Prince of Scorpio

Chapter two

Chapter two

Sweet and refreshing is canalwater of ValliaThe released prisoners wanted to build the cooking fires into conflagrations of joy, and I had to explain to them as gently as I could — and, Zair knows, I am a gentle enough man when the occasion calls for it — that as no one of them knew where we were, and I did not, the night would almost certainly contain hostile eyes. We must cook our supper carefully, and post watches, and be ready with the gathered-up weapons to defend our newly-won freedom.

They all seemed to think I had been in the prison ship with them. On her way to the Penal Islands, a gale had driven her off course. No one knew where we were — but they all knew from whence they had come.

Vallia!

I was on an island off the southeast coast of Vallia. Somewhere over that sea lay the island empire ruled by the despotic father of my beloved. Over there lay my target, Vallia, the island I had vowed to reach and storm, bare-handed if necessary, and claim my Delia before all the world.

Prosaic matters obtruded themselves now, however. The released prisoners were far too weak to march, and we had espied not a sign of life or a habitation of any sort. The prisoners could not march; I could not stay here.

The big brown bear of a man — Borg — said, when I queried him: “Prisoners, dom? Aye, we are prisoners, truly enough. Politicals.”

At a guess, I said, “The Racter party?”

He glowered. “Aye! The racters, may Gurush of the Bottomless Marsh take them all.”

I have spoken of the Racter party, those great lords, landowners, and wealthy tycoons who were bitterly opposed to the wedding between myself and Delia. These people were almost all of the Panval party, a more popular front, although containing many folk, I suspected, who had joined together in mere opposition to the Racters as through any common ideology.

Borg was a canalman. The canals of Vallia are one of the wonders of Kregen, spreading out over the entire island, fed by the awe-inspiring Mountains of the North, which have various names in their various districts. The canalfolk are a people apart and a way of life apart. Borg’s name was Ven Borg nal Ogier. Ven is a title applicable only to canalmen, as Vena for the canalwomen. Ogier was his canal, the Ogier Cut, from which he took his patronymic. That the canal was upward of six hundred miles long, with many branches and loops, spreading across many counties of Vallia, meant nothing. Mere land area was of no account to a canalman; he marked out his lineage in the canal his parents traversed.

“I shall go and find help,” I told Borg. “These people must be cared for.”

He had taken a guard’s leather tunic, but his arms and legs were bare. He carried the rapier and left-handed dagger as though he knew how to use them. He nodded in agreement.

“Good. Then, Koter Drak, I will come with you.”

Koter is pure Vallian, equivalent to our Earthly “mister.”

“No, Ven Borg. If you will, you would do best to look after these people. And without disrespect to you, I can travel faster alone.”

He glowered at me, and fingered the plain steel hilt of the rapier, but he saw my face, and agreed.

“By Vaosh the all-glorious! You are a hard man.”

“Sometimes I have need to be.”

My feelings after Alex Hunter had died revealed another facet, but I would not discuss that. The thought occurred to me to wonder if the Star Lords had brought me here because they knew Alex Hunter would fail? But that would indicate a prophecy, a power to foretell what would happen. I put nothing past the Star Lords in those days, but the idea made me prickle a little up the backbone. Then the further thought came to me that the Savanti had sent Alex Hunter on a mission similar to those I would have been sent on had I passed all the stringent tests of Aphrasöe, instead of having the Savanti boot me out of paradise. I still bore them no ill will for that. They had their nature as I had mine. Whatever the truth of the business, I was here on Kregen and — given I could avoid too obvious a collision with either the Savanti or the Star Lords — here I intended to stay and reach Vallia and claim Delia as my bride.

And such was my mood, I was beginning to feel to hell with her father.

So far, the thought that I must in some measure demean him in her eyes had halted me, had checked my footsteps, had held me back from the headlong rush to Vallia and the arrogant barging into Vondium I knew I would have, one day, to make.

I gently unwrapped and unstrapped Alex Hunter’s Savanti hunting leathers from him, before I buried him with solemnity and two prayers. Then I washed the leathers in a stream of clear water — how marvelously supple is the hunting leather of the city of Aphrasöe! — and donned them, pulling the end up through my legs and buckling up the wide belt. I hesitated before pulling on the boots, but I might need them if the going became rough. After my march across the Owlarh Waste and through the Klackadrin I felt my foot soles could march across hell without flinching.

And the sword.

The Savanti sword!

