The broad ship lurched beneath our feet as water gushed in.
“You will die, slave, and join your fellows here!”
I did not answer. Again the blades crossed and I swung on the disengage, but be was quick even on that cumbered deck and avoided my blow. He bore down on me, anxious to kill me and take as many as he could with him to the ice floes of Sicce.
A slave shouted from the deck, high and exultant.
“Jikai! Chop him, Pur Dray, my Lord of Strombor, Krozair!”
The swifter captain’s blade faltered. He drew back. On his face grew such a look of fury and despair as sickened me to see.
“You-” he choked. “You are the Lord of Strombor — Krozair!”
Without bothering to reply — for I felt the broad ship’s sluggish wallowing movements and knew she would go down any instant — I leaped forward. And now our blades clanged and rang with that ferocious screech of steel blade on steel blade. He was good and he was strong but I was in a hurry now and in a quick passage of murderous blows he fell.
Someone shouted: “The ship’s going!”
And amid the tumultuous shouts of the freed slaves as they saw the hated Magdag overlord dead at their feet I leaped nimbly up onto the swifter’s beak. A florid but sea-bitten man rushed forward, his slashed blue finery proclaiming him the captain of the merchantman.
Seg was there and with the help of slaves who seemed to carry some authority among their fellows a space was cleared. The merchant skipper grasped my left hand, babbling his thanks. His ship had gone, but his life was safe. Overside now the broad ship wallowed deeper, and thrashing around her and waiting for their grisly harvest the chanks with their twin stiff upright fins, the sharks of the inner sea, patrolled hungrily.
“May Ta’temsk shine upon you, my Lord of Strombor!” He let my hand go as I began to strip away the bloodied brown rag from my loins. “We fought as well as we could, but the rashoon dismasted us. My crew fought like demons, as you can see — even my passengers fought — ah, how they fought-”
“Passengers?” I had found a length of red cloth wound about the body of a dead man — evidently one of the passengers the merchant skipper was speaking of — and I wrapped it around my waist and drew the end up between my legs and tucked it in. The brave scarlet color cheered me. “Yes — a strange lot. The men fought like men possessed. Look, Pur Dray — there is one now, dying, and yet still he thinks he fights.”
Hauled out of the way beneath a varter a man lay dying. What the skipper said was true, for he kept opening his arms wide and closing them again in the rapier and main-gauche drill known as the “flower”
although his right hand was empty. He wore long black boots and a snug-waisted brown coat which flared wide over his hips and up to his shoulders. He wore no hat, but I could guess what sort of hat he would own. In his left hand he carried a bejeweled main-gauche with which he kept up his laborious flow of passages at arms.
I knelt by his side.
“You were with Vomanus?” I said. I spoke as gently as I might, but my words cracked harsh and impatiently for all that.
“Vallians,” said the merchant skipper. “A strange lot.”
“Sterncastle,” gasped the dying man. Blood dribbled from his mouth. I looked up at the broadship’s captain.
“Alas, my Lord of Strombor. The men of Vallia were insistent that every care should be taken of the passengers and so on my orders they were shut up in the Sterncastle, for safekeeping. But the fall of the mainmast, and the ferocity of the attack — we could not get them out. I fear they are doomed.” I was puzzled. Granted that Vomanus had shipped aboard this vessel now sinking into a chank-infested sea, I couldn’t understand my not seeing him. He would never be shut up in a safe place when there was a fight brewing. The Vallian was young, handsome, with a long brown moustache and neatly trimmed beard. He tried to speak, spat blood, tried again, managed to blurt out: “They must be saved!”
“There is no saving them now,” said the captain, with a grim nod at the decks of his ship about to submerge beneath the water and the twin fins of the chanks circling nearer. “My old ship is taking them to their grave, may Ta’temsk smile on them.”
The dying Vallian opened his eyes and there was reason in them. He had stopped his ghastly phantom swordplay. I took the dagger from him, gently, respectfully. Blood gushed from his mouth as he burst into an impassioned and mortal shout.
“You must save her! She is trapped, drowning, doomed — you must! The Princess Majestrix of Vallia!
