CHAPTER NINE

Of Mayfwy and of swifters

Two disgusting specimens of some abhorrent species of water vermin were hoisted aboard next morning, swinging groaning and complaining over Lilac Bird ’s parados to be dumped all squishy and green of face onto the deck.

The mobiles in their gaudy clothes and rusty swords who had brought them home stood on the jetty, guffawing, their hands on their hips, their heads thrown back, emptying their stalwart lungs into the early morning suns-shine. Both the suns of Kregen were close together. The genial sounds of work in the harbor floated up, cries and calls, the clink of tools, the slop of water, the screams of gulls. The lighthouse men were going off watch, rubbing their eyes and yawning. The tall pharos reared up from the far end of the jetty past the first of the seaward defense walls, its immense lantern mirrors dark and motionless. Down by the fishmarket the catch was being landed and the wives were arguing and fighting and more than one silvery-scaled fat fish went slap! across the cheeks of a beldame. The scene was one I could half close my eyes and absorb and imagine I was back in Plymouth — well, almost. Zolta and Nath lay on the deck, two pitiful objects.

Sharntaz, the new second in command, rolled across to inspect them with the toe of his boot. I, Dray Prescot, who seldom laugh, felt the strange bubbling inside me, straining my ribs. Nath held his head and groaned. Zolta held his stomach and moaned. As objects of pity they aroused only the most violent hilarity in the rough seafolk of Sanurkazz.

When Zenkiren appeared and everyone immediately straightened up ready for morning inspection, he cast a single glance at the two culprits, who attempted to stand up, their faces the color of that interesting cheese sometimes discovered abandoned in the buildings of Magdag.

“You two,” he said. He jerked a hand. “With the Lord of Strombor. Move! ”

“Aye, Captain,” they stuttered, and shambled off after me.

It was hardly fair on them, but I knew they would not forgive me if I traveled to Felteraz without them. As I had explained to Zenkiren, they were oar comrades of Zorg also. We made the journey in a two-wheeled cart drawn by a docile ass, a somewhat different variety from that of the Plains of Segesthes but with the same patient obstinacy, and as I handled the reins those two lay in the back and groaned with every jolt of the wheels.

“My head! Mother Zinzu the Blessed! For a little wine to moisten these cracked lips!”

“You drank it all last night,” said Zolta disagreeably.

“And that wench you found me! Aie! How she—”

“You have no stomach for the finer arts, Nath, and that is the truth, by Zim-Zair.”

“Ha! Since when have you used Krozair oaths, my fat tallowed sea snake?”

Then we were all silent, for a space, for we remembered our friend Zorg of Felteraz, to whose widow we now traveled.

The way was not far but we did not hurry in the warm sunshine. The weather continued fine and mild. For Zolta and Nath this was a holiday as well as a pilgrimage; for me it was a digression from my set course I had to make, a task laid on me, a task I knew without a single hesitation Delia of the Blue Mountains would approve and applaud.

Felteraz, a town and an estate and a small fishing harbor, lay a little over three dwaburs to the east and we had to be ferried over the neck of the Sea of Marshes to pick up our asscart. The gut there was about a mile or so broad and no bridges spanned it, but the shining water was always alive with small craft, oared wherries, pulling barges, dinghies, ferries, and the occasional stately passage of a swifter, every oar in line and rising and falling as one to the beat of the drum-deldar. Now we ambled along the dusty path, for the suns had quickly dried the overnight dew. We passed cultivated fields, and small farms and a tiny village or two nestled into the rocks. Here there could be habitation near the shore. For the frowning walls of the citadel of Sanurkazz to the west and the much lesser citadel of Felteraz to the east provided protection and a powerful deterrent to a swift raiding descent on the coast. In general the coasts of the inner sea, the Eye of the World, lie barren beneath the suns.

I wondered what Mayfwy would be like. Zorg had never mentioned her, save that once, when he had been unable any longer to keep bottled within him the passions of his life, for he had been dying. He had said “Krozair” and “Mayfwy” in a breath, a dying breath. I had formed an image of her, of a serene and calm grand dame, straight, with the management of the estate and the overlordship of the town and harbor and citadel a burden she was capable of bearing with dignity and composure, a charge she accepted with all the loyalty I had come to know and admire in Zorg, her husband. We stopped to eat in one of the villages, and Nath quickly bargained for a bottle of Zond wine, and Zolta had an apple-cheeked girl perched on his knee and screaming with laughter in almost no time at all. I ate bread, soft, fluffy bread torn in chunks from the long loaves of Kregen, and smeared with honey from the innkeeper’s hives. A heaping dish of palines in the center of the table completed Nath’s hangover cure; there is nothing as sovereign as palines to pick a man up from the floor. There are many things I know I have forgotten in my long life. I sincerely believe I shall never forget that ambling ride on an asscart from Sanurkazz to Felteraz along the dusty coast road of the Eye of the World with the warm sunshine golden and glorious upon us, streaming in opaline radiance upon the vineyards and orange groves, and upon the browned and smiling faces of the people we passed. It is a simple memory, but a long one. And those two lusty rogues, Nath and Zolta, rollicked and sang in the cart as we rolled creaking and lurching along the road.

