Without a sound I jumped from the sunken wherry into the skiff. I tried not to kill. I toppled the two oarsmen overboard. The two men in the bows reared up, their chains chirring with ugly menace.

“Slave—die!” and “Human—perish!” they shouted.

Had they not shouted that, perhaps I would not have fought as I did. But I did fight. My chain blurred through the air and sliced a vulturine beak; the thing gargled and toppled. I ducked the second chain and then brought my own back so fast I nearly overbalanced. It looped around that incredibly thin and long neck, doubled on itself. I yanked and the Rapa staggered forward so that I could land a solid blow. He collapsed. I heard a shout behind me and ducked again and the chain smashed a huge chunk from the wooden side of the skiff. I sprang to face the last Rapa. He poised, the chain circling.

His beaked face leered on me; he knew all must be over for him—and yet, could he dispose of me and row for the main canal he would be away, and with a human woman as a hostage. He had all to play for. I feinted and the chain hissed. I pulled back and he leered at me again.

“Human offal!” His gobbling croak harsh in my ears stilled the mad thumping of my heart. I sized him up. That chain could break an arm, a leg, could throttle me, long before I could reach him. I flexed my legs, braced against the bottom boards where water slopped. He had not, perhaps, the experience in boats I had. I began to rock from side to side.

His arms flew up. The chain circled crazily. The woman was clutching the transom in both hands I could not see her face for she wore a heavy veil of emerald silk. I rocked furiously. The Rapa staggered and lurched, recovered his balance, toppled the other way. The gunwales of the fragile skiff were slopping water at each roll.

With a shriek of mingled fury and despair the Rapa dropped his chain and lurched down to grab at the gunwale and with a last savage rocking motion of my leg I tipped him clean out of the boat. He flew across the water and went in face first, spread-eagled. His splash was a magnificent flower of foam. I did not laugh. I quietened the skiff in the water and seized the oars. The Rapa drifted away. I turned to the woman.

“Well, my girl,” I said harshly. “You’re all right. No harm has come to you.”

I did not want her to panic, lest she upset the skiff. She regarded me through the eyeslits of her veil. She sat very still and straight. I towered above her, my naked chest heaving from the slight exertion of the fight, water and sweat rivuleting down my thighs where the ridged muscle shone hard, like iron. She wore a long gown of emerald green, unrelieved by ornament. Above the green veil she wore a tricorne hat of black silk, with a curled emerald green feather. Her hands were cased in white gloves, and on three of her fingers, outside the gloves, she wore rings: one emerald, one ruby and one sapphire.

I began to pull back to the jetty.

A story to account for my broken slave chains rose into my mind.

The woman had not said anything. She sat so still, so silent, that I thought she must be in shock.

When we reached the jetty she stood up and held out a foot in its jeweled strappings. I reached out my palm and she put her foot in that brown and powerful hand and I lifted her up onto the jetty as an elevator lifts one up through the giant trunks of the plant-houses in distant Aphrasöe.

A certain concern was removed from my mind as I saw floating in the water the form of a Rapa guard with a slave chain wrapped around his neck, his great beaked face twisted sideways and loose from his trunk. He was a Deldar, a commander of ten, and he had been the sixth guard aboard our wherry.

Slowly I climbed onto the jetty.

The woman was surrounded by a clamoring mob of guards and nobles in gaudy finery. Of slaves there was no sign save the blood that stained the stones beneath their feet.

“Princess!” they were calling. And: “We thought your precious light had been removed from us!” And: “Praise be to mighty Zim and to thrice-powerful Genodras that you are safe!”

She turned to face me, her head high, her gown stiff and tent-like about her, her jeweled feet invisible. She lifted a white-gloved hand and the babble fell silent.

“Dray Prescot,” she said, and, saying, astonished me beyond words. “You may incline to me.”

I stood there in the light of the twin suns, a reddish shadow from my heels lying north-northwest and a greenish shadow lying northwest by north, give or take a point. Nowadays, of course, a ship can be steered to a degree; it is wonderful what a difference steam and diesel and nuclear power have made to navigation of the oceans—I gaped at her.

The man I remembered as Galna thrust forward. His face was at once ugly and vengeful and gloating. His all-over green leathers glistened in that Antarean sunshine.

“I shall run him through now, my Princess, as you desire.”

He drew a rapier from a velvet lined sheath. I hardly noticed the thing. I stared at the woman. Incline to her? I did not want to die. I bowed, a stiffly formal making of a leg, my right hand elegantly waving in the air before my breast and then finishing up, fingers gracefully curled; before me, my leg stuck forward, the other back, my left arm outstretched behind me, my head bowed over low—low!

If this absurd posture, so carefully taught in the scented drawing rooms of Europe, should be taken as an insult—I heard a light laugh.

“Do not kill the rast now, Galna. He will make better sport—later.”

I straightened up. “I was freed from my chains by the Rapa guard so as to help better with the marble—” I began to say. Galna struck me viciously across the face with the flat of his rapier. At least, he would have done, had I not jerked my head back. Men jumped forward.

“Down, rast, when the princess addresses you.”

An arm laid across my back, a foot twitched my ankles, and I was down, spine bent, rear high, nose thrust painfully into the stones of the jetty where marble dust irritated my eyes and nostrils. Four men held me.

“Incline, rast!”

Perforce, I inclined. I had learned something a slave of the Esztercari Household must know in order to stay alive. Even then, as my nose bumped painfully in the marble dust of the jetty, I contrasted this barbarous posture with the graceful gestures of the ceremony of obi.

I knew that death was very near.

Princess Natema Cydones stirred me with her jeweled foot. Her toes were lacquered that same brilliant green.

“You may crouch, slave.”

Assuming this meant exactly what it sounded like I sat up in a crouching position, like a fawning dog. No one struck me, so I guessed I had learned a little more. There had been some sharp words, and muttering, and acid commands from the group and now I heard the clink of chains. A short stout man clad in a pale gray tunic-like garment bound with emerald green borders, and with two large green key-shaped devices stitched to his breast and back, now strutted forward. Under the fuming eyes and pointed rapiers of Galna and the other nobles, this man loaded me with chains. He snapped an iron ring about my neck, an iron band about my waist, wristlets and anklets, and from loops on all of these weighty objects he strung what seemed to me more than a cable’s length of harsh iron chain.

“See that he is transferred to my opal palace, Nijni,” ordered the princess, casually, as though discussing the delivery of a new pair of gloves. No—as I was prodded along by the slave-master Nijni’s sturm-wood wand of office, I knew I was wrong. She would give more concern, much more concern, to the choosing of a new pair of gloves.

I had escaped from one kind of slavery to that of another. The future loomed as dark and perilous as ever. Only one ray of hope in all this I could see—my men, my loyal clansmen, my brothers in obi, had been set free from their slavery and their chains.

Chapter Eleven

The Princess Natema Cydones of the Noble House of

Esztercari

How my brothers in obi would have laughed to see me now!

How those fierce fanatical clansmen would have roared their mirth to see their Zorcander, their Vovedeer, dressed like a popinjay!

Three days had passed since my futile attempt at escape. I knew I had been bought from the marble quarries. When the Princess Natema wanted anything men trembled for their lives until that thing was brought her. Now I strode the tiny wooden box in the attic of the opal palace I had been given as my room—strange, I had thought when a gray-clad slave girl had shown me in with a furtive, scared look—and stared at myself in contempt. I had refused to don the garments; but Nijni, the fat, dour, ever-cham-chewing slave-master had whistled up three immense fellows—scarcely human with their bristle bullet-heads, their massively rolling shoulders, their thick dun-colored hides mantled with muscles of near-armor thickness and toughness, their short sinewy legs and slayed feet—two to hold me and the third to strike me painfully across the back and buttocks with a thin cane. This was so remarkably like the rattans carried by our warrant officers of the King’s Ships on which I had served that I received three strokes before I had sense enough to cry out that I would don the garments, for, after all, what did foolish fancy dress signify in so much of squalor and misery?

The man who had struck me, and I must think of him as a man although from what pot of incestuous and savage genes he sprang I do not care to contemplate, leaned close as he went out.

“I am Gloag,” he said. “Do not despair. The day will come.”

He spoke in, a voice throttled in his throat, a whisper from lungs and voice box used to a stentorian bellow as a normal method of conversation.

I gave no sign I had heard.

So now I looked in dissatisfaction at myself. I wore a fancy shirt of emerald and white lozenges, with scarlet embroidery. A silk pair of breeches of yellow and white, with a great embroidered cummerbund of eye-watering colors. On my head perched a great white and golden turban, ablaze with glass stones, and gay feathers, and dangling beads. I felt not only a fool, I felt a nincompoop. If my savage brethren of the plains of Segesthes saw me now what would they not make in jest and ribald comment of their feared and respected Vovedeer?

Nijni came for me with Gloag and his men, and three lithe lissom young slave girls. The girls were clad in strings of pearls and precious little else. Gloag and his men were from Mehzta, one of the nine islands of Kregen. They wore the usual simple gray breechclout of the slave, but they each had an emerald green waistbelt, from which dangled the slim rattan cane. I went with them. In my naïveté I had no idea of where I was going, or of why I was dressed as I was, or even why I had been forced, not unpleasantly, to go through the baths of the nine. This was simply a process of proceeding from lukewarm water where the grime washed off me in sooty clouds into the liquid, through nine rooms where the water grew at each step hotter and hotter until the sweat rolled from me, and then colder and colder until I shouted and shivered and bounded as though from ice floes. I did feel invigorated, though.

Nijni paused before an ornate gold and silver door set with emeralds. From a side table he took a box and from the box a paper-wrapped bundle. Carefully he pared back the tissue. Within, virginal, white, gleaming, lay a pair of incredibly thin white silk gloves.

The slave girls with exquisite delicacy helped me don the gloves. Nijni looked at me, chewing endlessly on his wad of cham, his head cocked on one side.

“For every rip or tear in the gloves,” he said, “you will receive three strokes of the rattan. “For every soil mark, one stroke. Do not forget.” Then he threw open the doors.

The room was small, sumptuous, refined past elegance, decadent. It was, I suppose, what one would expect of a princess who had been brought up from birth to have every whim instantly gratified, to have every luxury heaped on her as a right, and who had never felt the restraining touch of an older or wiser hand, or the sound common sense of a person to whom everything is not possible.

She reclined on a chaise longue beneath a golden lamp carved in the semblance of one of the graceful flightless birds of the plains of Segesthes the clansmen love to hunt and catch to give their bright feathers to the girls of the vast chunkrah herds. She wore a short gown of emerald green—that eternal hateful color—relieved by a silken vest of silver tissue. Her arms were bare, round and rosy in the light. Her ankles were neat, her calves fine, but I thought her thighs a fraction heavy, firm and round and delightful; but that infinitesimal fraction too thick for a man of my finicky tastes. Her lush yellow hair was piled atop her head and held in place by pins with emerald gems. The sweetness of her mouth shone red and warm and inviting.

Beyond her, in an alcove, I could see the lower body and feet of a gigantic man clad in mesh steel. His chest and head were hidden from view by two carved ivory swing doors. By his side, its point resting on the floor, he held a long rapier. I did not need to be told that a single command from the Princess Natema would bring him in a single bound into the room, that deadly point at my throat or buried in my heart.

“You may incline,” she said.

I did so. She had not called me a rast. A rast, I knew now, was a disgusting six-legged rodent that infested dunghills. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe, apart from my four limbs and my larger size I, in this palace, was no better than a rast in his dunghill. At least, that was his nature.

“You may crouch.”

I did so.

“Look at me.”

I did so. In all truth, that was not a hard command to obey. Slowly, languorously, she rose from the couch. Her white arms, rounded and rosy in the lamplight, reached up and, artfully, lasciviously, she pulled the emerald pins from her hair so that it fell in a glory around her. She moved about the room, lightly, gracefully, scarcely seeming to touch the scented rugs of far Pandahem with those pink feet with their emerald-lacquered toenails that shone so wantonly. The green gown drooped about her shoulders and I caught my breath as those two firm rounds appeared beneath the silk; lower down her arms dropped the gown, lower, sliding with a kind of breathless hiss, so that at last she stood before me clad only in the white tissue vest that ended in a scalloped edge across her thighs. Silver threads glittered through the tissue. Her form glowed within like some sacred flame within the holy precincts of a temple.

She stared down on me, insolently, taunting me, knowing full well the power and the drug of her body. Her red lips pouted at me, and the lamplight caught on them and shot a dazzling star of lust into my eyes.

“Am I not a woman, Dray Prescot?”

“Aye,” I said. “You are a woman.”

“Am I of all women not the most fair?”

She had not touched me—yet.

I considered.

Her face tightened on me. Her breathing came, sharper, with a gasp. She stood before me, head thrown back, hair a shining curtain about her, her whole body instinct with all the weapons of a woman.

“Dray Prescot! I said—am I of all women not the most fair?”

“You are fair,” I said.

She drew in her breath. Her small white hands clenched. She stared down on me and I became closely aware of that grim mailed swordsman half-hidden in the alcove.

Now her contempt flowed over me like sweetened honey.

“You, perhaps, know one who is fairer than I?”

I stared up at her, levelly, eye to eye. “Aye. I did, once. But she, I think, is dead.”

She laughed, cruelly, mockingly, hatefully. “Of what use a dead woman to a live man, Dray Prescot! I pardon your offense—”

She halted herself, and put one hand to her heart, pressing. “I pardon you,” she said, again, wonderingly. Then: “Of all women living, am I not the most fair?”

I acknowledged that. I saw no reason to get myself killed for the sake of a spoiled brat’s pride. My Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains—I thought of her then and a pang of agony touched me so that I nearly forgot where I was and groaned aloud. Could Delia be dead? Or could she have been taken by the Savanti back to Aphrasöe? There was no way I could find that out except by finding the City of the Savanti—and that seemed impossible even if I were free.

