The Pandahem Cycle II

Chapter three

Chapter three

We sail for BormarkWe stared aft as that cruel bronze rostrum smashed through spray after us. The oars rose and fell, rose and fell, beautiful in their way, derisive of the agony entailed in their hauling. Pompino stamped a booted foot upon the scrubbed deck.

“Now I am growing heartily sick of this seafaring life, Jak! I thought buying a few ships and trading would turn an honest ob or two, in between serving the Star Lords. Yet it seems an honest sailorman’s life is bedeviled every which way he turns.”

Somewhat drily, I said: “They are probably not pirates, Pompino. No doubt they are some of the Seaborne Watch of Peminswopt. They would like to ask us some questions.”

Pompino eyed the pursuing craft meanly. She foamed along, yet I fancied that once we left the shelter of the cliffs she’d feel the bite of the sea and the thrust of the wind. Once out into the offing we should outrun her, if the breeze held.

“This Kov of Memis runs a tidy province, I’ll say that for him.”

“Do I detect a hint that our own young Kov Pando na Bormark does not?”

“Ask his mother—”

Involuntarily, I glanced down as though, foolishly, I could see through the solid planking of the deck into the aft staterooms. Sprawled on a seabed down there, Tilda — Tilda of the Many Veils, Tilda the Beautiful — would no doubt be drinking with a steady regularity from any of the splendid array of bottles provided. Never fully drunk, always a trifle lush, the Dowager Kovneva Tilda presented us with a sorry problem. We knew that the Star Lords, superhuman, almost immortal, unknowable, as I thought then, wished us to cleanse the province of Bormark of the Leem Lovers. We had burned a temple in the capital of Tomboram, Pomdermam, and now we had burned the Devil’s Academy in Peminswopt, in Memis. Next along the coast in the enormous curve of the Bay of Panderk lay the stromnate of Polontia. I had not yet made up my mind if we should stop there or make directly for Bormark, at the western frontier of the kingdom of Tomboram.

The pursuing swordship foamed along. Long and lean like all her class, she presented only that wedge-shaped bow and the wings in their shining splendor, rising and falling, rising and falling. Faintly, borne across the breeze, the sound of the drum reached us.

“They mean to catch us.”

I made up my mind. As Pompino the Iarvin considered he led our partnership I had to put the decision to him tactfully; this was accomplished easily enough by spelling out our alternatives. Pompino nodded decisively.

“Captain Linson!” he called. “We steer straight for Bormark!”

Linson nodded, dark and smooth and as sharp as a professional assassin’s dagger. Tuscurs Maiden responded to a delicate helm, a trifle of canvas management. She headed directly for the open sea, bearing boldly out across the Bay. Soon the swordship was going up and down like a dinosaur in a swamp.

“Hah!” shouted Pompino, filled with childlike glee. “They do not like that, by Horato the Potent, they do not!”

“I,” I said with firmness, “am hungry.”

“And I. Is there time to eat before—?”

“He won’t catch us now. And his oarsmen will have shot their bolt soon enough. Poor devils.”

By this time in our relationship, Pompino knew this was no idle remark. He agreed, commenting on his previous remarks about the plight of oarslaves. He had been made well aware that my face was firmly set against slavery.

Sharp set, we went below.

“Of course,” said Pompino as we entered his stateroom, “there remains the problem of the Kovneva Tilda.”

“She expressed the firm desire to return home to Bormark. Our way lies in that self-same direction.” The table was spread with excellent promise, and I addressed myself as much to the viands as to Pompino. “And Pando will not be a long away from his estates, not with the trouble he has brewing there.”

Biting into a succulent vosk pie, well stoked with momolams and greens and with a gravy poured from the tables of the gods themselves, I realized how fatuous that remark was. On Kregen, wonderful, horrible, fascinating, trouble is always brewing — if it is not already here and hitting you in the back of the neck.

“Did you follow all that rigmarole of the love lives of these folk?” Pompino spoke around a leg of chicken that dribbled gravy into his whiskers. This he wiped away at once with a clean yellow cloth. Khibils are fastidious folk.