Felteraz came in sight. I shall say little about the place. The town was charming, high-banked along the terraced side of a hill, trending up to where a great dike cut off the frowning mass of the citadel. I have seen the incomparable view along the brilliant cliffs of Sorrento. Felteraz is something like that. The harbor lay cinctured by a solid granite wall and there was also a lighthouse as there was in Sanurkazz. From the high loft of the citadel I could look out and down along those cliffs which the setting suns crimsoned and opaled in breathtaking radiance, smothered in profuse vegetation, with blooms of gorgeous color and scents of delight breaking the patterns of greenery and rock. We rolled along behind our ass up to the drawbridge over the dike, and the bridge was down and a friendly man-at-arms clad in mail let us through. His white surcoat bore a symbol I was to come to know well: two galley oars, crossed, divided upright by a long sword, so that the whole looked something like the letter X with a center upright. The symbol was stitched in red and gold, surrounded by a lenk-leaf border. The man-at-arms lifted his long sword in salute as we passed, and, gravely, I acknowledged it. A smiling maid in a white apron, with naked flashing legs, with a sprightly eye that sized up Zolta in a moment, led us into a spacious antechamber hung with tapestry and with solid tables and chairs positioned about. She was gone only five minutes or so and I knew Zenkiren had sent a message, that we were expected.

Mayfwy, widow to Zorg of Felteraz, entered the room.

I knew what I had expected. A grand dame, solid, filled with the virtues of her exalted office, wearing stiff robes, brocade, girdled with a golden belt from which hung suspended bunches of iron keys of her responsibilities as chatelaine.

Of all the inward expectation, Mayfwy possessed only the glittering golden belt. From the belt, the chatelaine itself, hung a silver key.

Mayfwy danced lightly into the room, smiling, brimming over with joy and goodwill. She was young, incredibly young to be what she was. Her mass of dark and curly hair glistened with health and oils and ministrations. Her pert face with its saucy eyes appraised us. Her small and sensuous mouth broke into a smile as she advanced, more sedately, her hand extended.

“My Lord of Strombor. I am heartily pleased to welcome you to Felteraz.” She beamed on Zolta and Nath. “And to Nath and Zolta, my dear husband’s friends, and therefore my friends. You are heartily welcome.” She laughed, rushing on, giving us no time to speak. “Come. You must be hungry — surely you must be thirsty? Nath, deny it if you can! And you, Zolta, the name of the morsel who showed you in is Sinkle.”

She went dancing out on her satin slippers and we, like three calsanys, followed her onto a terrace from which the whole breathtaking view of the cliffs and the bay and the harbor below the town spread out below us. I could spare time later to see the view. I studied this girl, this impish sprite, this Mayfwy, who was a widow.

She wore white, a sheer white linen dress that was held in place over her shoulders by golden pins encrusted with rubies. Her golden belt circled her waist and hung low in the front and to one side, emphasizing the long curves of her. Her figure was lithe and feminine and seductive in an artless way, as though no matter what she did she could never fail to be attractive. In her curled dark hair posies of small forget-me-nots clustered.

I have little idea of what we talked about, there on that sun-drenched terrace over the blue sea. Nath took himself off to organize a wine delivery system, and Zolta was taken off by Sinkle, who had the grace to giggle as she led him out.

“Zorg,” I said, and plunged brusquely and brutally into an account of our lives as slaves. She quieted down, and listened attentively. She did not cry, and as I talked and felt the response flowing so gently from her, I knew she had cried all the tears she could shed. Captivity and slavery had worn Zorg down. This elfin sprite had once been his match. Her dark days of agony had passed when news came that Zorg’s galley had been captured. “He was sent to the galleys as a punishment for breaking the heads of those evil men of Magdag. They sought to discipline him. I tell you, Mayfwy, Zorg’s spirit was never broken.” And then I told her of what Zorg had said as he died, but I did not tell her of the manner of his death.

“He was a proud man, my Lord of Strombor. Proud. I thank you for your goodness in coming to see me.” She gestured, a half helpless little movement of one slender naked arm. She wore no jewelry apart from those blazing rubies in the golden pins clasping the shoulders of her deeply-cut gown. The scent of her perfume came very sweetly as she moved.