As though suddenly wearying of this petty taunting, although, heaven knew, she was prideful enough of her beauty, she flung herself wantonly on the chaise longue, her head back, her arms flung casually out, her golden hair cascading down to the rugs from far Pandahem. “Bring me wine,” she said, indolently, pointing with her jeweled foot.

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.

“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 enormous 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 the 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!”

“Would you offer me all this if I were not your slave?”

“You are my slave, to do with as I will!”

I did not answer. She looked back to where Delia sat, idly sewing a silken bit of tapestry, and pretending not to look at us. Her cheeks were flushed. Natema’s ripe red mouth drew down. “I know!” she said, and her voice hissed between her white teeth. “I know! That slave wench—Here! Guards—bring me that wench!”

When the Chuliks stood grasping Delia before us, she lifted her little chin and regarded Natema with a look so proud and disdainful all my blood coursed and sang through my body. Delia did not look at me.

“This is the reason, Dray Prescot! I saw, in the corridor where you slew the five treacherous guards! I saw.”

She gave an order that froze me where I stood. A Chulik drew his dagger and placed it to Delia’s breast, over her heart. He looked with his oily yellow face to Natema, stolidly awaiting the next order.

“Does this girl mean anything to you, Dray Prescot?”

I stared at Delia, whose eyes now remained firmly fixed on me, her head lifted, her whole beautiful body taut and desirable and infinitely lovely. Queen among women is Delia of the Blue Mountains! Immeasurably the most beautiful woman in all Kregen and all Earth, incomparable, radiant, near-divine. I shook my head. I spoke roughly, contemptuously.

“A slave girl? No—she means nothing to me.”

I saw Delia swallow and her eyelids blinked, once.

Natema smiled, like one of those she-leem of the plains, furred, feline, vicious, against which the clansmen wage continual war in protection of the chunkrah herds. She gestured and Delia returned once more to her tapestry. I noticed her fingers were not quite steady as she guided the needle; but her back was erect, her body taut, the pearls taking all their luster from the glowing glory of her skin.

“For the last time, Dray Prescot—will you?”

I shook my head, thankful that, at least for the time, Delia had been spared from immediate danger. What happened next was quick, brutal and, given the circumstances, expected. The Chuliks at Natema’s fierce, broken-voice command, seized me, ran me to the rail, thrust me half-over where I hung suspended over that gulf. Below me the water curled away from the long sandspit tailing at the end of the island. The air smelled very sweet and fresh, tanged with salt.

“Now, Dray Prescot! One word! One word is all I ask!”

I was not such a fool as to imagine I might easily survive such a dive; it would be a gamble with the odds heavily against me. I could easily throw these Chuliks off, snatch a rapier, fight my way through them and hope to escape into the warrens of the palace. But I did not think Natema would have me tossed into eternity. And, thinking that, I realized I was a fool, that she had been accustomed to doing anything at all and having anything she wanted from birth. But, if she did fancy she loved me, would she destroy me?

I braced myself, ready to twist like a zorca and fling these two yellow-bellies into space.

“One word, Natema, one word I spare you! No!”

I heard Delia screaming, and the scuffling sounds of a struggle. I dragged up one arm and the Chulik gasped and tried to hold me down. I was ready to turn and rend them…

“What is going on here?”

The voice was harsh, strong with the tone of habitual absolute authority. The Chuliks hauled me back inboard. A tableau was frozen on that scented roof garden.

All the slaves were at the incline. Delia was held down by two Chuliks. Natema was gracefully inclining her head in a semblance of a curtsey. The man to whom these obvious and immediate marks of servile respect were addressed must be Natema’s father, the Head of the House, the Cydones Esztercari, the Kodifex of the city himself.

He was tall, gaunt, with a grim pucker in the lines around his mouth, an arrogant black light in his eyes. His hair and beard were iron-gray. He stood tall, clad all in the Esztercari emerald, a jeweled rapier and dagger at his side, and I wondered how many slaves he had had killed, how many men he had spitted in duel and bravo-fight. In his face showed clearly the fanatical obsession of power, the greed to possess power and to exercise it ruthlessly.

“It is nothing, Father.”

“Nothing! Do not seek to fob me off, daughter. Has the slave interfered with your girl? Tell me, Natema, by the blood of your mother.”

“No, Father.” Natema resumed her natural arrogant stance.

“The girl means nothing to him. He has said so.”

The hooded black eyes pierced into me, into Delia, into his daughter. His hands, gloved, gripped the weapon hilts.

“You are pledged to the Prince Pracek of Ponthieu. He is here to speak to you of the wedding arrangements. I have, as is proper, attended to the financial bokkertu.”

A man stepped forward from the mass of emerald green clothing in the rear of the Kodifex. I saw Galna there, his face as white and mean as ever. This young man wore the purple and ocher of Ponthieu. His rapier was over-ornate. He took Natema’s hand and raised it to his forehead. He had a sharp-featured face, with that kind of lopsidedness to it that offends some people; but he was most polite.

“Princess Natema, star of heaven, beloved of Zim and Genodras, the crimson and emerald wonders of the sky—I am as dust beneath your feet.”

She made some formal icy reply. She was looking at me. The Kodifex saw that look. He gestured and men—human men—seized me and Delia. They hustled us to stand before the Kodifex. Natema cried out. He silenced her.

“Do not think I am not aware of what the frippery this slave wears means, daughter! By your mother’s blood, do you think I am a fool! You will obey! All else is nothing!” He gestured, a familiar, habitual movement. “Kill the man, and the girl, kill both the slaves. Now!”

Chapter Fourteen

Delia, Gloag and I eat palines together

“Kill both the slaves. Now!”

I kicked the noble Kodifex in the place where it would do him the least good, dragged the two guards around before me and hurled them staggering into the emerald green knot of nobles, snatched the Kodifex’s rapier from its scabbard, slew the two guards holding Delia with two quick and savage thrusts, and seized her hand in my free left hand and dragged her running toward the stairs at the end of the roof garden.

“Dray!” she said, sobbing. “Dray!”

“Run, Delia of the Blue Mountains,” I said. “Run!”

At the foot of the stairs where the doorway, ornate this side, plain the other, separated the noble area from the slave quarters beneath the roof, two Ochs tried to stop me and died for their pains. I slammed the door shut after us. We ran.

Slaves moving about their business stared at us with lackluster eyes. The buyers of the new slaves and the slave-masters like Nijni had beaten many backs right from the start so as to instill from the outset that fear and despair that is the necessary condition of the slave. We were not molested, scarcely remarked. I hoped that in a month or so the slaves would have found some semblance of the usual slavish chatter and hubbub and quick interest.

“Where are we going, Dray? What are we to do?”

I wanted to fall on my knees before this radiant girl and beg her forgiveness. But for me she would be home in Delphond, happy in the bosom of her family. How she must regard me with contempt and loathing! And, even worse, because I had been suspected of loving her she would have been killed! How often can that be said of a man’s unwanted attentions to a girl on Earth?

“Hurry,” I said, not trusting myself to say more.

In my room I rolled the trundle bed away. Gloag stared up. He saw Delia. His eyes went big. He saw the rapier. He whistled.

“Come, Gloag, my friend,” I said, speaking with a harsh ruthlessness that made him jump up and Delia flinch.

Out we sped into the warren of passageways and halls. In an alcove far from my room I ripped off the stupid finery and between us with the rapier we cut it up and fashioned breechclouts for Gloag and myself and a tunic shift for Delia. I felt a warm admiration for the way in which she had completely accepted her nakedness in our presence. On matters as desperate as those on which we were engaged the sight of a few inches of pink skin mattered little.

We stood ready to venture forth. Delia went to hurl the strings of pearls away in disgust; but I restrained her. I put them to my teeth.

“They’re real. They will serve a purpose.”

Then a thought of shocking impropriety hit me. Natema as a proud princess would not clothe her slave girls in imitation pearls, it would be tasteless and loutish behavior. Would, then, she likewise clothe the man she hoped to make her paramour in imitation gems? I fancy my fingers shook a trifle as I rummaged through the pile of discarded clothing, the immense turban, the jeweled sash and slippers.

The gems were real.

I knew. I had not boarded prizes among the battlesmoke for the glory of it. I had been to a London jeweler and had handled the gems, precisely against that need.

I held a fortune in my hands.

“Hurry,” I said, and thrust the gems in a fold of cloth within my breechclout. Around my waist was buckled the broad leather belt of the steel-meshed warrior. We padded down corridors known to Gloag. He carried a billet of wood. I would not much like to stop that with my cranium.

On Gloag’s tough dun-colored hide, over his left shoulder blade, I had noticed a brand-mark, the solid block-lettered outlines of the Kregish letters for “C.E.” Natema would not disfigure the slave maidens who attended her and whom she would see every day, and to my infinite relief Delia, having been in the kitchens only for a day, she told me, had not been branded. As the princess’

potential lover and then a corpse, I, too, had not been branded. We made sure that not a scrap of emerald green cloth remained of the fancy clothes in the material we chose for our new clothing. I slung a short scarlet square from my shoulders as a cape, and I forced Gload to do likewise.

He knew his way with unerring accuracy, and I had navigated my way from the roof garden to my room, and so now I navigated my way alongside Gloag until we reached a narrow, dusty, cobwebby, flang-infested corridor low in the palace where water seeped oozing through the cracks between the massive basalt blocks of the walls on one hand. We would have a better chance at night, when the twin suns have set in their riot of topaz and ruby and, if we were lucky, with a little cloud to drift between the first of the seven moons. Like any sailor, once I knew the state of tide or moon I kept that information continually turning in my head, ready at any moment to bring forth the exact state of either. On Kregen, there were seven moons with their phases to consider; but I was automatically sure that I could tell when the darkest period of the night would occur.

Accustomed to long periods on duty without food, I was concerned over Delia; but then Gloag astonished us all by producing a length of loaf, somewhat limp and bent, and a handful of palines he had kept over from the previous meal I had smuggled to him. We ate with a gusty hunger, not leaving a crumb. Given the circumstances the rest of our escape was not overly difficult. We crawled through a stinking conduit and postern. Gloag was a superb scout. We swam the canal, stole a skiff, rowed in the dim light of three of the smaller moons passing low overhead. The nearer moons of Kregen have an appreciable motion. To escape from the city would be out of the question without an airboat, and even then the city wardens would patrol the air lanes. I asked directions, discreetly, of slaves, and Gloag it was who discovered the exact whereabouts among the islands of the enclave of Eward. I was taking a desperate gamble; but I had a card to play.

The city would be up over the escape of slaves, particularly from the ruling House, and we might simply be handed straight back. But I did not think so. Eward and Esztercari were at daggers drawn. We rowed quietly up to the stone jetty where men in the powder blue livery of Eward escorted us to an interview with the Head of their House. I had acted with arrogant authority, letting the guards see the tangible reality of my presence. A Vovedeer can be as autocratic and dictatorial as any other man who commands men, when the need arises.

Our interview was informal and pleasant. Wanek of the family of Wanek of the Noble House of Eward reminded me of no one more vividly than Cydones of Esztercari. Both men contained that gaunt obsessive drive for power. He sat in his powder blue robes, hand on fist, listening. When I had finished he called for wine, and slave girls to care for Delia.

“I welcome you to Eward, Dray Prescot,” Wanek said, as we sat down to the wine and a meal. The suns were breaking in golden and crimson glory patinaed with a paler green fire in the dawn above the rooftops. “My son, the Prince Varden, is away at this time. But I shall be honored to help you. We are not as the rasts of Esztercari.” His fingers gripped his chin, whitening about the knuckles. “This union between their princess and the puppy Pracek you speak of is serious.” And then he began a long discourse on the tangled power politics of the city.

The General Assembly sat continuously. Never was there a break in their deliberations and debates and legislation. There were four hundred and eighty seats in the Assembly. In the city there were twenty-four Houses, both Noble and Lay, so that the average number of seats per House was twenty. Some, like Esztercari, boasted more, twenty-five, the same number as Eward. But the pressures came from alignments of power, alliances and pacts between House and House so that a party might always have the majority vote. When I marveled at the stamina of the Assemblymen Wanek laughed, and explained that only the seats counted. Anyone from a House could sit in the seats reserved to his House in the Assembly. Only the number of seats conferred the power; the men who sat in them came and went, continuously, often on a rota basis, like our system of watches at sea.

“And the Esztercari carry the weight, the alignments, and Cydones Esztercari is Kodifex of all Zenicce!”

Clearly, this was the source of the rancor in Wanek of Eward. Clearly, in his eyes, he should be Kodifex, the acknowledged leader of the most powerful coalition.

Then I saw another of the interesting facts of life in Zenicce. A bent, wizened, bearded fellow in the gray breechclout of the slave was summoned and he, with a delicacy marvelous to see, removed the brand-mark from Gloag’s shoulder. He would have heated his irons and branded Gloag afresh, with the entwined “W.E.” but I prevented him.

“Gloag is free,” I said.

Wanek nodded. “Evidently, you and Delia of the Blue Mountains are free, Dray Prescot, for you are not branded. And so therefore must be your friend, Gloag.” He motioned the brand-remover away. “I will have his skin doctored. The scar will not show.” He chuckled, an unlikely sound, and yet fitting in context. “We are old hands at removing brands and substituting our own, in Zenicce.”

His wife, upright, stern, yet still bearing an unmistakable aura of vanished beauty shining about her motherly virtue, said gently:

“There are about three hundred thousand free people in Zenicce, compared with seven hundred thousand in the great Houses. Of course”—she gestured with one ivory-white hand—“they have no seats in the Assembly.”