“Most. It is not an unfamiliar pattern—”

“Oh, agreed. I meant how can we turn it to our own ^benefit?”

Sharp, too, are Khibils, especially those dubbed the Iarvin.

I speared a momolam and lifted it. Tuscurs Maiden, in Limki the Lame, boasted a cook to be prized. In this, Linson merely emphasized his own approach to the important things of life. I squinted at the momolam, the small yellow tuber glistening and delicious and aching to be tasted.

“Whoever supports us in opposition to Lem receives our support in their amorous designs? Is that it?”

“Aye. Probably.”

“Too simple, my friend.”

“Nothing is simple where you’re concerned, Jak.”

I placed the momolam into my mouth and shut my eyes and chewed. Pompino was right, confound it!

I wondered what would chance if the Star Lords dispatched Pompino to Vallia to sort out a problem for them and we met up. I’d have a deal of explaining to do then, by Vox!

He waggled his knife at me.

“Your young friend Pando, the Kov of Bormark, is a rascal and yet a very very highly placed noble. He means to have his own way with this girl and to Cottmer’s Caverns with his cousin Murgon.”

Refusing to be drawn into a wrangle about Pando’s character I said: “The Everoinye have commanded us to go and burn Lem’s temples. So this we do. We are going to burn as many temples as we can find in the kovnate of Bormark. Young Pando is the kov. A great deal of his property is going to be burned up when the temples are destroyed. What, Pompino, do you think the young rascal of a kov will say to that?”

Pompino laughed and threw his gnawed chicken bone into a silver waste dish.

“Why, Jak! He will roar and rage. But the temples will be burned!”

“Humph,” I said, taking refuge in that silly sailorman’s noise when he has nothing to add that makes sense.

So, after an interesting space in which Pompino fussed over selecting a wine that pleased him — a light Tardalvoh, of all things — I had to say: “Yes. Pando is determined to take the girl, this Vadni Dafni Harlstam, to wife. This will not only increase his estates, for her vadvarate marches with his kovnate to the south, it will infuriate his cousin Murgon—”

“It may destroy him!”

“You think so? He struck me as dark and dangerous—”

“Oh, aye, he is. But I read him as a man to be broken rather than bend.”

“With all the delays that have bedeviled us it’s a racing chance Murgon will reach Bormark before we do. As for races, I wouldn’t care to wager on which cousin will get there first.”

Thinking of Pando and his mother, Tilda, I was of a mind that Murgon could bend or break so long as he failed in his dark designs. In this I was woefully adrift, as you shall hear.

I could not tell Pompino that over the years I’d had agents in Pandahem to keep an eye on Pando and Tilda, and that they had failed me. The reason for their failure, at the time, was easy to understand, what with the turmoil of the Wars and the struggles against poor mad Empress Thyllis of Hamal and the devil wizard, Phu-Si-Yantong, known as the Hyr Notor. In those dread days men’s and women’s lives were cheap. We were clawing back to the light of the Suns, now, and life was resuming something of order and civilization; we still had a long way to go.

So — this meant I was not in possession of the full facts. Ahead all was murk and uncertainty.

Patting my lips with a yellow cloth, I stood up.

“I’m for a spell on the quarterdeck. I need the breeze in my face for a time. You’ll join me?”

“Later. If we are to avoid the Stromnate of Polontia and head straight for Bormark there are arrangements in the bills of lading and the accounts I must make.” He c****d a bright eye up, mocking and yet serious. “We great shipping magnates have our work, as well as these tarry sailors.”

“Hah!” I said, not particularly convincingly, and went up on deck.

A great deal had to be thought about, and much of what I had to contend with was, of course, completely unknown to my kregoinye comrade Pompino. We headed straight across the Bay of Panderk in the days following, shipboard routine continued, the breeze blew, the Suns of Scorpio shed their mingled lights across the waves, and if a fellow had had no other thoughts in his head he might well have enjoyed an idyllic period. We sighted no other sail until a morning of crimson and jade and hurling wind, with Tuscurs Maiden bowling along under all plain sail, hard braced, heeling on the starboard tack, racing along — well, racing along for a stumpy argenter.