I thought of the Princess Natema Cydones, of the Noble House of Esztercari, in far Zenicce, and then I did not think of Natema, who must by now be married to my friend Prince Varden Wanek of the Noble House of Eward, for some considerable time.

“You are not drinking your wine, my Lord of Strombor.”

I reached for the crystal goblet.

Truth to tell I always preferred the rich and fragrant Kregan tea I had become used to on the Plains of Segesthes with my Clansmen, but this Felteraz wine was light, golden, and sweet, and cloyed not unpleasantly on the tongue.

“I drink to your eternal happiness, my Lady of Felteraz.”

It was polite, a formula; it was also clumsy.

Her face moved toward me, her eyes immense and luminous, dark with remembered pain. “Ah! My Lord of Strombor!”

I rose and walked to the marble balustrade hanging above the tremendous view. I could see three galleys, hundred-swifters, tucked in the inner harbor, their yards and masts struck down, their awnings up, their oar ports leathered over. Gulls wheeled over the sheer drop. The perfume of the flowers was overpowering.

We took time, Nath and Zolta and me, to make ourselves as respectable as three ruffianly fighting-men might for the lavish meal Mayfwy provided that evening. The dishes passed before us, served on platters of beaten gold — which always let the food go cold too fast for a real gourmet — and the goblets of wine consumed were beyond counting. Mayfwy laughed and my two companions roared and sang and told stories that brought a sparkle to my Lady of Felteraz’s eyes. Zorg was dead. He now sat in glory on the right hand of Zair in the paradise of Zim. He would not begrudge his old oar comrades some fun and relish from life, nor would he begrudge the girl he had loved the same human needs. We had seen Zorg’s and Mayfwy’s son and daughter: a fine, upright youngster with the features we had come to recognize in Zorg, and a winning little girl who at first was shy until Zolta perched her on his shoulders and pretended to be a sectrix, the while she belabored him with a stick, at which Nath cried out: “That’s the idea, my little darling! Beat him like a calsany! He can only improve!”

The evening meal which in truth was more like a banquet — and I fancied, not without a twinge of shame, a banquet in our honor — passed. Also present were the guard commander and a number of the chief men of the estates and their ladies, all good kindly folk with country ways that came as refreshing as a cool westerly after days of sweltering in southerlies.

I was left at last with Mayfwy in a small retiring room, with only three rose-colored lamps for light, with a soft sofa on which she half reclined, her linen dress changed for one in much the same style but created all from shimmering silk, with a side table on which delicate wines waited our attention.

“Now, my Lord of Strombor,” she said to me, her smooth and elfin face serious, that sensuous little mouth trying to be firm, her hands clasped. “I want you to tell me the truth about Zorg. I can stand it. But I must know the truth!”

I felt genuine distress.

How could I explain to her what her man had endured?

Such a thing was barely possible.

I could feel my heart thumping. The wine rose to cloud my vision and coiled thickly in my head. The rosy light of the lamps shed gleams on her curled gleaming hair. Her silken dress clung here and there to her body. She half reclined and gazed at me, and her ripe red mouth trembled so that I could think of nothing save obeying her commands; and yet, to speak of what I knew of the horrors of a Magdaggian galley to this girl?

“My Lord of Strombor,” she said softly, and now her breathing was as unsteady as mine. She leaned toward me, her lips half parted, yet clinging still, her eyelids half closed, her breast rising and falling.

“Please — my Lord?”

I leaned toward her.[3]

* * * *

The Magdaggian hundredswifter had turned now, reached around, her oars a smother of foam in the sea. Again a hurtling mass of rock from her aft varter skimmed over our heads. Men were yelling as arrows feathered into them. The Magdag galley turned, her oars churning, and still Zolta had not sorted out the horrible confusion on our rowing benches amidships.

“Throw them overboard, if you have to, Zolta!” I roared at him. A man at my side screamed and started back with an arrow pierced clean through his eye. “Cut them loose! Get the oars into action!” The hundredswifter was swinging around and her ugly bronze beak was building a comb of white water as she picked up speed.

In only minutes that bronze rostrum would smash into us, her beak would rend over our parados and men would come leaping like sea-leem down among us. My thinned crew couldn’t stop that strength in boarding.

Zolta’s sword flashed and flashed again as he cut down the frenzied slaves. Nath was there, down from his place at our forward varters. The whip-deldars were unchaining the dead slaves. The mass of rock from the Magdaggian varter had pulped their naked bodies like nits beneath a thumbnail. Slaves toppled over the sides. The splashes as they hit were lost in the uproar. As in the many fights I had been in, some of which I have mentioned, on the Eye of the World, once again I was struck by the absence of the smashing concussion of gunfire, the choking clouds of smoke. I could see, all right. I could hear. Both senses brought me tales of destruction.