It was a beautiful specimen, with that subtle straight blade that in some alchemical way combines all the best features of a rapier’s flexibility with a shortsword’s harsh thrusting action, together with the slashing capabilities of a broadsword. I felt, then, handling that superlative weapon with its basket hilt, that even a Krozair longsword could not compare with the Savanti sword. I suppose, in mundane weapons, it most resembled an English basket-hilted sword of about 1610 with that cunning Savanti curve to the hilt to enable rapier work to be put in. The blade retained a brilliant sharpness of edge without continuous honing. I had no conception of how it could be done, then, and even today I am sure that no metallurgists of Earth could reproduce that exact mix of metals, that fantastic alloy. But then, as I knew to my cost, the Savanti, although mere mortal men, were capable of superhuman powers.

“Well, Koter Drak,” said Borg, proffering a rapier and left-handed dagger. “You had best go prepared.”

I slung the baldric of the Savanti scabbard over my right shoulder and let the sword dangle at my left hip. “I will take this sword, Ven Borg.”

“It is a strange blade, and yet a useful one, as I judge.”

I took the baldric off. I had grown accustomed to having my sword scabbards attached to my belt in such a way that all my upper body was free from strappery. I fabricated a sling, and the lockets would serve. Borg watched me, critically.

“On the canals we use the rapier and the dagger, the Jiktar and the Hikdar, but rarely, they being weapons not easily come by.”

“You have used them before, Ven Borg.”

He chuckled. The camp fire threw his mass of brown hair into deep tangled shadows across his face. He bit hugely into the thigh of a bosk — a rather less stupid and smaller relative of the vosk — from the provisions we had taken from the wreck. “Aye. I was accounted a fair swordsman, along the Ogier Cut, Koter Drak.”

I was not absolutely sure how these people had my name as Drak. Drak is the name of a legendary figure, part-human, part-god, who figures largely in the three-thousand-year-old myth-cycle the Canticles of the Rose City. Culture is widespread on Kregen, and the old legends and stories travel the world, and are repeated over and over again. Also, Drak had been the name of the Emperor’s father when he ascended the throne. I had a dim memory of saying, in response to a query, “I am Dra—” and then of a shout or a scream interrupting me. I believe it was the women called the Theladours; they had found a guard half alive, and had finished him off with their hands. Anyway, the beginning of Dray and the instant associations with Drak had named me. I did not care, then, what they called me, for I intended to leave them in the morning when the twin suns rose, and after finding help for them, see about taking myself across the stretch of sea to Vallia to the west.

Also, I did not fail to realize that the continent of Segesthes, and the enclave city of Zenicce, lay across the Sunset Sea to the east. In Zenicce stood my own proud enclave of Strombor. I was the Lord of Strombor. But Strombor and all my friends there would have to wait — as they had waited for years — until I had won my Delia finally.

From the shattered remnants of the wrecked prison ship we took what we could of food and wine and I saw that the survivors, about a hundred and twenty or so of them, men and women, would not suffer from starvation before help could reach them. From what Borg said, I judged that he would be very careful how they accepted help; for as political prisoners their fate would depend much on the tendencies of their rescuers.

The political situation in Vallia was complex and finely balanced, the racters and the panvals in their eternal struggling for power, the Emperor now strong, now weak, eternally seeking help from one side, now the other, always asserting his own power and demanding absolute obedience from the citizenry. To hell with all that! Vallia, Vondium, and Delia!

Much banging and ringing of iron finally fell quiet and the last of the fetters had been cut off. I found a snug hole down between two boulders, and with a scrap of cloth from the ship to serve as padding and cover, went to sleep. On the morrow, after a great dish of fried bosk rashers and a jar of some sweet rose wine — a vintage of western Vallia, so Jeniu told me — I was ready to leave.

They waved to me as I set off. They were a starveling crew, eating properly for the first time in many a day, their nakedness covered as best they could manage. I waved back, and I confess, to my shame, that I scarcely thought more of them except as people to whom I owed the duty of what help I could give. Beyond that — Delia!

“Remberee, Koter Drak!”

“Remberee,” I shouted back, striding on. “Remberee!”

Many times I have marched through country completely new to me, alone or with companions. Memories ghosted up — but I would not think of them now. I studied the land critically. It looked bleak, bare, somehow tired and dispirited. Clumps of thorn-ivy grew along the way and, a dismal prospect on Kregen, no palines. No palines! Not a country for me, I decided, and thereby, as you will hear, made a stultifying mistake.

The suns of Scorpio cast down their opaz beams and the weather, although warm, was in no wise stifling. If what the prisoners had told me was true — and their ideas of where we might be were almost as chancy as mine — we must be on a latitude sixty or seventy dwaburs north of the southern coast of Vallia. That, as far as I could judge, would be on a latitude about the same distance south of Zenicce.