“They live on islands and enclaves split by avenues,” said Wanek. “They ape our ways. But they are merchants and tradesmen, like ourselves, and sometimes they are useful.”

I had the sense not to remark that from his words one might assume those in the Houses might not be free. Within the Houses all those not slaves were free with a freedom denied to those independent free outside.

Toward the center of the city the river Nicce divided once more in its serpentine windings to the sea and left a larger island than any other in the complex of land and water. On this island was situated the heart of the city—the buildings of the General Assembly, the city wardens’ quarters, administrative buildings, and a mind-confusing maze of small alleyways and canals off which opened the souks where anything might be bought or sold. The noise was deafening, the colors superb, the sights astounding and the smells prodigious.

After a time when it seemed that Wanek and his wife had nothing better to do than talk to me, Wanek asked, most politely, if he might inspect my rapier. I did not tell him I had taken it from Cydones Esztercari. He took it with a reverence strange to me—he could have bought and discarded a thousand like it—and then his mouth drooped.

“Inferior work,” he said, looking across at his wife with a small smile. She tut-tutted, interested in her husband’s occupation.

“Krasny work. But the hilt is fashionable although too cluttered with gems for a fighting man.” He shot a look at me as he spoke. I rubbed my fingers.

“I had noticed,” I said.

“We Ewards are the best and most renowned sword-smiths in all the world,” he said, matter-of-factly.

I nodded.

“My clansmen obtain their weapons from the city, as needs they must; we do not care who fashions them provided they are the best we can buy—or take.”

He rubbed his chin and handed the rapier back. “The weapons we make for sale to the butchers and tanners, who sell them to you for meat and hides, are never rapiers. Shortswords, broadswords, axes—rapiers, no.”

“The man who owned this is not dead,” I said. “But he is probably still doubled-up and vomiting.”

“Ah,” said Wanek of Eward, wisely, and asked no more. The talk drifted. I suppose they, like a number of persons in authority, did not realize that other people were tired when they were not. The hated name of Esztercari cropped up again, and I learned they were the leading shipowners of the city. That figured. Then Wanek’s wife said something almost below her breath, about the damned butchers stealing what was not theirs, and murder, and then I heard a name spring out, hard and strong and resounding. Strombor, was the name.

I believe, now, that then, when I first heard that name it rang and thundered in my ears with a clarion call—or do I deceive myself and am I influenced by all the intervening years? I do not know; but the name seemed to soar and echo and resound in my skull.

At last I managed to make my leave—the question of payment for their hospitality had delicately been raised and as delicately dropped—and I was conducted to a chamber where Gloag snored away in the corner. I dropped on the bed and sank into sleep and my last thought was, inevitably, of Delia of the Blue Mountains. As it was on every night of my life.

We roused in the late afternoon and satisfied our hunger with the fresh light crispy bread of Kregen, loaves as long as rapiers, and thin rashers of vosk-back, and palines, with the Kregen tea—full-bodied, aromatic, pungent—to finish. When we saw Wanek again he greeted us kindly. I asked for Delia.

“I will ask her to join us,” said Wanek, and a slave departed—only to come back with the word that Delia was not in her room and the slave who had with such kind care and attention insisted on attending to her was also missing. I sat up. My hand fell to the hilt of the rapier.

“Please!” Wanek looked upset. A search was instituted; but Delia was not to be found. I raged. Wanek was beside himself at the insult he was thus forced to endure—the insult to him in that he insulted an honored guest.

Delia of the Blue Mountains and I had exchanged only a few words during our escape, for Gloag was near and, at least on my part, I felt a constraint, sure that she hated and detested me for what I had done to her. She had said something that puzzled me mightily. When we had both vanished from the pool of baptism in far Aphrasöe she had opened her eyes to find herself on the beach with the Fristles bearing down upon her, so that she had not been surprised to see me. When I had, in the moment of victory, been tumbled from the zorca, she had been taken to the city and straight to the House of Esztercari. Because of their shipping interests the Esztercari did a thriving business in slaves, and they could also command those caught in other ways. Then Delia had shaken me. For, she said, the very next day, she had seen me in that corridor, dressed in those accursed clothes, and had spilled and broken the water jar.

She also told me that one each of those occasions when she had been captured or enslaved she had seen a white dove flying high, with a great scarlet and golden raptor far above. A messenger was announced. A bluff, moustached bulky man looking oddly out-of-place in the powder blue of the Ewards stalked in, his rapier clamped to his side, his face alive with wrath and baffled fury. He was, I understood, the House Champion, a position occupied in Esztercari by Galna of the white face and mean eyes.

“Well, Encar?”

“A message, my leader, from—from the Esztercari. A slave whom we trusted—how they mock us for that!—has abducted the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains—”

I leaped to my feet, my blade half out of its scabbard, my hands trembling, and I know my face, ugly as it is, must have seemed diabolical to those around me.

It was true. The slave wench with her blandishments had arranged it all. She was a spy for Natema. She had got a message out, it seemed clear, and men had been waiting in that damned emerald livery at a tiny postern. There they had snatched my Delia, thrown a hood over her head, carried her swiftly aboard a gondola and poled away to the enclave of Esztercari. It was all true, heart-breakingly true.

But there was more.

“Unless the men called Dray Prescot freely surrenders himself to the Kodifex,” Encar went on, his bluff honest face reflecting the distaste he felt at his words, “the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains will meet a fate such as is meted out to recalcitrant slaves, to slaves who escape—” He faltered and looked at me.

“Go on.”

“She will be stripped and turned loose into the Rapa court.”

I heard gasps. I did not know—but I could guess.

“Dray Prescot—what can you do?” asked Gloag. He had risen to stand by me, splayfooted, incredibly tough, intelligent, a friend despite his dun bristly hide.

As I may have indicated, I do not laugh easily. I threw back my head, I, Dray Prescot, and laughed, there in the Great Hall of the House of Esztercari.

“I will go,” I said. “I will go. And if a hair of her head is injured I will raze their House to the ground and slay them all, every last one.”

Chapter Fifteen

In the leem pit

Gloag wanted to fight for me.

“No,” I said.

“Give me a spear,” he growled in that rumbling voice.

“It is my business.”

“Your business is my business. At least, a spear.”

“You will be killed.”

“I know the warrens. Without me, you will be killed.”

“I know,” I said.

“Then we will both be killed. Give me a spear.”

I turned to Wanek, leader of the Noble House of Eward.

“Give my friend a spear.”

“Now may the light of Father Mehzta-Makku shine on us both.”

From Wanek I obtained a high-quality rapier and dagger, and in return told him who had been the last owner of the rapier I bore.

His delight at holding the trophy wrested from his hated enemy was keen.

“You said the hilt has value,” I said. “And, here, will you keep these gems in trust for me?” I handed over the cloth-enfolded gems. Gloag insisted his share, also, should be handed over, and then I knew he meant business, for with that wealth he could have set himself up in a small way in business in the free section of the city and lived out his life in prosperity and respect. When I told Wanek what further I requested of him he slapped his thigh in merriment, and called Encar to ready a skiff in which would go one of his men disguised to look as much like me as possible. We then went up to the roof and not without a tremor I lay down on an airboat. This was the first time I had been in one; the first time I had ever flown. Such a thing was a marvel to me. It was petal-shaped, with a transparent windshield in front, and straps to retain one in place and pelts and silks to cover the rider. Gloag and I strapped down. The driver—the word pilot was unknown to me then—except in the connotation of a ship’s pilot—sent the little craft leaping into the air into the floods of sunset light from the crimson sun. The green sun would soon follow. In the course of time, after the suns’ eclipse, the green sun would precede the red in order of rising and setting. The Kregan calendar is based on the suns’ mutual rotations to a great extent. I braced myself as we skimmed through that ruddy falling light.

I had planned to descend on the roof garden before the skiff bearing the pseudo-me reached the Esztercari landing stage. We slanted down and, thankfully, I saw the garden empty beneath us. Gloag and I leaped off and the airboat withdrew to a discreet distance. We raced for that stairway and so into the slave quarters. Wearing the slave breechclout of grimy gray we would still attract attention by reason of our weapons, so I had elected to retain my scarlet breechclout and scarlet cape, and Gloag had done likewise. Often I have been able to pass in disguise suddenly devised where, say, a man with red or green hair would find it impossible to go, although in the House of Esztercari green dyed hair, where it was not shaved off, was common.

We found a slave girl who under the threat of Gloag’s spear was only too anxious to tell us that the prisoner, whom she remembered well, was shut in the cage above the leem pit. I shuddered. Bad enough it had been to plunge once again into that towering pile of the opal palace; but far worse was it to know that we must venture down itno the depths, below the water level, where the leems slunk, furry and feline and vicious, around the damp walls of their pit. Many human bones moldered there. The leem is eight-legged, sinuous like a ferret or a weasel, but the leopard-size, with wedge-shaped head and fangs that can strike through oak. We killed them without compunction on the great plains as they sought to raid the chunkrah herds, going for preference for the young; for a grown chunkrah will impale them on his horns and hurl them a hundred yards, spitting and mewling through the air.

I have seen a blow from a leem paw with claws extended rip a warrior’s head from his body and squash it like a rotten pumpkin. Yet the leems would be far more preferable a fate for my Delia of the Blue Mountains than to be tossed nude into the Rapa court.

Our only chance was the speed and audacity of our venture. I hoped that Cydones Esztercari and his evil daughter, the Princess Natema, would be awaiting with Galna at the landing stage the arrival of the skiff that would surely be reported to them. Yet—was Natema evil? If she truly loved me, and given the circumstances of her birth and upbringing so unfortunate as to character, would she not have acted exactly as she had done? A woman scorned is not a person to turn one’s back upon, especially when she wields a dagger or can hurl a terchick.

We circled warily around the high ledge above the leem pit. The walls exuded moisture cloudy with nitrates. The place stank of leem, that close, furry, throat-clogging stench that is so noticeable in confined spaces and that is dispersed on the plains by the wind, to be scented by the savage chunkrah and warn them it is time to tail-lock, and with infants in the center, to face horn outward. A large fully-grown leem can pull down a zorca.

A vove and two leems present so fightful a picture of mutual destruction in combat that its hideousness is best left to the imagination. I have witnessed it, and testify that truth. A vove will win, for a vove is a terrible machine of destruction; but he will need careful nursing for days thereafter, if the leems fought well. These were the creatures who circled the walls of the pit beneath us. In the center, hanging suspended, was the cage in which Delia slumped, her wrists bound. Lines led to the cage through blocks by which means it could be pulled in and out. When Delia saw us she cried out, and the leems below hissed and spat and leaped in graceful vicious arcs up the walls of the pit. There were six cords and I laid my hands on the one I could see would haul in the cage.

Gloag laid his spear across my arms.

“No,” he said. I looked at him. “My Lady!” he called to Delia.

“You must stand up and lock your arms in the bars of the cage. Hold on tightly—for your life!”

I hesitated no longer. “Do as Gloag says!”

Stumbling, her hair falling across her face, Delia stood and wedged her bound arms between two bars, hung onto a crossbar.

“I am ready, Gloag,” she said. Her voice did not falter. I hauled in.

The instant the line tautened the bottom of the cage parted along the center and flapped down in two halves. Had Delia been meekly standing there she would have been pitched out like coal from a dumper, to plummet down to the fangs and claws of the leems.

I hauled her in and caught her in my arms and lowered her to the ledge. She still wore the scarlet breechclout. She trembled, suddenly, uncontrollably, and I lifted her up and a single slice of the rapier freed her from her bonds. Then we were hurrying and slipping and sliding around the ledge and out of that infernal pit. Lamplight streaked across the sweat slicked on Delia’s smooth long back and cupped in the hollows at the base of her spine. We reached the roof and the green sun had sunk; now the largest moon of Kregen, the maiden with the many smiles, sailed above us drenching the garden in a cool pink haze. The airboat driver was on the alert and came slanting in. Another airboat was approaching; the two were on converging courses. The night breeze rustled the blooms which had closed their petals at sunset and were now opening their larger outer rim of petals to the moonlight, and there were footsteps on the stairs, and voices, and harsh torchlight and the flicker of swords and daggers.

Our airboat touched. The second dropped beside it and Chuliks bounded out, their gray and emerald a weird sheen under the light. Men boiled out onto the roof behind us.

I pushed Delia toward the airboat and Gloag with his spear low made a dead run for the Chuliks.

Men behind, Chuliks before; we were outnumbered and trapped; but we would fight.

I slew three with quick simple passes, backing toward the airboats. Chuliks were attempting to get at Gloag, who passed his spear, and lunged and returned, with a wild exultant precision; but he was bringing their life’s blood out to stain the flowers a more sinister color. I caught Delia around the waist with my left arm, the dagger dabbling her breast with blood.

“Up into the airboat, Gloag!” I yelled. “Hold them off from there with that damn long implement of yours!”

With a shout he leaped. The driver was now in action, his sword a glitter of fire beneath the moon. We were being pressed. Chuliks slid before me, and I battled on. Delia squirmed against my arm.

“Let me go, you great ninny!”

I released her and she scooped a dropped dagger, plunged it into the heart of a Chulik who would have taken that opportunity to do the same to me, and sprang for the Chulik airboat. The next Chulik was dispatched by me with a single thrust. I jumped for the airboat, bundling in alongside Delia, turning like a leem to slice my blade down on an upturned face, beating down his rapier guard and biting deep into his skull. An arrow caromed from the windshield. I yelled, deep and fierce, and Gloag’s driver sent his craft swinging upward. The driver of the Chulik airboat, a soft-looking young man in Esztercari green, stared at my blade, gulped, and passed his hands over his controls. We began to rise. Pink moonlight fell about us. The breeze caught at my scarlet cape.