Princess-”
The blood choked him. I felt — I thought — I -
Delia! My Delia! Delia!
Chapter Six
Delia of Delphond and I swim together
I have no memory until I stood before the doors to the broad ship’s aftercastle with its hideous tangle of wreckage blocking them off, tearing at them with my bare hands, the dagger naked in my clenched teeth. It was all a long time ago and four hundred light-years distant, a drama played out on a distant sea beneath the lurid fires of the twin suns of Antares; and yet — and yet!
Water slopped about my thighs, pouring in an ever-thickening flood over the gunwales. I heaved timber aside, used the keen dagger edge to slash through water-soaked ropes. I reached the door and now I became aware of the yells and shouts from the swifter.
“It is too late!” “Come back!” “You will be drowned!” and — “My Lord — the chanks!”
I ignored the jabbering.
A stubborn balk impeded me and I put my shoulders to it — those shoulders that had been the despair of my ever-sewing mother — and heaved up until the blood seemed to compress all my brains and threatened to burst from my eyes and nostrils. My muscles rippled and bunched and I heaved — how I heaved!
With an abrupt screech the balk slid aside and I lurched forward into the doors. I used that lurch -
there was no time to draw back — and smashed solidly into them. I heard metal snap. Water roiled around my waist now and I felt the ship wallowing and lurching like a drunk staggering from The Fleeced Ponsho in Sanurkazz.
I kicked the doors in and a frenzied woman was in my arms, all dark hair about my face like damp laundry, and softness against my naked chest, and a screaming mouth and fiercely clawing fingers. A voice yelled in my ear.
“Pass her back!”
“Here, Seg.”
I knew it was him, and there was no time for my gratitude. He was no seaman, he could probably swim with a dog-crawl; he was risking more than I here, on the deck of this sinking ship. I plunged into the cabin.
The whole ship shuddered and the ominous roar of thousands of gallons of water suddenly victorious pouring into her told me she was gone. Water smashed me forward and I swirled around in the sudden green gloom.
With the dagger between my teeth again I held my breath.
And then-
Delia! My Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond was once more in my arms and I held her dear form to me in that water-choked cabin of a sinking ship. I felt her waist as lissome and as lithe as I remembered, and I swung around and struck out for the door. Timber and cordage and canvas floated like octopuses with groping tendrils, seeking to ensnare us and drag us back. But we pushed through the door and the gloom decreased. Light struck down from above. I kicked with a savage exultant fierceness and we rose upward.
I could see the whole extent of the deck of the broad ship with only a few bubbles bursting from her shattered hatches and all the miserable aftermath of the battle. And, among those twisted shapes of corpses, hunting like ghouls, the long sinuous shapes of the chanks nosed in from all sides. We broke surface.
The swifter’s proembolion had nudged off the sinking merchantman. She moved now some distance away. Nearer to us swam the little muldavy in which Seg and I had escaped from Happapat. We had to reach that before the chanks reached us.
I looked down.
Too late. . The chank was already here, was nosing up with that
characteristic shark-like belly roll to expose all his corpse-white underbelly. I thrust Delia away from me, took the dagger into my right hand.
“Swim for the boat, Delia! Swim! ”
The breath I drew in scorched my lungs. I dived. The chank saw me coming and half rolled. I went with him. I would not grasp his pseudo-scaled skin for those scales would lacerate my own human flesh like rasps.
As he rolled so I rolled with him and nicked aside so that his gape-jawed attack sliced water. As he went past I thrust the dagger in as hard and as fast as I could. Blood poured out to roil in a thick cloud-like mass in the water. He went on and slowly began to roll, his tail seesawing. A quick look around showed me no more ominous shapes immediately in my vicinity and I kicked hard after Delia. The water was limpid clear, with the surface, the exotic silver sky, all rippled and chiaroscuro-shot with color.
I caught Delia around the waist and heaved her up into the muldavy. I had to be sure.
I ducked down and, sure enough, another chank was circling in. He would razor off my legs before I could scramble into the boat. As I went under again I headed straight for him. He moved aside, those immense jaws gaping, then straightened and headed for me, trying to roll sideways at me. Chanks only need to roll over to seize their prey when it is above them on the surface. Otherwise they are quite capable of gulping a man down from any position.
