to the masthead!

  “I will send for you, slave,” were her farewell words to me. I didn’t give a tinker’s cuss for her. Delia… Delia!

  Natema for the sake of her dignity and position must display her pride and arrogance before all men. She could not own to anyone the love for a slave she had only recently been so ardently displaying to me, naked and begging on her knees. But when she would send for me—what could I do, say?

  A knock sounded on my door, rather, a furtive scratching that lacked the courage to knock loudly. When I opened it Gloag stumbled in, his body blood-stained, his face ghastly, his fist still gripping the stump of a spear. He looked at me.

  “Was this the day, Gloag?”

  He shook his head. “They brought their airboats, flying to the roof, they brought men onto our rear, men and beasts and mercenaries—swords and spears and bows—we did not have a chance.” He sagged, exhausted.

  “Let me bathe your wounds.”

  He wrenched his lips back. “This is mostly accursed guards’ blood.”

  “I am pleased to hear it.”

  He did not say what had brought him here. He did not need to. This man had struck me with the rattan. I fetched water in a bowl, and salves left by the old crone for his wounds and bruises, and fresh towels, and I cleaned him up. Then I pulled my trundle bed away from the wall and pointed to the space beneath it, between wall and floor.

  He grasped my hand. His great booming voice husked.

  “Mehzta-Makku, Father of all, shine down in mercy upon you!”

  I said nothing but pushed the bed back, concealing him.

  The killing of slaves went on for three days in the opal palace of the Princess Natema Cydones of the Noble House of Esztercari. Many were the brilliantly-colored liveries of the different Houses in alignment with Esztercari as they came hurrying to suppress this slave revolt. The city wardens in their crimson and emerald also acted with vigor; for this was a matter that touched the security of the whole city of Zenicce.

  During this period I brought food and wine for Gloag, hidden beneath my bed, and saw to his toilet needs, and talked to him, so that we came to understand each other better.

  “I hear you are a great swordsman with rapier and dagger,” he said, licking his bowl with a crust.

  “I could show you a style of fence with a smaller sword than a rapier, without a dagger, that would astonish these rufflers.”

  “You would teach me swordplay?”

  “Do you know the layout of the palace?”

  Gloag did; he might know little of the city, but he could find his way about the opal palace readily enough by its secret warrens and runnels. He had not escaped before because his duty lay with the slaves; now he was trapped in my room. I promised him.

  I believe that only Delia and the two slave girls in their strings of pearls, Gloag and myself, and one other, escaped the dreadful retribution wrought upon the slaves. When all had been killed the Noble House spent of their fortune to buy more slaves. That hurt them—the sheer financial loss on the slave revolt.

  Natema sent for me and, once more dressed in my offensive clothes, a new set even more luxurious than the last with a great deal of brilliant scarlet, I went with guards and Nijni—who as slave-master held a post of some authority and had hidden during th
e revolt—up to a high roof overlooking the broad arm of the delta on its seaward side. Wide-winged gulls circled overhead. The suns sparkled off the water, and the air smelled fresh and sharp with sea-tang after the close sickly confinement of the palace. I opened my lungs and drew in that old familiar odor.

  Landward of us lay the city, a blaze of color and light, with tall spires, domes, towers, battlements, creating a haphazard jumble of perspectives. Across the canal the purple and ocher trappings of the House of Ponthieu flamed from a hundred flagstaffs. Beyond their walls there were other enclaves built upon the islands of the delta. Seaward I could see—and how my heart leaped—the masts of ships moored to jetties hidden by the walls and the intervening roofs.

  This hidden roof garden rioted in a thousand perfumed blooms, shady trees bowed in the breeze, marble statuary stood in niches of the walls where vines looped, water fountains tinkled. Natema waited for me reclining in a swinging hammock-type seat facing a rail overlooking a sheer drop of a thousand feet. Gulls whirled there, shrieking.

  Delia of Delphond, clad in pearls and feathers, crouched by her jeweled feet.

  I kept my face expressionless. I had sized up the situation instantly, and the danger made me tremble for Delia.

  For Delia had uttered a low gasp at sight of me, and Natema’s proud patrician face had turned to her, a tiny frown indenting her forehead above her haughty nose.

  The interview wended its way as I had expected. My refusal astonished Natema. She bade her slaves retire out of earshot. She regarded me tempestuously, her hair ruffling in the breeze, her cornflower blue eyes hot and languorous, together, so that she seemed very lovely and desirable.

  “Why do you refuse, Dray Prescot? Have I not offered you everything?”

  “I think,” I said carefully, “you would have me killed.”

  “No!” She clasped her hands together. “Why, Dray Prescot, why? You fought for me! You were my champion!”

  “You are too beautiful to die in that way, Princess.”

  “Oh!”