A hand grasped the gunwhale of the craft, tipping it. A Chulik rose into view, his dagger between his teeth, his rapier leaping for Delia. I brought my blade down overhand onto his head, splitting it, and he shrieked once; his hand flung up and the dagger spun away, and he fell back and wrenched the rapier, wedged in the bones of his skull, from my hand.

A long soft groan like a small explosion sounded from the airboat and whirled and all the world jumped into my throat. Delia… ?

An arrow had struck the driver, passing through him, and a shower more, passing where my head had been, tinkled and feathered into his controls. The airboat leaped wildly. It rose like a cork, swinging, the wind catching it and driving it under the moonlight.

Faintly, far below, I could hear shouts.

“A Chulik rose into view, his dagger between his teeth.”

I tipped the dead driver out of his reclining seat, and flung him overboard.

Then I stared helplessly at the controls.

“They are smashed, Dray Prescot,” said Delia of Delphond.

“The airboat cannot be controlled.”

The wind thrust us over the city faster and faster. In an instant the mammoth buildings fell away to the dimensions of toy blocks on a nursery floor. They they vanished in moon haze and we were alone, drifting helplessly over the face of the plains beneath the moons of Kregen.

Chapter Sixteen

On the Great Plains of Segesthes

If you say to me that, in view of her two suns, Kregen was provided with an inordinate, not to say excessive, number of moons, I can only reply that nature is by nature prolific. That is Kregen. Wild and savage and beautiful, merciless to the incompetent and weak, tolerant of the ambitious and mercenary, positively rewarding to the stouthearted and unscrupulous, Kregen is a planet where the virtues take different forms from those of our Earth.

And, too, as I understand it, Earth’s moon and the planet Mars, which is relatively small, were both fashioned from the molten crust of the Earth flung off in primeval days when the solar system was in process of formation. Something like two-thirds of the Earth’s crust was thus lost to space, and the floating plates of the Earth’s crust, on some of which lie continents, and on some seas, now slip and slide over the molten magma beneath bereft of the building materials that would have given us a greater area of land surface and consequently deeper seas. On Kregen, so I believe, only about a half of the original molten surface was flung off, to form not one moon and a planet but seven moons. It is all astronomically apposite.

Of the nine islands of Kregen not one is lesser in area than Australia. There are, of course, uncounted numbers of smaller islands scattered about, and who, still, can say who or what lives there?

We floated, Delia of the Blue Mountains, and I, Dray Prescot, in our crippled airboat far out onto the Great Plains of the continent of Segesthes.

We talked but little. I, because I felt the hurt in this girl against me, the natural feelings of disgust and contempt she must have for me, despite that I worshiped her as no man has worshiped a girl in all Earth or Kregen, for she did not know, must not know, of that selfish passion.

At first she refused my offer of the scarlet cape; but before dawn when the Maiden with Many Faces paled in the sky she accepted, with a shiver. The red sun rose. This was the sun which was called Zim in Zenicce. The green sun was called Genodras. I doubt if any scribe knew the numbers of names there were all over the planet for the suns and the moons of Kregen.

“Lahal, Dray Prescot,” said Delia of Delphond when the sun’s rim broke free of the horizon.

“Lahal, Delia of the Blue Mountains,” I replied. I spoke gravely, and my ugly face must have oppressed her, for she turned away, sharply, and I saw she was sobbing.

“If you look in that black box under the control column,” she said after a time, her voice still choked, “you may find a pair of silver boxes. If you can move them apart, just a little, just a fraction—”

I did as she bid, and there were the two silver boxes, almost touching, and I forced them apart with a grunt, and the airboat began gently to descend.

My surprise was genuine. “Why did you not—” I began.

But she turned that gloriously-rounded shoulder on me, and pulled the scarlet cape higher, and so I desisted.

We touched down at last and once more I stood on the prairie where I had spent five eventful years of my life. I was a clansman once again. Except—I had no clan about me.

Our only weapons were my dagger, our hands and our brains. Soon I had caught a prairie fox, good eating if rolled in mud and roasted to remove the spines, and we drank from a bright clear spring, and sat before the fire, and I stared at the beauty that was Delia’s and I found it in my heart to be content.

We had passed over the wide fertile cultivated strip of land that borders this sea—the sea into which the River Nicce flows, the sea men hereabouts call the Sunset Sea, for it is to the western edge of the continent. It reminds me, nowadays, of the sea into which the sun of San Francisco descends in those fantastic evening displays. We were in the outskirts of the Great Plains proper. Zenicce draws her revenues, and her slaves, the minerals from her mines and the produce from her fields, from all the coast and for far inland. There are settlements of small size all along the coast and for some way inland. I had hopes that if we were lucky we would run across a caravan before we decided to walk back to the city.

I had decided to wait a week. The chances of clansmen finding us were grave; for I could not hope that the Clans of Felschraung and of Longuelm would happen by. Any other clan might well be hostile to us. The girl, then, would be a burden in negotiations. We waited six days before we saw the caravan. During that time I had found a dawning break in the granite barrier that separated Delia and myself. She was beginning to lose that reserve and to be the impulsive, lovely, wayward girl she really was. She would not speak to me of Delphond, or of her family or her history. The only people who might have told me where Delphond was I had not asked—the House of Eward—and the slaves were ignorant of it.

We had made our little camp and Delia helped willingly about the chores. I had fashioned a stout sharpened stave from a sturm tree, and would twirl this about, remembering. Once I had to fight an outraged she-ling. It had crept from a bush and sought to snatch Delia away. The ling lives between the bushes and rocks of the small-prairie, where there are trees and streams, and is as large as a dog of the collie variety; but it has six legs, a long silky coat, and claws it can extend to four inches in length and open a rip in chunkrah-hide. From the pelt, I fashioned Delia a magnificent furred cape. It suited her well. She looked gorgeous and feminine in the furs.

Our first intimation that the caravan was near was not the tinkle of caravan bells, or the thud of calsany pads, or the shouts of the drivers; but the shrill yammer of men in combat and the gong-like notes of steel on steel.

I leaped for the fringe of bushes above our camp, the sharpened stake gripped in my fist. This period with Delia had become very precious to me. Had I deluded myself, or had there been a softening in her attitude to me? Always, she was correct, polite, meek and obliging about the camp in the small matters of domestic chores. When we avoided the agreed taboo subjects we could talk, lazily, for hours on topics ranging from that vexed question as to who was the first creature on Kregen, to the best way of dressing the silky white ling furs, and all manner of delicious speculations in between. Yes, very precious to me was that time beneath the moons of Kregen around our campfire at night. These thoughts rushed through my head as I saw a small caravan under attack by clansmen. Why should I embroil myself?

Far better to wait until it was over and the clansmen had taken their booty and such prisoners as would bring a ransom and had ridden off, singing the wild boisterous clan songs. Any interference on my part might well result in an ax-blade through my thick skull, and would certainly destroy this too short sweet period of growing friendship between Delia and myself.

“Look, Dray Prescot,” said Delia from where she lay at my side, peering down through the bushes. “Powder blue! Eward—a caravan of the Noble House of Eward.”

“I can see,” I grunted.

The clansmen were from a clan I did not recognize. When I rode the Great Plains as a clansman, had we met, there would have been bloodshed between us, perhaps; if we lived, the giving and taking of obi. They meant no more to me than the men of Eward. But Delia compressed her lips, and looked at me, and her eyes sparkled dangerously—at least, that is how they appeared to me, for whom, in two worlds, there was no other woman fit to hold the hem of her dress.

“Very well,” I said. Lately I had been speaking a very great deal. Naturally taciturn except when a subject excites me, with Delia lately I had, as a newer time would have it, been shooting my mouth off. Having decided, I wasted no time. I stood up, hefted my hunk of timber, and charged down into the fracas.

Men in powder blue were riding their half-voves in furious combat with zorca-mounted clansmen. That gave the men from the city some chance. Rapiers sliced past clumsy guards and pierced brawny chests; axes whirled high and descended to split skulls and spill brains. It was a small raiding party of clansmen—the zorcas told me that—and they must have stumbled on the caravan unexpectedly. I was down and among them before anyone realized a new force had been added to the conflict. I did not utter a sound.

In an instant I had dismounted two clansmen, seized an ax, swung violently against a group of three who sought to rip the hangings from a sumptuouslyappointed palanquin. I had discarded the notion of making a noise as though I were the forerunner of an army. I was not dressed as a clansman, nor as a city man—I was dressed as a hunter of Aphrasöe—and both sides would immediately have seen through the ruse and all surprise would have been lost.

The ax parted a neck from its trunk, sliced back to sever a cheek and knock the man from the saddle. The third man reined up his zorca, its hooves flashing, ready to swipe down on me, fully extended. I convulsed back and his blow swept through empty air. The hangings parted and a head crowned in a wide flat cap poked unsteadily out. Beyond the man about to attack me again I saw a man in powder blue sink his rapier into the throat of a clansman, the blade caught, and he jerked for a moment unavailingly. To his side a clansman lifted a bow string drawn to his ear. The next instant would see that iron bird buried in the man of Eward’s back.

I hurled the ax high and hard, in the old clansman’s cunning, and the daggered six inches of bladed steel sank into the zorca rider’s breast. He looked down stupidly and then fell off. Then the man facing me was spurring forward and bringing his ax down. I went in under the sweep of the blow, avoided the zorca’s mouth—with a vove I would have been already a dead man—and sprang upward and took him about the waist. We both toppled to the ground. When I arose and looked alertly about my dagger was brightly-stained.

“Well done, Jikai!” I heard a croaking voice call.

The zorca riders had had enough. What should have been a nice leisurely killing and plundering had turned into a bloodbath. With wild and baffled shrieks they rode off. We avoided their last Parthian discharges as the bolts thunked into the ground. If they stood off, we had bows enough to give them a spirited return to their shooting.

Often these days I am forced to smile when reading the ill-informed and ignorant usage of words when Earthmen speak of barbaric weapons. How often one reads that arrows are “fired” in combat. I have used flint and steel to fire a musket, and a percussion cap to fire a pistol, and have fired a high-velocity rifle many and many a time—I have even used a lighted match wound around a linstock to fire a thirty-two pounder in the pitching gundeck of a three-decker—but in all this smoke and flame I have never “fired” an arrow. One does not “fire” bow and arrows. Except, perhaps, if you allow that term to those occasions when we clansmen set blazing rags to our shafts and used them to set fire to the wagons and the roofs of our foemen, as we did that wild day in the Pass of Trampled Leaves.

The half-vove rider had freed his rapier. He looked at me with curiosity all over his bronzed, keen face, with the black eyes and the cropped hair beneath the steel cap, and he sized me up as I sized him up. Lithe and strong, he rode well, and I had seen his swordplay—with the last exception of those neck-bones, and they can be lubbers at letting a blade free—and he handled himself superbly well.

He rode over.

He passed me with an intent, anxious look on his face, bent to the palanquin.

“Great-Aunt Shusha! Are you all right?”

The old head in its wide flat hat poked out again. This time more of the old woman appeared, I saw she carried a dinky little dagger in her gloved right hand. Her face was old—old—and lined and pouched with the record of her years; but her eyes were lively enough, bright and malicious on her nephew.

“Don’t prattle so, young Varden! Of course I’m all right! You don’t think I’d let myself be fretted by a miserable bunch of scallywags like these pesky clansmen, do you?”

She was thrashing about now in attempting to alight, and men ran to let down the steps of the palanquin from its height, slung between two calsanys. She stepped down, small, incredibly vital, dressed in a powder blue gown that had scarlet stitching threaded all over it like sunshine on water.

“Great-Aunt Shusha!” The young man, whom I knew now to be the Prince Varden Wanek of the House of Eward, protested in mock horror and despair. “You mustn’t keep tiring yourself.”

“Tush and bottlecock! And you haven’t even said Lahal to this young man—” She peered up at me with her faded eyes. “Look at him, walking about half-naked, and killing men as easily as I push a needle through a tapestry.” She hobbled over to me. “Lahal, young man, and thank you for what you have done. And, it minds me—”

She broke off, and Varden leaped from his high saddle and caught her to support her. “The color—the color! It reminds me so vividly…”

“Lahal, my lady,” I said. I made my voice as gentle as I could; but it still came out in the old forbidding growl.

Varden, holding his great aunt, stared at me. His eyes were frank on mine. “Lahal, Jikai,” he said. “I own to a fault, it was remiss of me, not to thank you seemly. But my great-aunt—she is aged—”

She tapped his bronzed hand with her gloved finger. “That is enough of that, you young razzle-dazzle, insulting me. I’m no older than I should be.”

I knew that on Kregen men and women could look forward, if they were not killed or fell sick, to a life considerably longer than that on Earth, and this old lady, I judged, must be nearer two hundred than one hundred years old.

All this time I had not smiled. “Lahal, Prince Varden Wanek of Eward. I am Dray Prescot.”

“Lahal, Dray Prescot.”

“You did not see Dray Prescot save your hide, did you, nephew?” She explained how I had thrown my ax to save Varden as the man about to kill me charged. “It was true Jikai,” she finished, a trifle breathlessly.

“I had my Hikdar, my lady,” I said, holding up the dagger. She chuckled and coughed. “As I had my little Deldar.”

I looked, and, it was true, the dagger was a terchick. A shout of surprise brought our attention back to the scene around us. Delia of the Blue Mountains walked down the little slope toward us. Clad in the scarlet breechclout and with the white furs swinging, swinging in time to the sway of her lithe body, her long lissom legs very splendid in the suns’ light, she brought a gasp of awe and wonder to the lips of the men. I caught my breath. She was magnificent.