“You’ll get no damned renders in this weather,” exclaimed Cap’n Murkizon, bristling, grasping a ratline. He stared off across the tumbled sea. “Up by the Hoboling Islands you’ll find ’em creeping about, pirating honest sailormen.”

“You’ve experience of the Hobolings, Cap’n?”

“By reputation. I heard that once they sent a fleet to fill the oceans down to Tomboram. That was a time ago, now. They’ve not repeated that kind of raid, to the glory of Pandrite the credit.”

That was a most serious statement from our Murkizon.

Carefully, I said: “I heard a chief pirate was Viridia the Render. Does the name mean aught to you?”

“Only as a render leader. She fought better than a man, I am told.” Before he or I could continue this hazy conversation, the lookout bellowed. For want of anything better to do and the desire to know, I scampered up to the cross-trees and wedged myself and stared at the distant speck bobbing on the horizon rim.

The breeze blustered past and the ship gyrated as any ship will on almost any board and the old sailorman’s trick of holding the glass steady enabled me to center the sighting.

She was no pirate. She was a Galleon of Vallia.

Satisfying myself that she was on an interception course, I shinned down the backstay and found Pompino on the quarterdeck with Captain Linson. Both looked grave.

“A Vallian?” Linson rubbed his chin. “We cannot outsail her, then.”

Pompino huffed up; but he had to accept that when it came to sailing ships, the Galleons of Vallia were the finest sailing these seas — apart always from the damned Leem-Loving Shanks from over the curve of the world, blast their eyes.

“The days of enmity between Pandahem and Vallia are over,” I said. “By Chusto! Those days are dead and gone!”

Both men swiveled to regard me. I realized I had spoken with some warmth. The subject was close to my heart, as you know, and I was wrapped up in schemes for the future when Pandahem, Vallia and the other land masses of Paz must cooperate against the Shanks.

“I picked up rumors in the Captains’ Saloons, here and there,” remarked Linson. “Not all Vallians share the friendship for Pandahem proclaimed by their new emperor.”

I said: “There has for many seasons been friendship between Vallia and Tomboram.”

We spoke lightly of Pandahem, which is an island cut up into kingdoms and kovnates, when each nation was an entity unto itself. Just how much truth there was in my last observation I still was not sure; maybe that was just a pious hope.

“Well, Vallian galleons have pirated ships of Tomboram, along with all the other nations of Pandahem. I think,” said Linson in his hard way. “I shall prepare for any eventuality.”

“Of course.”

No captain was going to risk his ship through lack of preparation.

“You think, Jak,” said Pompino, “we should run up the flag of Tomboram? Of Bormark? This will safeguard us from the Vallian?”

“It should.”

I could hear that infuriating quaver of doubt in my voice as I spoke. By Vox! Hadn’t these idiots grasped essentials yet? My idiots of Vallia? Pirating each other, which is what it came down to, how did that help us against the greater foe?

As though further to emphasize the difference between a Vallian galleon and an argenter of any other seafaring nation, the breeze slackened, backing, and Tuscurs Maiden although sailing well lost a deal of her speed. Not so the Vallian. He came on at a great rate, and it was now transparently plain that he was, indeed, steering an intercept course.

Linson eyed the other craft meanly.

“If he means to fight, then we can accommodate him.”

This idea dismayed me. Of course, from the first moments I’d realized that as a member, supernumerary, of the ship’s crew, I would expect to fight her enemies. Those enemies were seamen of my own nation. Before I believed that, I had to cling to the belief that seamen of Vallia no longer preyed on the seamen of Pandahem. But — some still did. I knew that. It was no good blinking at facts. If that galleon over there, foaming along with the bone in her teeth spuming white, all her canvas drawing, was in truth a pirate — why then I, Dray Prescot, Emperor of Vallia, had better keep that fact very quiet. Very quiet indeed. A gang of cutthroat renders would as lief string up the emperor as spit at him — they’d more than likely spit on his corpse. My Delia had experienced something of this dilemma in her brush with the Sisters of the Whip, when to be acknowledged Empress of Vallia would have brought not instant obedience and protection but chains, the whip and a death in torment.