I marched on and soon I walked through the remains of a village. The houses had been constructed of wood, and they had burned. There were bones among the ashes. The sad relics of an abandoned living-site passed to either side as I walked through what had once been a bustling main street. No birds waited to scavenge. This had happened some time ago, for the dusty vegetation was creeping back.

The prospect opened up beyond this dismal scene, and hills closed in on my left, so that I walked for a space beside a stream. Here vegetation had taken a hold and I saw many varieties of the myriad growths that flourish so freely on Kregen. Here, too, I came across paline bushes and so could pick a handful and munch them as I traveled.

Far away on my right and ahead, obscured occasionally by cloud and by intervening rises, the tall blue outlines of mountains jagged against the sky. Snow glistened on their peaks, so they were of a size. The forests thickened, and I saw lenk and sturm, an occasional sporfert, and many trees of secondary growths that are common both to Earth and Kregen. Grass grew more lushly — and then I walked out upon a great clearing where the neat rows of samphron bushes lay all untended, where the crops had ripened and seeded and rotted, and where I saw a small village laid waste, burned, destroyed, abandoned.

I began to wonder if I would ever find succor for the prisoner survivors here in this desolate land.

The way I followed had seemed to me to mark itself out by its contours as a track and when this wended into a valley and ran side by side with a sheet of water, I felt certain I trod a dirt-packed way that once had been a highroad. Now grass and weeds thrust through, worts, ragbladders, creeping vines, and here and there the banks had slipped into the water. At the far end of the lake I came across a lock. Its wooden gates were closed, and I was downstream. It was such a lock as I was perfectly accustomed to back home on Earth. The navigators had made of the country a different place, and the genius that had put the lock to work, so that narrow boats and barges might rise and fall through mountains, had laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution.

Dangling over the lock gates a yellowing skeleton brought me sharply back to Kregen.

Wedged in the skeleton’s backbone was an arrow.

I studied it. Knowledge of one’s opponent’s weapons is a psychological knowledge of him, as I have said before.

This arrow had not been loosed from a Lohvian longbow. It was shorter; the point was, although of steel, merely an arrow-shaped barbed wedge. The feathers, bedraggled, were not, to my mind, set by a master-fletcher. They were red and black.

Red and black had been the colors of the prison guards’ sleeves.

I left the arrow where it was, and saluting the skeleton’s departed spirit — what some Kregans call the ib — I passed on.

That night I had to face a decision. I could not cross the stretch of water and reach Vallia to the west without a boat, and to find a boat I needed help. But I had also my duty to the prisoners, prisoners no more, although for how long they would retain their freedom I did not care to speculate. If I circled — then I faced facts. This land had been raided dry. Slavers had done this. Their handiwork is all too plain. I must press on, look for the lay of the land where it was likely to find habitation, and then see about a boat.

The next day I swung a little more to the west, leaving the canal. I found only scorched earth and moldering skeletons. I wended back to the east, crossed the canal, and pressed on through woodlands and open spaces where great fires had raged and the growth was only just beginning to sprout through. This was hard going.

On the third day I came across a fine metal road. Oh, it was no road of Imperial Loh of ancient times, but it was easy to walk on. I felt absolute certainty that there was no other person near me; long before I suspected I was approaching humanity I would be off the road and into the trees.

The road struck off due east.

This was taking me away from the coast, and I must perforce accept that annoyance, for I now saw that this land had been struck by raiders from the sea who had ravaged the coastal belt clean. I suspected these signs of destruction were more than two seasons old, and the still-dangling skeleton seemed to confirm that the inhabitants had not dared return. I was on an island, therefore I might find someone on the eastern coast or in the inland massif.

Drink was no problem, for the canalwater was surprisingly sweet. On reflection I assumed this to be the result of the absence of traffic. I saw a string of sunken narrow boats. Food was relatively easy to come by, a few carefully laid traps of plaited reed, a spirited rush, and a stupid bosk wriggled in the trap. Also, there were palines.

The impression I gained was that this had been a prosperous farming community of interconnected villages and towns, and the wild animals I might have expected — leems, graint, zhantils, and the like — had been banished long ago and had not found their way back. These bosk, now, must be the descendants of domesticated herds. Then, as though to prove me right, I came walking down into a valley where crops grew in neat rows, tended crops, with the sign of mankind strong and orderly upon them. There were, however, indications that the harvest was poor, and here and there the ground showed dry and dusty. Indeed, it had not rained since I had landed here.