After the introductions were made it only remained for us to ride back to the city with the Eward caravan. It had been to fetch Great-Aunt Shusha from her annual pilgrimage to the hot springs of Benga Deste. Benga, I should hasten to say, is the Kregish word most corresponding to “saint” in English. Beng is the male form and Benga the female, the suffix letter “a” playing a similar part in Kregish as it does in Italian.

I cannot explain why; but when I asked my habitual question of fresh acquaintances on this occasion I felt a taut sense of expectancy. A vague look came over Great-Aunt Shusha’s wrinkled face.

“Aphrasöe? The City of the Savanti? It seems I have heard of such a place, once; but it is long ago, so long ago and my poor head cannot remember.”

Chapter Seventeen

A bravo-fighter of Zenicce

Now life took a completely fresh turn for me, Dray Prescot. If I had missed companionship before, finding that rare commodity at last on Kregen among the tents and wagons of the clansmen with Hap Loder and his like—for Maspero and those, as I thought godlike beings, of Aphrasöe created always in me a breath of awe—I found it once again with Prince Varden and his drinking companions in the House of Eward of the city of Zenicce. And, too, most strangely, I found a compelling sense of friendship, warm and human and very luxurious to me, in the wise companionship of old Great-Aunt Shusha. I owned she might one day recall what she knew of Aphrasöe; but I did not need that hope to make me respect and admire her, and I admit my fondness for her grew almost foolish, if affection can ever be called foolish. Airboats are rare and precious objects in Segesthes and Wanek sent a party to repair and bring back the one Delia and I had escaped in, regarding it as another trophy wrested from the hated Esztercari. Delia said that she was familiar with airboats, and added that they were not manufactured in her land. That ruled out Havilfar, where I understood the mining was done on which the airboats depended for their lifting force.

I had entered with some spirit into the plans of the House of Eward to take down more than one peg the House of Esztercari. Dressed in the powder blue of Eward I would ruffle it with the other young blades as we strolled through the arcades, patronize the drinking taverns, watch the varied amusements in the Barbary Coast area of Zenicce. I went to the impressive Grand Assembly buildings, and watched as the never-ending debates took place, with men and women walking in and out to leave or resume the seats allotted to their Houses. We even got into one or two bravo-fights, all flurrying cloaks and the clink and rattle of rapier and dagger, and shouting and laughing, and hurried retreat as the crimson-and-emerald of the city wardens was espied hurrying to break up the fracas.

Once across the canal and within the cincturing walls of our enclave, of course, we were absolutely safe. To break into a House enclave would take an army and although many sporadic raids took place—often, I learned with an amusement so grimly ironic Prince Varden was surprised, to steal a girl—no House felt strong enough alone to challenge another directly. The Esztercari’s had by chicanery, murder, corruption and then naked force, ousted the previous House from the enclave and further estates in which they had now settled some hundred and fifty years ago. Some of Great-Aunt Shusha’s venomous hatred for the emerald green was explained when I learned she had been a Strombor, a girl of the previous House and recently married into the Eward’s, when her family, her friends, her retainers were killed and scattered. Some had been sold as slaves, some had gone to the clans, some had vanished in their ships over the curve of the world and never returned.

By the twin forces of law and custom all the rights, ranks and privileges of the House of Strombor had passed to the House of Esztercari.

Each House enclave was a city in itself: tasselated pavement, marble, granite and brick walls, domed roofs, colonnades, towers and spires, all the whole gorgeous jumble of splendid architecture enclosed and supported a living entity within the greater entity of the city. The Eward beer was extremely good; Zenicce was famous for its beers, although its lagers, as all are, were weak and dispirited. We young blades would go ruffling a long way to sup a new brew of beer, commenting wisely and with many hiccups on its quality and strength. Zenicce claret, too, is very fine. I looked very kindly upon being a citizen of Zenicce, and of having the undisputed run of the enclave-city of the Ewards with its own canals, avenues and plazas.

There were temples throughout the city, of course, mostly erected to Zim and Genodras; but each House also maintained its own temples and churches to its own personal House deity. In all this frenzied pleasure-seeking I indulged in at that time I could see, even then, that it was merely a hollow scrabbling at an anodyne. The problem of Delia remained forever with me, and nothing would remove it. I hugged my ache to myself, hating it and yet incapable of cauterizing it. Delia must be returned to her own land; yet to find that land was the difficulty.

We pored over the maps and charts in the library, and I saw with a nostalgic pang how similar and yet how different were the charts of these people. There were portolanos in the great library of the Esztercari’s; we could not study those. The globes were so like those of Medieval Europe, the confident coastlines of countries near at hand, the gradual loss of definition as distance threw a pall of ingorance across knowledge until, on the opposite sides of the globes, only the most general outlines of those of the seven continents and nine islands thought to lie there were represented. Aphrasöe was never shown; neither was Delphond.

Looking at the maps, Delia shook her head.

“My country is not shaped like any of these.”

I had shared the gems three ways, and Gloag had smiled his wolfish smile, and taken them; but he remained with me as a raffish drinking companion. Delia had pushed the gems back to me across the shining sturm-wood table, her face disdainful, her mouth prim.

“I would not take anything from that woman.”

I kept in a chest those gems, promising myself they were in trust for Delia of the Blue Mountains.

Wanek and his son, Varden, insisted that we regard the captured airboat as our own. Delia took me flying and showed me how to operate the controls, which I found magical and wonderful, and of which I will speak at another time.

During this period I talked long into the night with Great-Aunt Shusha, for she needed little sleep, and I have grown accustomed to doing without all my life. She had witnessed that terrible attack on her House, and had seen the young girls carried off and the men killed. She did not, I noticed, maintain a great retinue of slaves, and, indeed, the Ewards were as humane as they could be, given the circumstances and the nature of the thing, in all their dealings with their slaves.

At last we had fomented our plan and it was time for me to play my part. I had more or less given my word to Varden that I would assist him. The Esztercaris, we had discovered, planned a great rising against the Ewards, and the Reinmans and the Wickens, Houses in alignment with the Ewards. The stroke was audacious; but it could be accomplished, and we must get in our blow first, or we would be lost. Almost inevitably, whichever way the contest went, the city would be up. The stakes at risk were enormous. From the zorcas and the equipment we had taken on the day I’d helped beat off the clansmen’s attack on the caravan I had selected a fine beast and set of equipment. I donned my scarlet breechclout and then over it pulled on a clansman’s russet leathers with the fringings. I would say a brief farewell to Delia and then be on my way. It was on this day, strangely enough, that I learned just which girl it was that Prince Varden mooned after, and had told me of during our tavern-times and ruffling strolls through the city. Varden, it seems—and I felt a jolt of incongruous guilt strike through me—had lost his heart to the Princess Natema. He had seen her many times, always with a powerful bodyguard, and his hopeless passion festered in his breast.

“She is promised to another, to that oaf Pracek of Ponthieu. And, anyway, how could our two Houses consent to such an alliance?” I felt very sorry for the prince; for I would have you know he was a true and gallant friend.

“Strange things have happened, Varden,” I told him.

“Aye, Dray Prescot. But none as strange as the chance I shall ever hold Natema in my arms!”

I said: “Does she know?”

He nodded. “I have had word taken to her. She scorns me. She sent back insulting— It is enough that she refuses.”

“That is her father’s doing. It may not be hers.”

“Ha, Dray! You seek to cheer me and mock me more!”

If I told my friend Prince Varden that I had come from the planet Earth which I now know is four hundred light-years from Kregen under Alpha Scorpii, Antares, and that the strangeness of that must surely outweigh the strangeness that a girl would change her mind, he would have gaped at me. I thought again of Natema, of her willful obstinacy, her complete lack of understanding that others besides herself had any desires that should be fulfilled. Her obstinacy, I knew, was a pliant reed beside the steely obduracy of Delia of the Blue Mountains. Delia had stood at my side as we fought hostile men, Chuliks and wild animals. Delia had even smiled at me over the smoke of our camp fire as we ate the meat from my kill she had cooked. Delia wore the white furs I had stripped from the fresh kill I had made for her in protecting her life.

I noticed that Delia of the Blue Mountains wore those white furs I had given her when she might have had the choice of a hundred furs far more magnificent.

She must do that, I thought in my ignorance, to mock and humiliate me, and I could not blame her for that, seeing to what distress I had brought her, and I feel nowadays the shame of my worthless thoughts; but then I was in agony for Delia of Delphond, knowing, as I thought, that she hated me, despising and scorning me for my clumsiness and high-handed actions toward her. If Varden had had the same experience with his Natema as I had had, and if he had gone through what I had with Delia, I wondered, very bitterly, how he would regard her then. Delia was always kind to Varden and, it seemed to me, went out of her way to be pleasant to him. He would be a good match, if the Esztercaris did not slit his throat. But I refused to allow jealousy to foul our friendship.

And so I went that morning in the turn of the year to see Delia and bid her what I hoped would be a brief farewell. She was sitting in a powder blue gown reading an old book, its pages browned and crumbling. On the low seat at her side the white ling furs glowed silkily.

“What!” She started up as I finished telling her. “You’re going away! But—but I think—”

“It will not be long, Delia. In any case, I do not think my absence would displease you.”

“Dray!” She bit her lip, then thrust the book toward me, her pink and shining nail, perfectly trimmed, pointing out a smudgy woodcut.

The art of printing varies widely as to quality and technique throughout Kregen; but this was an old book, and the woodcuts messy, the print heavy.

“I believe, Dray, that that is a map of my country.”

At once I felt the flare of interest.

“Can we reach it—in an airboat, say?”

“I believe so—but I must compare this with the more modern charts. And, they do not compare. So—”

Then I remembered why I had come to see her, and my promise to Varden. I felt my eyebrows pulling down and my lips thinning, and knew my ugly face wore its ruthlessly forbidding look. “I have promised Varden. I must go.”

“But—Dray—”

“I know with what contempt you must regard me, Delia of the Blue Mountains. It was my selfishness that has dragged you through all the dangers you have undergone. I am sorry, truly sorry, and I wish you were back with your family.”

I make it a rule never to apologize—but I would say I was sorry a million times to Delia of the Blue Mountains. She started up from the seat, and her face flushed painfully, her eyes bright and brown and glorious upon me. She grasped the white ling furs convulsively.

“If you think that, Dray Prescot, you had best be gone on your mission.” She turned away from me, holding the book in one small hand limply at her side. “And when you are successful and have conquered the Esztercaris, the Princess Natema will be freed from her father’s domination. I think perhaps you welcome that.”

Delia had seen me in that ridiculous emerald, white, scarlet and golden turban and robes, coming out of Natema’s boudoir. She had seen me fighting desperately for the princess’ life. She had seen and scarcely understood the drama on that high rooftop of the opal palace, when I had scorned her for the sake of the dagger at her heart, and Natema had had me held over nothingness. What did she think of that? How could I explain? I looked at her and I felt as low as a man has any right to be in his life.

Then I swung away with a clash of my swords—for I wore clansman’s gear—and stamped out, seething, furious, sad and empty, all at the same time.

The powder blue of the Ewards escorted me until I was safely well away from the city, and then astride my zorca. With three more in a following string, I galloped headlong out toward the Great Plains and my clansmen.

Chapter Eighteen

I feast with my clansmen

Hap Loder was overjoyed to see me.

Truth to tell I had expected some stiffness about this reunion.

But Hap danced about, shouted, thumped me on the back, grabbed my hand and threatened to wring it off, bellowed for wine, hugged me, roaring and hullabalooing so that all the wide camp of the clan came arunning.

They were all there, Rov Kovno, Ark Atvar, Loku, all my faithful clansmen. There was no business to be transacted that night. Immense fires blazed; chunkrah were slaughtered and the meat roasted to its gourmand’s delight of tastiness, the flesh perfect, the fat brown and crisp, the juices more heaven-savory than all the sauces of Paris and New York put together. The girls danced in their veils and silks and furs, their golden bells and chains ringing and tinkling, their white teeth flashing, their eyes ablaze with excitement, their tawny skin painted exotically by the firelight. The wine goblets and wineskins and wine jugs passed and repassed; the fruits of the plains lay heaped in enormous piles on golden platters, the stars shone and no less than six of the seven hurtling moons of Kregen beamed down on our feasting.

Oh, yes, I had come home!

In the morning Hap rolled into my tent declaiming he had a head like the hoof of a zorca, thump, thump, thump across the stone-hard plains during the drought.

I threw him a branch from a paline bush and he began to chew down the cherry-like berries. They were near-miraculous when it came to hangover time.

The awkwardness I had expected arose from my presumed death. Hap Loder would now be Zorcander, Vovedeer. There was a step in rank between the two, the Vovedeer being the higher; but my clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm regarded me as a Vovedeer, anyway, even though strictly speaking the name applied to the leader of four or more clans. But Hap was explaining that they were not sure I was dead, that they believed I would return, that he was a Half-Zorcander. I put a hand on his shoulder.

“I want you to be Zorcander of the clans, Hap. If I ask the people to help me in this it is as one of them; not as their Zorcander and commanding them.”

He would have been insulted if I’d given him the chance.

“I know you will help, Hap; but I want you to know that I do not order it, and I do not take it for granted. I am truly grateful.”

“But you are our Zorcander, Dray Prescot. Always and forever.”

“So be it.” I told him the plan and then the others came in, my Jiktars, and I was pleased to see Loku among their number. A Jiktar does not necessarily command a thousand men, or the other ranks their multiples of ten; the names are names of ranks and, like the centurions of ancient Rome, command whatever numbers the current military organization demands.

Loud were the shouts of glee when the plan was spread out for inspection. It was childishly simple, as most good plans are, and depended on surprise, stealth and the awesome fighting prowess of the clansmen for success.

Loku jumped up, laughing. “We can find that little thief, Nath. He will help, for he knows the city like a louse knows an armpit.”

“Nath?” I said. “Why, Loku, you mean you didn’t slit his throat?”