I went with him, then scissored my legs in a frantic explosion of energy, scythed around his thrusting snout, and buried the dagger six times into his belly. Blood streamed out like a wake. He went on, turning slowly, and I glared up against the radiance. The curved wedge-shape of the muldavy’s bottom showed like a balloon against that silver sky, water-rippled. I shot up stiff-legged, burst from the water, hooked an arm over the gunwale, and hauled. I could feel the expected snap of gigantic chank jaws and expected to pull a legless torso aboard.
When my feet hit the bottom boards the jolt came as a reassuring bolt. I was light-headed, for I would not have attempted to leave the water had I anticipated the chank could return to the attack before I could clear the surface.
The muldavy bounced.
The chank — or another — had returned and was trying to overset us. I saw Delia standing up, lithe and lovely in a blue short skirt and tunic, hefting the water breaker up over her head. She tensed and then, whoosh — down went the water breaker over the side to bash the chank on the snout. With a flick of his tail he took himself off.
She stood there above me, gazing down, her water-soaked garments shining and clinging, and she smiled — she smiled!
“Dray!”
We were in each other’s arms, then, and if the muldavy had rolled over spilling us into the chank-swarming sea I do not believe we would have noticed.
When we returned to a semblance of sanity a hail reached us and I saw the swifter turning and moving gently down on us, twenty or thirty oars clumsily splashing. Seg shouted again.
“You are all right?”
I waved and shouted something.
“Thank the veiled Froyvil for that, then!”
“Thelda!” Delia said suddenly, her sweet face changing expression to one of concerned alarm.
“If that is the buxom hell-cat who near scratched my eyes out back there in the cabin,” I said, “friend Seg took her off me. Thank the Black Chunkrah,” I added, lapsing into a blasphemy of my Clansmen.
“I am glad,” Delia said. “For Thelda means well.” And she laughed in that old thrilling spine-tingling way. How incomparable a woman is my Delia of the Blue Mountains!
The muldavy was hoisted aboard the swifter. Thelda rushed to Delia and gathered her in her arms, cooing and sighing and sobbing. Thelda’s hair, already drying in the suns-light, was a darker, deeper brown than Delia’s without those glorious auburn highlights. She tended to plumpness — I would not go so far as to say fatness — and she bubbled with eagerness. She was all over Delia. Her ripe red lips smiled easily. I saw Seg giving her his undivided attention, and sighed, for I foresaw only problems for him there. In that, as you will hear, I sadly underestimated the whole truth. Somewhat on the stocky side was Thelda, but she was built magnificently, with thick ankles somewhat detracting from her attempts at languorous beauty when she remembered to forget her eagerness. I cannot be too cruel to Thelda, for Delia clearly suffered her with a good heart. The first order was obtained. With so many men aboard unchained I had thoughts of mass rape; but the knowledge that I was Pur Dray, the Lord of Strombor, a famed and feared Krozair of Zy, corsair of the Eye of the World, had impressed the ex-slaves. Very willingly they agreed to return to their oar benches, this time as free men, and pull for Sanurkazz. I took hands with many of them, and was not surprised to feel that secret sign of the Krozair from many of them. Also there were men of The Red Brethren of Lizz, and others from the Krozairs of Zamu — famous fighting Orders of Chivalry dedicated to Zair. But none, as I had known even before I was one, as strict, as famous, as notorious where it mattered as the Krozairs of Zy.
One of the ex-slaves who had given me the secret sign, a man of superlative musculature, as must any man possess if he is to survive at the oar, a massive black beard and a head of that curly black Sanurkazzian hair, gripped my hand and said: “You do not recognize me, Pur Dray?”
I studied him closely. Seg was taking care of the girls as I sorted out the swifter. I shook my head, then halted that instinctive negative.
“By Zim-Zair! Pur Mazak! Pur Mazak, Lord of Frentozz!”
We clasped hands again.
“We shared a raid against Goforeng, you and I, Pur Dray. You with your Zorg and I with my Heart of Zair. You recall?”
“Can I forget! We took — what was it? — twelve broadships and dispatched three large swifters into the bargain! Great days, Pur Mazak.”