The canal I had been following had curved away the previous day, but the road which had tracked the canal had seemed the more likely prospect. Feeling I had been proved right I trod on — warily! — and was most surprised to discover the road, wending with the course of the valley, swing away from that glimpse I had had of crops. I walked on for a bur or so, pondering, and then the explanation occurred to me. The road did indeed follow the natural line; those crops I had seen and the village they suggested must lie adjacent to them, had been sited away from the road, off the beaten track, hidden. They had been revealed by some local flaw in the tree cover.

At once I turned off the road and headed straight down into the valley bottom.

In the event, my clever supposition, although right, was rendered totally unnecessary. As I slithered and scraped through the trees down the slope I saw below me the same confounded thorn-ivy hedge that surrounds any boundary of cultivated land against the wild. The thorn-ivy was not of recent growth, for what was wild had once been tamed, but it gave me a few nasty jabs and stabs and scratches before I went through.

Cursing, I stood up, and there, coming down smoothly and decently from the road above, was a side road, all neat and clean and easy. And I’d gone headfirst through a thorn-ivy boma!

So much for my cleverness.

“Sink me!” I started off to let rip a whole string of the curses of two worlds and several colorful cultures — and then I stopped. I didn’t laugh, for as you know I laugh seldom and then in situations that seem not to call for laughter as the correct critical response; but I could see the humorous side of that slide down the valleyside and the crash through the boma. I was still picking thorns out of my shoulders when I walked into the single main street of the village.

The houses were more like huts: bark-logged walls, large leaves of the papishin trailed over a ridge-pole for roofs, mere holes for doors, and of windows not a sign. A pen contained a dozen or so bosks, squealing and grunting. A few ponshos, languid in the warmth, their fleeces, although heavy, in poor condition, were actually nibbling the grass growing up between the logs of the huts. There was a well. I walked straight to it. It had adobe walls and a fractured cover, but there was a rope and a bucket. I threw the bucket down, hauled it up, and drank deeply, then plunged my head in the icy water.

When I lifted my head and shook it like a ponsho-trag a quavering voice said: “Llahal, dom.”

I turned slowly. I turned carefully. I still held the well bucket in both hands and I could hurl that and draw my sword with blinding speed, if I had to.

The old man confronting me did not look any kind of threat.

He was old, for his hair was white and his thin beard draggled whitely across his shrunken chest. He must be at least two hundred years old, I judged. He wore a simple garment of orange cloth around his middle, hanging to his knees, with a broad fold thrown up and over his left shoulder. For only a single instant could the foolish fancy that he was a Todalpheme attract me; but I knew he was not, for around his waist he did not have a colored tasseled rope; the robe fell loosely.

“Llahal, dom,” I replied.

His weak eyes regarded me. “You are welcome to our poor village. We have little, but what we have is yours.”

The words might have been rote — as I wondered then, they might be a trap — but I sensed in this man that what he said was true; he and his people were friendly to me. I saw a number of other people gathering and saw instantly that they were all old or babes-in-arms, held by their great-grandmothers. I knew these signs of old.

They were desperately poor. The strong young men and the beautiful young girls had either been taken up as slaves or had run off into the central massif. These people were abject. They had been shattered by a continuous succession of slave raids, and they had no fight left. They accepted their fate with a fatalism that, while I could not share its abnegations, I could understand.

The old man, Theirson, led me to his hut and I sat on the packed dirt floor, and they gave me a bowl of fruit, gleaming rounds of the fabulous fruit of Kregen. I picked up a squish. I thought of Inch and his taboos, and then I did not think over those memories again. I munched a mouthful of squishes as old Theirson talked.

“You had best not linger here, Koter Drak. You are most welcome and we would love your help in the fields, for the work is hard and we are old. But no young man is safe. The aragorn, for whom the Ice Floes of Sicce most certainly wait, ride through and take what they will and no man dare say them nay.”

His wife, Thisi the Fair — she was old and stringy and her hair as white as his own — shivered. “Do not speak of the aragorn, Theirson, I beg you. If only the old days were here!”

I felt a peculiar sensation in my stomach, and I rubbed it. I felt hot and yet I felt cold. I drank a cup of water. I wanted all the information I could get; yet the hut walls were receding and closing, swaying, rippling like the bed of a mountain stream. My tongue seemed as thick as a chunkrah’s tongue.

Theirson, Thisi the Fair, and others were looking at me with kind expressions, and talking, but their words boomed and echoed and hurt my ears. I fell full length, and lay there, unable to move. They were all looking down on me with worried, concerned expressions, and Thisi felt my forehead.

“It is the sickness,” she whispered. “Koter Drak — you must fight for your life!”

And then I swung away like a surfer on the bottom of a board with only the deep black-green of nothingness beneath me.