Loku roared with merriment.

“It will be very good,” said Rov Kovno with fierce meaning,

“to return there with weapons in our hands.”

“Bows, mainly,” I told them, once more their Vovedeer. “And axes. I feel you would be at a disadvantage if you opposed your broadswords to the citizens’ rapiers and daggers. The shortswords, though…”

There were wise nods. These men well understood the difference in techniques required for fighting astride a vove in the massive cavalry charges of the plains, and those required by close fighting in the streets of a city. They possessed the sheer speed and striking ability to beat down a rapier and dagger man, and I knew, because I had insisted on the art being continued, that they could wield a shortsword in the left hand as they used broadsword or ax in the right; but they would be slow. Maybe it would be best to rely on the techniques they knew, and so I did not suggest that each man carry a main gauche. I did, say, however, tentatively: “Of course, a particularly long broadsword wielded as a two-hander might tickle a rapier man before he got at you.” I freely admit I was desperately worried at the thought of my nomadic warriors going up against the sophisticated rapier men of the city. After all, a rapier is a hefty weapon, quite unlike the small sword with which the French style of fencing is done. Maybe sheer weight and muscle would carry my men through.

“If only you’d consider carrying shields, then your shortswords would be deadly,” I began; but their reaction choked the idea off. I sighed. In a clash of cultures the newer usually wins; but then, the clansmen were no babes-in-arms, no novices. I can see now, what I could not see then, the comical reactions of myself to the coming conflict when so much was at stake, that my main concern was with the well-being of as rough and tough and fearsome a bunch of fighting men as I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet.

Originally I had intended only to spend a single night and day with my clansmen. Already I had seen how effective was the control exercised by Hap Loder, and if a great deal of his success in handling the clans sprang from the tuition he had imbibed as my right-hand man, I took little credit for that, for Hap is a marvelous man at absorbing obi. As a matter of interest he absorbs it like he absorbs the clan wines. He can drink from a flagon with his left hand and swing his razor-sharp ax with his right, in the midst of a battle. I have seen it. I’ve done it myself, of course; but I doubt if I do it quite with the panache of Hap Loder.

So it was that I spent the next night with my clansmen also, wherein we drank hugely, cheered and clapped the girls as they danced for us—they were never dancing girls, and the man who made that mistake would have a terchick in him before he’d finished the last syllable of his mistake—and roared the clan songs to the hurtling moons above.

“Remember,” I said, pulling out the suit of powder blue from my saddle bag. “This color is for us. If you see emerald green—stain it crimson with its owner’s blood.”

“Aye!” they roared, “The sky colors were ever in mortal combat.”

At last, and not without a last ten or eleven stirrup-cups pressed on me by my Jiktars and the crowding clansmen, I bade them all farewell and began my ride back to Zenicce. The plan was for me, some miles from the city, to find a caravan and change into my powder blue and thus enter the gates without notice. As a clansman, of course, I would have been an object of deepest suspicion.

The caravan was large and slow and colorful and ablaze with the panoply of Kregen. It had come safely through the prairie limits of the clans, and as well as Chulik guards, there were mercenary clansmen serving in the long lines of pack animals. My powder blue mingled easily with the chiaroscuro of colors. As well as the indefatigable calsanys, and long strings of the plains asses, there were many pack mastodons. These goliaths could each carry two ton loads, slung a ton each side, and they lolloped along like true ships of the plains. I admired their rolling muscles and massive tread. I hoped that when they reached their destination they would not be slaughtered for their ivory and hides, as often happened, and would once more be able to plod so tirelessly along the untracked pathways of the Great Plains. The discovery by chance that much of the pack mastodons’

burdens consisted of paper—reams and reams of it all beautifully packed—excited my intense curiosity. I recalled the mystery surrounding the manufacture and distribution of paper from Aphrasöe. Coins had, since I had taken up residence in the House of Eward, now formed part of my transactions with life. The Savanti used no form of monetary exchange and the clansmen cared for coins only as booty from plundered caravans, which they might melt down for the metal, or use to barter with the city. As a slave, there had been no time for me to acquire the small copper coins that often came the way of slaves. Now by the suitable distribution of some silver coins with the face of Wanek finely executed upon one side, and the Kregish symbol for twelve on the other, plus a bottle of the fiendish drink called Dopa, I was able to make an inspection of the paper.

It was fine, smooth-textured from super-calendering, tough with a rag fiber base, and, I judged with a rush of blood to the head, milled in Aphrasöe. Questions elicited the dismaying information that it had come already packed and wrapped in these very bundles, from ships plying into Port Paros, over across the peninsula three hundred miles away, the last port of call before Zenicce. I had heard of Port Paros, a minor seaport serving a hinterland remote enough from Zenicce not to bother that great city. Port Paros was not a great city and did not count; but I wondered why the paper-carrying ships had docked there and not Zenicce. The merchants winked their bright eyes and laid fingers alongside their noses. They would by this mean avoid the iniquitous port taxes levied by the House of Esztercari on foreign ships. Paper, particularly, was ruinously taxed. Alas, no, they had no idea from which land ships had sailed.

Also, they bought the paper at ridiculously low prices and could look forward to a thumping one thousand percent profit in Zenicce.

One unsettling event took place as we made the last few miles to the city. I do not count the cutthroat who tried to stab me that night having seen the silver Eward coins I had disbursed. I rolled away from his blade and took him by the throat and throttled him a little and then broke his blade over his head, lifted him up and kicked his rump with some force, and sent him stumbling, yelling, into the lines of calsanys, which did what they always did when excited all over him. I did not feel inclined to stain my steel on him.

The event was simply the sight of a gorgeous scarlet and golden raptor, floating high in hunting circles above the caravan. That magnificent bird, I felt sure, must come as a sign that the Star Lords were taking a further interest in me. Undoubtedly, they had been instrumental in bringing me to Kregen for the second time, and, I surmised, with a complete faith in my own reasoning, they had not consulted the Savanti as to their action. The Savanti, I often had to remind myself with surprise, the memory of their warm goodness and fellowship so strong upon me, had kicked me out of Paradise. The Star Lords, I reasoned, would regard me as a very suitable tool if they wished to work against the Savanti. The caravan-master, a lean, chisel-faced black man from the island of Xuntal, an experienced and honest farer of the plains, looked up with me. He dressed in amber-colored gear and cloak, and carried a falchion, and his name was Xoltemb. “Had I a bow with me now,” he said in his slow voice, “I would not lift it. I think perhaps I might cut down a man who lifted a bow against that bird.”

Questions convinced me he knew nothing of the bird; that only its scarlet magnificence awed him, and the stories told around the camp fires about that serene and lofty apparition. I paid him the fees he had earned by the protection, as he supposed, his caravan had extended to me and my four zorcas. The fee was reasonable and I had not traveled far with them. He did say, as we saluted and parted: “I would welcome your company if you travel the Great Plains again. I am always in need of a good blade. Remberee.”

“I will bear that in mind, Xoltemb,” I said, “Remberee.”

Prince Varden, and his father Wanek and his mother and Great-Aunt Shusha were most pleased and relieved to see me returned safely.

“The plains are never safe,” scolded Shusha. “Every year I must make my pilgrimage to take the hot springs of Benga Deste. I sometimes wonder if I do not fret away all the good they do me on that frightful journey.”

“Why,” I said, “do you not take an airboat?”

“What?” Her old eyebrows shot up. “Risk my poor old hide on one of those flimsy, scary things!”

Then they all suddenly looked extraordinarily grave. Varden stepped forward and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Dray Prescot,” he said—and I knew.

I can remember that moment as vividly as though it were but this morning, when—but never mind now. Then—then I knew what he was going to say and I believe my heart turned to ice within me.

“Dray Prescot. Delia of the Blue Mountains took your airboat and left us. She did not say she was going, or where. But she is gone.”

Chapter Nineteen

The Lord of Strombor

The next day I had a little recovered.

Wanek was distressed, and his wife even cried a little until Great-Aunt Shusha shushed her and then drove them all away. Varden stood before me, all his friendship glowing in his face. He lifted his chin.

“Dray Prescot. You may strike me, as you will.”

“No,” I said. “I am the one to blame. Only me.” I could not say how much I raged and scathed myself with deep biting contempt. Delia had been dragged into all these miseries because of me, and I had failed her when she had almost found the answer to her way home. If only I had listened to her! If only I had done as she asked! But my stupid pride had blinded me; I conceived it my duty to stand by my promise freely given to Varden when, I felt sure, by a word he would have freed me from it. I had felt we owed much to the Ewards and I owed them my loyalty. How much more I owed all my loyalty, my life, to Delia of the Blue Mountains!

When a retainer reported that the airboat, the one we had captured from the Esztercari, had been only temporarily repaired and that more work was needed on it to make it really airworthy, I felt no more crosses need be hung upon me. Delia could be adrift over the face of Kregen, a prey to any of the many and various ferocious men and beasts, and half-men, half-beasts, loose upon the planet. She could have fallen from the air in a wild swooping plunge that would end with her body broken and lifeless upon the rocks beneath. She could have drifted out to sea and be starving and driven to desperation by thirst—I knew it, I knew it! I do not like, at any time, to recall my frame of mind in those days. Great-Aunt Shusha tried in her own guileful ways to comfort me. She told me of the old days of the Strombors, and I found some sort of surcease from agony with her. Many of the girls and some of the young men had gone to the clans, and most, I gathered, had gone to Felschraung.

“My clan,” I said. “Of which they will not let me loose the reins of leader—of Zorcander and Vovedeer, with Longuelm.”

She nodded, bright-eyed, and I guessed she was turning over ripe schemes in that devious mind of hers.

“I am an Eward by nuptial vows, and they are a goodhearted House, and the family of Wanek is very dear to me. It was Wanek’s uncle whom I married. But they are not Strombors! Only by treachery were we conquered. I think it is time a new House of Strombor arose in Zenicce.”

“You would be its Head,” I said, feeling my affection for her make me reach out and touch her wrinkled hand. “If that were so, then I agree. You would make a superb Head.”

“Tush and flabber-mouth!” Then she turned her bird-bright old eyes up at me, so woebegone and miserable with worry over Delia. “And if I were, and it were so, I could delegate, could I not?

That would be my right by law and custom.”

“Varden,” I said. “He would be a good choice.”

“Yes. He would make a fine leader for a House. I am glad you are friends with my great-nephew. He has need of friends.”

I thought of the great Noble House of Esztercari, and of a certain enameled porcelain jar of Pandahem style over-man-height standing in that corridor between the slave quarters and the noble, and I sighed. Varden and Natema would make a splendid couple. I had fought for her there, against the Chulik guards, and Varden would have done the same.

Varden had something else on his mind.

We were standing in an immense bay window overlooking an interior avenue of the enclave filled with the bustle of morning market and the cries of street vendors and the passage of asses and the squawking of birds and the grunting of vosks, with the slaves purchasing food and clothes and drink and all the busy hustle and bustle of everyday life. Varden tried to open the subject of conversation a number of times, and at last I had to make him speak.

“I know you fought for Natema,” he said. “For Delia told me of it. I do not know how to thank you for saving her life.”

I spread my hands. If this was all! But he went on.

“Delia told me, and she was angry—how superb she is when she is angry!—that you were in love with Natema.” Varden rushed on now, ignoring my sudden start and the glowering look of fury I knew had flashed into my face. “I believe that was the true reason for her leaving us. She knew you did not care for her, that you regarded her as an encumbrance, for she told me all this, Dray, and she was very near to tears. I do not know whether to believe it or not, for from all I have seen I had thought you loved Delia, not Natema.”

I managed to blurt out: “Why should my not caring for Delia make her leave, Varden?”

He looked astonished.

“Why, man, she loves you! Surely, you knew that! She showed it in so many ways—the ling furs, the scarlet breechclout, her refusal to take Natema’s gems—and the way she looked at you. By Great Zim, you don’t mean to say you didn’t know!”

How can I say how I felt, then? Everything lost, and now, when it was too late, to be told I had had everything within my grasp and thrown it away!

I rushed from that sunshine-filled bow window and found a dark corner and heard only the stamp of my heart and the crash of blood through my head. Fool! Fool! Fool!

They left me alone for three days. Then Great-Aunt Shusha wheedled me into returning to life once more.

For their sake, for pride’s sake, for the sake of my bonds of obi-brotherhood with my clansmen, who were riding over the plains toward the city, I paraded a facsimile of normal living. But I was a husk, hollow and dead, within.

Varden told me, with a smile he tried to hide in face of my agony, that Prince Pracek of Ponthieu had contracted with a most brilliant bride-to-be, a princess from the powerful island of Vallia; that the Esztercaris had, however unwillingly, agreed to this match, for it would strengthen their alignment—and this meant, as I saw at once, that Natema was freed. Varden bubbled with the hope that in some fantastic way he would claim her. I told him I was pleased for him. I even ventured out into the public places of Zenicce once more. I had to live now only for my life with the clansmen. An unpleasant scene developed one day as storm clouds rolled in the from the Sunset Sea over the city. We had gone to the Assembly Hall and, leaving, were met by a crowd of the Esztercaris entering, and with them the purple and ocher of the Ponthieu. In the animated crowds always to be found talking and lobbying in the corridors and halls surrounding the Great Hall there were the silver and black of the Reinmans and the crimson and gold of the Wickens, so we were not alone.

Among the Ponthieus walked a tall and burly man clad in a fashion strange to me. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, curled at the edges, and with two strange slots in the brim above his eyes. His clothes were of buff leather, short to his thigh, belted in at the waist so the small skirt flared, and immensely wide across the shoulders. The shoulders were padded and artificially broadened, I saw; but the effect was in no wise incongruous. He wore long black boots reaching over his knees. He wore no single item of jewelry. His face was wind-beaten, bluff, with a fair moustache that curled upward.