The crew took up the positions they occupied at action stations without the usual rush and scurry. The drums did not beat, the trumpet remained mute. Quietly, fingering their weapons, the men and women of Tuscurs Maiden stood to. Up on the forward platform our varterists waited around their ballistae. The forward boarding party, the prijikers, kept close, waiting for orders. Weapons were held down, inconspicuously out of sight of the Vallian. Captain Linson nodded as Pompino finished speaking to him, and issued orders.

Very shortly thereafter, the blue flag charged with the golden zhantil rose above our decks. We sailed under the flag of Bormark of Tomboram. How would the Vallian react to that?

Itching with impatience to know the outcome of the puzzle I took a glass up to the crosstrees again. The galleon neared. She was a splendid craft, one of the new construction we had put in hand after the Times of Troubles. She would be able to range Tuscurs Maiden, outsail her, riddle her. As to her crew, well, the Vallian sailorman is a fearsome foe upon the sea, as I knew and joyed in. If it came to a fight, the Pandaheem were on a losing wicket.

The circle of the spyglass roved across the approaching vessel. She was splendid! Soon I could discern the features of the men upon her quarterdeck. I did not recognize any — but at this range I could easily be mistaken.

I thought one man looked remarkably like Ortyg Fondal, and another like Nath Cwophorlin, both capable ship-officers of the old emperor’s navy; but I could not be sure.

The glass carried my gaze forrard and picked out the superior gros-varters of Vallia arranged on the forecastle. I stared. One man leaped into focus. His lean body was bare to the waist and his buff breeches were cut off at the knee. He wore a close-fitting leather cap, and there were not one but three red feathers sporting there. I could visualize the thin streak of black chin beard under his jaws, the lean eager look of him, the broken nose. Well, Wersting Rogahan had served me well and fought for Vallia; but he would just as easily fight to line his own pocket with pickings from a Pandaheem as not. I had to hope. Wersting Rogahan would listen to me if I spoke, that was certain.

I switched the glass back to the quarterdeck.

A man climbed up out of the aft cabin, and stretched, and looked across at us.

I felt a suffusing tide of relief. Upright, strongly built, lithe, the figure of the captain of the Vallian moved purposefully to the bulwark. He stared at us, and an outstretched hand was instantly filled by a telescope. He raised the glass to his eye. I felt like waving, and did not. I kept still and small, for Insur ti Fotor, with whom I had fought the Shanks, would recognize me wearing my old Dray Prescot face. He wore a trim naval officer’s uniform, with a little gold lace, just to let folk know he was the captain. For since my Delia had had him promoted to ord-Hikdar, he had climbed past the ninth and tenth grades of Hikdar, and was now a ley-Jiktar, into the fourth grade of Jiktar. He ran a taut ship; a single glance showed, unmistakably, all the marks of a vessel and crew on the top line, thrumming with energy and spirit. I counted Insur ti Fotor as a friend, and so I breathed again. Tuscurs Maiden would not be attacked and sunk by Vallian renders.

Trade was reopening between the two islands, and Insur must be here with his fine ship as protection for Vallians against pirates of any nation. That was why he sailed down on us, to reassure himself that we were honest merchants.

That could be left to Pompino and Linson. I could make myself scarce. The relief was intense. The thought of having to fight Vallians had been unpleasant for a variety of reasons. I decided to stay in my perch aloft as the formalities were observed.

At Captain Insur ti Fotor’s side a fellow lifted a speaking trumpet to his lips. He was a Womox, and his own horns were nearly as large as the horn used to fashion the trumpet. He bellowed, his words rolling out flat and booming, magnified across the water.

“You are a prisoner of war! Heave to!”

Wersting Rogahan’s forrard varter let fly and a rock hummed fearsomely across our forecastle.

“Heave to or I’ll sink you!”