“Aye, great days.”
“Well. They will come again for you.” I had made a decision. We must pull for Sanurkazz. Now I had Delia with me again we might spend a little time on the inner sea, for there were things still to be done there.
But as soon as we settled down on our course, south with a heading of west in it, that damnable gale got up, the sea rose, lightnings and thunders raged and roared. I shouted to the helm-deldars — men from the slave benches who had been rudder-deldars before their capture — to ease off and head east. As miraculously as it had arisen, the gale, which was not a rashoon, died away.
“Pattelonia,” I said to Delia, and I saw her face light up.
Arrangements were speedily made.
Clearly, the Star Lords wanted me out of the inner sea. Well, that suited me well enough. I felt sincere regret that I would not again see — for how long I knew not — my two oar comrades and rascals, Nath and Zolta, or Pur Zenkiren, or dear Mayfwy — I had wanted muchly for Delia and Mayfwy to meet, for I could not express adequately the thanks I owed Mayfwy, widow of my oar comrade and friend Pur Zorg.
As for Delia, she had loyally agreed to accompany me to Sanurkazz, but there was no denying her joy that we were to go directly to Pattelonia and from thence to Vallia. There was no problem over who would command the swifter we had captured — her name was Sword of Genodras — and I clasped hands again with Pur Mazak and entrusted him with the ship.
“She is a fine vessel, even if the apostis is a trifle bulky for my taste,” I said. “I would be inclined to pack a few more benches in along the upper deck — but that is of another time.” Mazak looked at me with the calm firm gaze of a true brother in Zy, and I knew the prize was in good hands. I gave him instructions that should the king, Zo, allow, Sword of Genodras should be bought into the service under the aegis of Felteraz, for I owed Mayfwy much. “At any rate,” I said. “My shares go to the Lady Mayfwy of Felteraz. You will speak with my agent, Shallan, who is as honest a rogue as any agent can ever be. And now, Zair go with you, Pur Mazak.”
“Remberee!” The shouts came across the water as the swifter gathered way. Delia, Thelda, Seg, and I watched from the muldavy which had been h
oisted over the side and fully provisioned and watered.
“Remberee!” and “Remberee!”
From the mass of booty and other materials in the aft cabins I had selected a number of fine Sanurkazzian long swords. Also I had fine silks from Pandahem, and leather of Sanurkazz, cloaks woven from the finest curly ponsho wool from Wloclef and, to prove how villainous a character I am, there was also a strong leather purse bulging with silver and golden oars of Magdag, as well as the varied currency of the southern shore. Seg had also helped himself, and in particular had taken a full score of the small bows. He grumbled about them, their puniness, with which I fully agreed. Nonetheless, I felt safer — if I may admit to such a feeling, for Delia was now in my safekeeping — with the archer from Erthyrdrin aboard.
As we hoisted the dipping lug and set sail for Pattelonia, I was able to hear Delia’s story. Characteristically, she remained silent about the parts I could guess had given her the most problems. Vomanus, whom I had sent with a reassuring message to Vallia, had told his princess and then had been sent off on some errand or other by Delia’s father, the emperor. Instead of Vomanus returning with an airboat for me, he was traveling in the opposite direction, toward Segesthes, and nothing was done about me. I fully understood about that, for I knew a little of the fierce opposition aroused in Vallian political circles by the Princess Majestrix’s decision to marry an unknown near-barbarian Clansman, for all he styled himself the Lord of Strombor. So — Delia had immediately set about flying herself. With a few trusted companions of her personal guard, and with her lady companion, Thelda, she took off. There had been no trouble at Pattelonia after the long flight across the fearsome mountain ranges collectively entitled The Stratemsk that walled off the inner sea from eastern Turismond. The broad ship had been sailing, and Delia had taken passage, intending to transfer subsequently and so find her way to Magdag. I shuddered to think what would have happened had she arrived at that wicked city and fallen into the hands of the Princess Susheeng, or those of her evil brother, Glycas; for I was growing more and more convinced as I pondered the matter that the Star Lords had ensured my old vosk-skulls would not overcome in their revolt.
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