“The consul of Vallia,” remarked Varden. I knew that in the city there were many consular offices, their functions more mercantile than diplomatic, for the niceties of foreign protocol are not too highly developed on Kregen, and a Noble House would have no hesitation in smashing down a consul’s door should they desire for some reason to do so.

The man struck me as a seafaring man, and his manner, quiet, relaxed, reminded me of the calm that deceives before the gale.

“They’re discussing the bokkertu, I suppose,” said Varden gleefully, Vallia was unusual among the land masses of Kregen in that the whole island was under one government. It lay some hundreds of miles away between this continent of Segesthes and the next continent of Loh. Vallia, as a consequence, was extremely powerful, with an invincible fleet. Such an alliance would make the Esztercari-Ponthieu axis so formidable nothing could stand against it. We must strike first, before their plans to attack us matured. It was on that day, I remember, that for some reason I went to the chest where I had stored the gems I held in trust for Delia. They were gone. Upset, miserable with my own worries, I had not stomach for further upsets and slave beatings, so I did not mention the matter. There was my portion that Delia might have—Delia, wherever she was now!

Now we glowered on the Esztercaris and rapiers were fingered and half-drawn and someone had the sense to send for the city wardens, and no blood was spilled. But the storm clouds above Zenicce were no blacker than our faces, and portended no greater hurricanes and whirlwinds.

A day later Gloag at last reported he had found Nath, the thief, and that Nath would help, for—how I relished the irony—he regarded himself as an obi-brother of the clansmen with whom he had escaped and shared dangers.

The simplicity of the plan was its strength.

No walls girded Zenicce with a ring of granite. Each enclave was a fortress in its own right. An attacking army might swirl along the canals and open avenues; they would swirl as the French cavalry swirled about the British squares at Waterloo—a scene I witnessed for myself. Even the three hundred thousand free people without the Houses maintained their own fortress-like enclaves into which they could retire from their souks and alleys. Great-Aunt Shusha gave me a surprise. She called me into the long room of her private apartments, and smiled and cackled at me as I gaped at a dozen of her personal retainers. They were clad not in the Eward powder blue but in a glorious, flashing, brilliant scarlet. They looked pleased.

“Strombor!” she said. She spoke the name proudly. “I have made up my mind.” She motioned and a slave girl brought forward two sets of scarlet gear for Gloag and myself. “Varden will have need of your strength, Dray Prescot. Will you wear the Strombor scarlet for me, and aid him?”

“I will, Great-Aunt Shusha,” I said.

She picked me up sharply. “I am not your great-aunt, Dray Prescot. Never think it.”

The affection I believed existed between us made me smother by surprise, for, of course, she was right. I was simply a wandering warrior, a clansman, with no claims to relationship with a great noble of the House of Eward or of Strombor. I took the scarlet gear and nodded.

“I will remember, my Lady.”

“Now,” she said, her bird-like eyes bright on me. “Go, Dray Prescot. Jikai!”

That evening as the storm clouds roiled and burst above the city the final plans were made. Clad in the gray slave breechclouts and carrying our magnificent scarlet gear and our weapons rolled in bundles, Gloag and I and the men we had chosen, twenty of us, swam the canal toward the island of Esztercari that had once been the island of Strombor. We entered through that low conduit from which Gloag, Delia and I had escaped—it seemed so long ago—and secreted ourselves.

The messenger from Hap Loder had arrived; in the dawn light the clansmen would reach us. Nath would see to that.

We waited, Gloag and my men and I, in the pouring rain, waiting for the first sign of the lumbering wherries easing through the canal water, dimpled with raindrops, from the marble quarries. The waiting was fretting.

So far I have deliberately made no mention of the Kregan system of time-keeping. But that wait was kept in counting the slow passage of the leaden-footed burs. A bur is forty Earth minutes long, and there are forty-eight of them in a Kregan day and night cycle. The discrepancies in the year caused by Kregen’s orbit of a binary were smoothed out by the addition or subtraction of burs during the festive seasons, and a similar calculation with regard to days at those times. Each bur contains fifty murs, or minutes. Seconds, although known and used by astronomers and mathematicians, are generally unnecessary in the daily commerce of Kregen. The position of the two suns by day, or any of the seven moons by night, can tell a Kregan the time instantly. An uproar broke out far above our heads. It was clearly extraordinarily loud for us to hear it, with the rain splashing down into the canal by our ears. I knew what it was. Up there on the bewildering profusion of roofs the powder blue of the Ewards would be spiraling down in their fliers, the men would be leaping out with rapiers aflame. They had not waited! They had gone into the attack early—and I could half-guess that the pride of the Eward House could not stomach waiting for my tough clansmen to strike the first blow. The fliers would be swirling away to bring more fighting men. The emerald green would be surging back, now. There would be death, violent, ugly death, sprawling all over the rooftops and down the stairways of the Esztercari enclave. And I was waiting here, helpless, in the rain.

By the nearness or the distance of the noise of combat we could tell how went the fray. And soon it was clear the Esztercaris were smashing back the men of Eward. Our allies in the Houses aligned with us and contracted to keep in play the Ponthieu and the others of their enemies. It was between Esztercari and Eward. The Houses varied in numbers of population and a Great House, whether Noble or Lay, might contain as many as forty thousand persons. Because of the practice of hiring guards, mercenaries, either men or half-men or half-beasts the actual numbers of fighting men available to a House was more than a normal breakdown of population would yield. We had estimated there would be about twenty thousand fighting men against whom we must strike in the Esztercari House. I had told Hap Loder he must leave ten thousand of our clansmen with the tents and wagons and chunkrah. If we failed and disaster overtook us, the clans must have a cadre on which to build afresh. Hap was bringing about ten thousand warriors.

“They have struck too soon,” Gloag was saying from where he lay at my side in the rain. “Where are the clansmen?”

Through the veils of rain we stared down the canal until our eyes stung.

Was that a wherry? Shadows moved through the rain as it hissed into the water. Gray shapes, moving vaguely, like pack mastodons, through the mist-veils? The suns were up now and trying to strike through the sodden cloud masses. Was that a harder shape, a long broad shape in the water, with the figures of men like ants poling it along? I stared—and—

“Time!” I said, and stood up and took my sword.

Without a second glance for the first wherry, which now showed its blunt snout over the rippled water, I led my men through the postern to the conduit and, clad in our slave gray, we hurried up the winding stair. The Chulik guards had split, half remained at their posts, the other half had gone to repel the rooftop attack. We cut them down instantly.

Then we flung our shoulders to the windlass and gradually the deadweight of the portcullis over the entrance canal lifted. We strained and struggled and puffed. Through an arrow slit I could look down from the masonry onto the mouth of the canal. The portcullis rose, dripping. And the snout of the wherry ghosted under it, heading into the Esztercari fortress, and in the bows, standing with bow in hand, was Hap Loder. Cheekily, he looked up, and waved.

We left the windlass dogged so that all the remaining wherries Nath had arranged to steal from the marble quarries and which had been packed overnight with clansmen could pass. Then we hurried through ways known to Gloag, down dim corridors and flang-infested crannies, until we reached the slaves’ cess-pit door. We flung it open, cutting down the Och guards, let in Hap and my men. Other clansmen led by Rov Kovno branched away at once. Loku would be bringing his men in through the postern conduit opening we had used. Now my clansmen were loose within the fortress of the Esztercari!

Once my men had solid roofs above their heads they dried their hands and then brought out the carefully coiled bowstrings from their waterproof pouches, strung their bows with quick practiced jerks. Their plains-capes were thrown off with the rain slick and shining upon them. The feathers of their arrows bristled from the quivers over their right shoulders, dry and perfect. We went hunting emerald green.

I believe I do not want, at this time, to dwell on the taking of the Esztercari enclave. We killed the enemy, of course; we drove them in a wave of shafts and steel from wall to wall and corner to corner; we linked hands with the exultant ranks of men in powder blue; but we sought to win the victory and not just simply to kill. Where that was necessary we did so, for that is the nature of warfare. But hundreds of emerald green sets of clothing floated in the canals as the mercenaries fled, and gray tunics with the green bands, and we did not pursue. We did not set flame anywhere, for I had told my men that this great House was the home of a noble lady, Shusha of Strombor.

I wore my old scarlet breechclout; and over it the brave scarlet gear of Strombor, as I had promised Shusha. Like my clansmen I did not disdain the wearing of armor, and had strapped on a breast and back, a pauldron over my left shoulder, and arm and wrist bands on my left arm. But my right arm and shoulder were naked, as they had been when I hunted in my Savanti leathers. In the press the blow that kills comes so often unseen, from the blind side, from the back. Armor can save a man’s life then. It saved mine.

The final stand was made around the noble quarters in the opal palace.

I raged through that old fighting ground where I had defended Natema, my clan ax biting into skulls and lopping arms. Now it was the nobles of Esztercari we faced. The corridor now presented the same problems. Two by two we fought. I knew everywhere else was in our hands. I leaped forward and hacked down a noble and my ax split along its sturm-wood handle so that the leather thongs sprang spiraling out. Galna, he of the white face and mean eyes, roared hugely and lunged with his glinting rapier. I dodged aside. For a moment, we stood in a cleared space, our men at our backs. There sometimes falls in battle a strange kind of hush as all the combatants pause to take breath and renew their strength before continuing. Such a hush fell now as Galna stalked me. One of my men, it was Loku, shouted and hurled an ax. I took the handle in my fist as it sailed through the air.

Galna smiled toothily. “My rapier will spit you, Dray Prescot, before you can lift that ax.”

He was the Champion of Esztercari. A master swordsman.

“I know,” I said, wasting breath, and turned, and smashed that gorgeous jar of Pandahem porcelain into a thousand shards. From the wrecked interior of the vase I snatched the mailed man’s rapier I had hidden there at the close of that epic fight, and swung up, and stood, facing Galna. I know now my face must have daunted him. But he faced me bravely, his blade a living streak of light in the lanternglow. Our blades crossed. He was very good. But I live and he is dead, dead and gone these many years. He fought well and with great cunning; but I took him with a simple developed attack against which his return faltered at the last instant; my dagger twisted his blade and then my brand passed between his ribs and through his lungs and protruded all blood-smeared beyond.

No further resistance was offered as my wolves of the plains surged forward.

We stood in the Great Hall beneath that wonderful ceiling with the lamplight and the torches adding to the crimson and topaz glory of the suns’ light through the tall windows. My men crowded about me, their russet clan leathers grim beside the powder blue and, even, beside the Strombor scarlet I wore. Their swords and axes lifted high, in salute.

“Hai, Jikai!” they roared.

A figure in emerald green, lost and drowned now in the surge of newer colors, was flung forward to the foot of the steps of the dais on which we stood. Wanek, Varden, great nobles of Eward, and my Jiktars, crowded the dais. We looked down on that crumpled figure in emerald green, with the rosy limbs and white body, the corn-yellow hair.

The Princess Natema of Esztercari lay there, at our feet. Someone had loaded her with chains. Her gown was ripped. Her cornflower blue eyes were wild with baffled fury; she could not comprehend what had happened, or, believing, refused. Prince Varden, at my side, started to rush down the steps. I held him back.

“Let me go to her, Dray Prescot!”

He lifted his rapier, all bloodied.

“Wait, my friend.”

He stared in my face, and what he saw there I do not know; but he hesitated. A man of Eward stepped forward and stripped off the emerald green gown and cast it underfoot so that Natema groveled at our feet, naked. But Natema would never grovel. She stared up, beautiful, disheveled, naked, but prideful and arrogant and demanding.

“I am the Princess Natema, of Esztercari, and this is my House!”

Wanek spoke to her, gravely but with iron resolve that bewildered her. “Not so, girl. You are no longer a princess. For you no longer have a noble House. You own nothing, you are nothing. If you are not slain, hope and pray that some man will take kindly to you, and may buy you. For you have no other hope in all Kregen.”

“I—am—a princess!” She forced the words out, gasping, her hands clenched and her vivid scarlet lips curved and passionate. She stared up at us on the dais—and she saw me.

Her cornflower blue eyes clouded and she jerked back in her chains as though I had stepped down and struck her.

“Dray Prescot!” She spoke like a child. She shook her head. At my side Varden jerked like a goaded zorca.

I spoke to the Princess Natema. “Natema. You may be permitted to retain that name; your new master—if you are not slain, as the Lord Wanek has suggested—may give you a new one, like rast or vosk. You have been evil, you have cared nothing for other people; but I cannot find it in my heart to condemn you for what your upbringing made you.”

“Dray Prescot!” she whispered again. How different now were the circumstances of our meeting! How changed her fortunes. With my clansmen about me with their weapons raised I looked down on Natema.

“You may live, girl, if you are lucky. Who would want a naked ragbag like you now? For you have nothing but an evil temper and a violent tongue and know nothing of laboring to make a man happy. But, maybe, there is to be found a man who can see something in you, who can find it in his heart to take you in and lift you up and clothe your nakedness and learn to school your tongue and temper. If there is such a man in all Kregen, he needs must love you very greatly to saddle himself with such a burden.”

To this day I do not truly know if Natema really loved me or was merely gratifying a lustful whim when she proposed herself to me. But my words struck through to her. She looked bewilderedly upon the pressing men in hostile dress all about her, at the steel of their weapons, at Wanek’s iron-masked face of hatred, and then she looked at her own naked body with the heavy chain pressing the white skin—and she screamed.

No longer could I hold back Prince Varden Wanek of Eward. He cradled her in his arms, smoothing back the lush yellow hair, calling for smiths to strike off the chains. He was whispering in her ear, and slowly her sobs and wild despair eased and her body relaxed from its rigid grip of hysteria. She looked at him, and, indeed, he was a fine and handsome sight. I saw those ripe red luscious lips curve.

I heard what she said.

She raised those luminous cornflower blue eyes to Varden, who was staring down at her with a foolish, happy, devoted and unbelieving look on his face.

“I think,” said the Princess Natema, “that blue will go with my eyes very well.”

I almost smiled, then.

A press circled in the hall and I saw a stately palanquin swing and sway in between the towering columns of the main entrance, slowly move toward the dais as the solidly packed masses of men whirlpooled away to give it passage. I also saw a sharp, weasel-faced little man dressed incongruously in clansman’s russet and with a long knife stuck through his belt, standing truculently, as though he had conquered everything himself, at the foot of the dais. Beneath the tunic of Nath the thief there were a number of highly suspicious bulges, and I remarked to myself that Shusha would be missing a few choice items when she installed herself in her new home.

“Hai, Nath, Jikai!” I called down to him, and he looked up with his furtive weasel face as proud as though he had stolen all three eyes from the great statue of Hrunchuk in the temple gardens across the forbidden canal.

The palanquin swayed to a halt and scarlet-liveried men helped Great-Aunt Shusha—who was not my great-aunt—up the dais steps. More men provided an ornate throne she must have had carried from some dusty and long-forgotten attic. She sat in it with a thankful gasp after climbing the dais steps. She was so covered with gems that scarcely a square inch was to be seen of her scarlet gown. Her bright eyes fixed on Varden, who had flung a great blue cape about Natema, and who now stood with his bride-to-be to one side.

All the noise of shuffling feet, of laughing, of hugely-excited men, fell silent. There was in the Great Hall of Strombor, that had once been Esztercari, an overwhelming tenseness of feeling, a current of thrilling excitement, a sense that history was being made, here and now, before all our eyes. The light fell from the tall windows and burned upon the colors and the weapons. The torches smoked and their streamers lofted into a high haze in which darting colored motes weaved endlessly. Even the very air smelled differently, tangy, tingling, bracing.

Here was a nodal point of history. Here was where a Noble House vanished, and another took its place, where the rightful House once more claimed its old rewards. The vague thought that I had been brought to Zenicce to encompass just this result flashed upon my mind, to be instantly dispelled.

I knew that Shusha might wish to administer the House of Strombor herself, for her Eward husband and sons and daughters were all dead and she was herself alone—but that she would certainly wish to unite the two Houses in the person of her great-nephew Varden. I felt this to a most happy outcome. She would will him everything, and this friendship between the Houses would be assured. I smiled at Varden where he clasped Natema, and surprised myself at the curve in my lips. His response a little surprised me, for he laughed widely, his eyes alight with merriment as he clasped Natema, and he bowed to me, a stately half-incline. I wondered what he meant.

Shusha of Strombor began to speak.

She was heard out in utter silence.

What she said shook and dumbfounded me, and explained Varden’s laugh and bow, for he must have known and approved. Shusha of Strombor had made me her legitimate heir, given me suzerainty over all the House of Strombor, with all ranks, privileges and dues thereto entailed in law; all the bokkertu—that is to say, the legal work—had been concluded. I was to assume at once the lawful title of Lord Strombor of Strombor. The House of Strombor was mine.

I stood there like a loon, stunned, not believing, thinking myself the victim of some kind of insane practical joke. But my men did not doubt. My wild wolves of the plains lifted their weapons on high and amidst a forest of flashing blades the cheers rang out. “Zorcander! Vovedeer! Strombor!” Among the russet and the powder blue there was now to be seen more color. The black and silver of Reinman, the crimson and gold of Wicken, others of our allies; they crowded in and lifted their weapons and shouted and roared.

“Dray Prescot of Strombor! Hai, Jikai!”

My slave clansmen knew I would not desert them for a soft city life; was I not their Zorcander and was I not sworn in obi-brotherhood with them? So they bellowed with the best. That great and glorious hall rang to the repeated cheers as the swords lifted high.

I looked at Shusha.

Her wizened face and bright eyes reminded me of a wise old squirrel who has stored her nuts and seeds for the winter to come. That stiff slit in my lips twitched again. I smiled at Shusha.

“You cunning—” I said. And as she laughed I went to her and knelt. She put her ring-loaded hand on my shoulder. That hand trembled; but not with age.

“You will do what is right, Dray Prescot. We have talked long into the night and I have seen you in action and I believe I know your heart.”

“Strombor will be a mighty House once more,” I told her, and I took her other hand in mine. “But, there is one thing—slavery. I will not tolerate slavery whether it be a kitchen drudge or a pearl-strung dancing girl. I will pay wages and the House of Strombor will maintain only free retainers.”

“You do not surprise me, Dray Prescot.” She pressed my hand. “It will seem a little strange, an old woman like me, going through life without a slave at my beck and call.”

I looked at her on her great throne. “My Lady of Strombor,” I said, sincerely. “You will never be without a slave at your feet.”

“Why, you great big slobber-mouth lap-lollied chunkrah! Get along with you!” But she was pleased. The noise in the Great Hall bellowed and racketed to that wonderful ceiling and I could look down from the dais again.

A man in black and silver was talking to Varden, who had been about to leap up to congratulate me as had the others on the dais, clasping my hand, the first of whom had been Hap Loder. Varden, holding Natema in the crook of his left arm, seized the man by his silver cords, staring into his face. My attention was instantly arrested. Then, the man’s laughing having ceased abruptly, he was pushed back by Varden, who came roaring and raging up the dais steps to me. Shusha regarded him with a lift of her old eyebrows. He came straight to me.

I stood up and held out my hand in affection.

“You knew of this, Varden, my friend?”

“Yes, yes—Dray! Hanam of Reinman has just brought news. He was laughing at our good fortune that the Prince Pracek of Ponthieu did not intervene in the fighting, and that they had had no need to cover us in that quarter, for the prince was celebrating his nuptials this day.”

“I had heard,” I said, surprised at his manner, at once agitated and nervous. “He is marrying a princess of Vallia, is he not?”

“A great match,” put in Wanek, with an odd look at the form of Natema shrouded in her blue cloak. I guessed he wished Varden, his son, had made a match that brought with it a whole island under one government, an invincible fleet, and trade contacts firm for ten thousand miles of Kregen. Plus a fleet of airboats hardly seen outside Havilfar.

“A great match, indeed, Dray Prescot!” burst out Prince Varden. “A match such as a Jikai would not suffer to go on! Know, Dray Prescot, that the Prince Pracek is marrying the Princess Delia of Vallia.”

Chapter Twenty

The Scorpion again

There is little more to tell.

There is little left to say about that time, my second sojourn on the planet Kregen beneath Antares.

I cared nothing for honor, for glory, for the colors of pride, I cared nothing for the bokkertu, for what might have been written down and signed and sealed. My wild clansmen would follow me across the Plains of Mist if needs be. With that marvelous rapier gripped in my fist, with my battle-stained scarlet gear flaming beneath the twin suns, and with my clansmen at my back, I paid a call on the wedding of Prince Pracek and his exotic foreign bride. The Ponthieu enclave lay just across the canal. There would be trouble there in the future. I might have to raze or capture the whole complex. On that day, so long ago, I and my men roared across in fliers, in skiffs, in the wherries that had ghosted up from the marble quarries with my men packed within. We smashed in with unceremonious power when the place was decked in purple and ocher, and wreaths of flowers hung everywhere and the scents of costly perfumes wafted in the corridors and halls, where slave girls danced in their silks and bangles, where music sounded on every hand. At the head of my men I burst into the Ponthieu Great Hall and a guard of Ochs and Rapas and Chuliks fell away before the ranked menace of our clan bows. Grim and terrible to see, as I know I must have looked by the way the women shrank away from me and the men in their purple and ocher fingered their rapier hilts and would not look at me, I strode down the central aisle. Gloag, Hap Loder, Rov Kovno, Ark Atvar, Loku—and Prince Varden—were with me, but they kept at a distance, silent and watchful.

So sudden, so violent, so vicious had been our descent that nothing could stop us. The first Ponthieu to reach for crossbow or rapier would have died with a dozen arrows feathered in his purple and ocher trappings. I halted before the great dais as the music faltered and died away.

Absolute silence hung in that Great Hall as it had hung in the Great Hall of Strombor—my Great Hall!—only, it seemed, moments ago when Shusha proclaimed my inheritance.

Prince Pracek, with his lopsided face and sallow visage, stood there, his hand gripping his rapier hilt, gorgeously clad in his wedding trappings. Priest were there, shaven-headed, long-bearded, sandaled. Incense smoke coiled, stinking. A crimson and green carpet led to the altar.

And there, standing with lowered head, stood the bride-to-be. Clad all in white, with a white veil concealing her face, she waited quietly and patiently to be united to this twisted man at her side. Bride-to-be! Could I be too late! Then—then I promised, she would be a widow within the second.

Pracek tried to bluster the thing out.

“What is the meaning of this outrage! We have no fight with you—clansmen, a scarlet trapped foe! I know you not!”

“Know, Prince Pracek, that I am the Lord of Strombor!”

“Strombor?” I heard the name taken up and repeated in a buzz of speculation about the great chamber.

But my voice had betrayed me.

The white-crowned head lifted; the veil was torn away.

“Dray Prescot!” cried my Delia of the Blue Mountains.

“Delia!” I shouted, high, in answer.

And then, before them all, I took her in my arms and kissed her as I had kissed her once before in the pool of baptism in far Aphrasöe.

When I released her and she released me she still clung to me and her eyes were shining wonders. She trembled and held onto me and would not let go—and I would not have let her go for all the two worlds of Earth or Kregen.

There was nothing Pracek could do. The papers relating to the bokkertu were brought and ceremoniously burned. I took Delia of the Blue Mountains—this strange new Delia of Vallia—away with me back to my enclave, to my House of Strombor. Any man who had tried to lift a finger to stop us would have been cut down in an instant.

Laughing, sighing, kissing, we went back to the Great Hall where I showed Delia of Delphond to everyone and announced she was the Queen of Strombor.

There is little left to tell.

How brave she had been! How foolhardy, how noble, how self-sacrificing! Believing I regarded her as an encumbrance, as a hindrance, that I was doing what I was doing out of love for Princess Natema, she vowed to aid me in every way she could. If she could not have me, then she would help me to obtain the woman she thought I wanted, if that would make me happy. I chided her, then, accusing her of weakness and of giving in; but she only said: “Oh, Dray, my dearest! If only you could see your own face at times!”

She had taken Natema’s gems, glad now to use them to aid me, and slipped away in the airboat so that I might think she had returned home. Of course, she had known where Vallia was all along. At first she had been reluctant to tell me she was the daughter of the Emperor of Vallia for fear I would demand an immense ransom—which would have been paid, I knew. Then, when she had known she could not live without me—I believe she might have done something brave and foolish immediately after the wedding ceremony with Pracek—she did not tell me because then she thought I would simply see her home and leave, or just send her home, away from me. And she could not bear that. But when her poor confused thoughts had tangled Natema with me she had gone to her father’s consul in Zenicce, that bluff, robust, booted man with the buff gear, using the gems to ease her way in the city and setting the airboat to drift far out over the sea, and told him she wished to be betrothed to Pracek. He had tried to dissuade her, for the match was too far beneath her; but with her own imperious will so different from that of Natema, she had insisted.

I hugged her to me. “Poor foolish Delia of the Blue Mountains! But—I must call you Delia of Vallia now.”

She laughed up at me, holding me close.

“No, dearest Dray. I do not think Delia of Vallia an euphonious name and never use it. Delphond is a tiny estate my grandmother willed me. And the Blue Mountains of Vallia are magnificent! You will see them, Dray—we will see them together.”

“Yes, my Delia of the brown eyes, we will!”

“But I wish to be called Delia of Strombor—for are you not Lord of Strombor?”

“Aye—and you will be Queen of Felschraung and Longeulm, Zorcandera and Vovedeera!”

“Oh, Dray!”

There is not much more to tell.

We were sitting in a room with the sunshine from Zim flooding crimson all about us waiting for Genodras to pour its topaz fires into the room. At the far end were all my friends, laughing and talking and already the bokkertu for our betrothal was taking place. Life had come to be suddenly a precious and golden wonder to me.

As the green sunshine slanted in through the window and mingled with the crimson I saw a scorpion scuttle out from under the table. I had never before seen one on Kregen.

I jumped up, filled with a frenzied, sick loathing, a foreboding, even a knowledge. I remembered my father lying white and helpless as the scorpion scuttled so loathsomely away. I leaped forward and lifted my foot to bring it down squashing on the ugly creature—and I felt a blue tingling of fire limning my eyes and penetrating into my inmost being—I was falling—and Delia was no longer a warm and wonderful presence. I opened my eyes to a harsh and yellow sunshine and I knew I had lost everything. I was on the coast of Portugal, and Lisbon was not far off and there was some trouble before I, naked and with no explanation of my appearance, could break free and try to make some kind of a life at the beginning of the nineteenth century on Earth. The scorpion had stung once more.

For hours I would stand, gazing up at the stars, picking out Scorpio. There, four hundred light-years away, on the wild and beautiful and savage planet of Kregen, beneath the crimson and emerald suns of Antares, was all I wanted on any world, denied, it seemed to me, forever.

“I will return!” I shouted, over and over, as I had shouted once before. Would the Savanti hear and take pity on me, return me to Paradise? Would the Star Lords once again pluck me across the interstellar gulf to be used once more as a pawn in their inscrutable plans? I could only hope.

So much—so much—and all lost, all lost.

“I will return,” I said fiercely. “I will never give up by Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Strombor!”

I would return, one day, to Kregen beneath Antares.

I would return.

I would return.

Scanned by Highroller.

Proofed by unsung hero.