Now our after varter could come into action and the men there let fly and at once began their frenzied efforts to wind up the windlass. The ballista was cocked again. The hundred-swifter was bearing down on us now, gathering speed, the bronze ram cutting the water, the metal gleaming and bright. Where the strengthening wales along the sides met forward at the proembolion the Magdaggian usually covered the junction with a sectrix head of bronze. Above that and beneath the beak the wales met in a bronze risslaca-head, a mythical lizard monster. After the ram had pierced and crushed us below water, the proembolion would push us back off the ram and upright so that the boarders could leap down from their gangways along the beak.

“Hurry it up, Zolta!” I roared.

My decks were covered with dead men. Arrows stood everywhere. My own archers were shooting, but I could not see the results of their handiwork past the erected palisade across the low foredeck of the hundredswifter. Her twin banks of oars rose and fell now in a quicker beat. Each blade hit the water as one, in two straight and parallel lines, churning her forward like a runaway train on tracks. I yelled at Nath again and he charged back up to the forward varter and hounded his men there into making a final fling.

My sword was in my fist.

If we were captured it would be the galleys of Magdag for us. I had tasted the freedom of the inner sea. I would not willingly go back to slavery again.

Zolta was beating all the fresh slaves we had up from the hold, herding them onto the benches. Here was one time when a single-banked swifter had advantages. Four slaves to an oar, then huddled down, lifting the looms, preparing for the stroke.

Even then the whip-deldars were chaining them down. I nodded. That was good. The oarsmen must respond at once to every order. If they were unchained they would be unsettled, thinking of seizing the chance to jump overboard. More of my men fell on the gangways as arrows flew down. Zolta waved his sword. His face was as wrathful as a whiter storm.

“Clear,” he bellowed. “Clear, Captain!”

I yelled down to the oar-master, but old Rizil was up to the job and at once his silver whistle shrilled, the drum-deldar smashed out the first booming beat, the bass and the tenor drumming in turn. The oars swooped down, hauled water, feathered and lifted in that short but incredibly powerful motion of oars arranged alla scaloccio . I felt Zorg leap through the water. All our artillery was shooting as we turned, and then the after varter fell silent and it was up to Nath as we swung around, bringing our bow against that of the green galley.

Bronze ram against bronze ram, now, we hurtled across the narrowing space of water. The foe was a hundredswifter, two banked with probably five or six men to an oar. Zorg was a sixtyswifter, single-banked, with four men to an oar. We would be slugged solidly backward at the point of impact.

Both captains, that man I fought and I, knew what to do in this situation. Amid the shrill of wounded men, the clang of the ballistae, and the plunging swoop of the iron birds of the air, we both stood as I stood, on the quarterdeck, waiting, judging, estimating, ready to choose the exact time.

But — which way would he go?

He would surely try to ram. As surely he would know I would seek to avoid collision and seek to shave down his side, smashing his cat head, rend away his whole double-bank of oars. But — which side, larboard or starboard?

I found my face twisting and realized I must be smiling at that Magdaggian captain’s dilemma. He wished to strike me; then he must make the decision. I must needs turn first; he would think. Yes, he surely must think that.

Zolta was at my side, his sword bloody, panting.

“If they set foot aboard, Captain, they’ll have to wade over my blood!”

“Yes, Zolta,” I said.

My men were crowding forward now, their white surcoats with that brave blazon of Felteraz heartening us all, their long swords ready. They crouched like leems, ready. I spoke quietly to the rudder-deldars. I had observed a slight incline in our passage, a slender movement with some current and the gentle breeze.

“When I give the order,” I told the rudder-deldars, hard-voiced, “turn instantly to starboard. To starboard. When you hear my order. Understood?”

“Yes, Captain,” they said, sturdily handling their rudders with a skill I had thrashed into them. “We hear.”

“Come on, Zolta,” I said. I spoke with a false cheeriness. “Let us go forward. Our blades are dry and thirsty.”

“By Zair the all-merciful!” said Zolta. “No Grodno-gasta will stop me enjoying a maiden tonight on Isteria!”

Now the hundredswifter was half-hidden before us by our own palisade stretching across the foredeck aft of the outreaching beak. We ran forward and waved a quick encouragement to Nath, who was keeping his two varters on the bows clanging away with a speed and precision his crews never reached in all the practice I made them sweat through.

I was in command of my own ship; I had been in command now long enough just to have reached a time when organization was beginning to go as I wanted; no mangy Grodno-worshiping sea-leem would cheat me of that now!

Then Nath, high on the varter platform, let out a shrilling shriek of triumph.

“May Mother Zinzu the Blessed be praised! Their drum-deldar lies like a squashed paline!”

Immediately the beat of the hundredswifter’s oars faltered. Even as the thought: Lack of training!

flashed through my mind I turned and, funneling my hands, yelled aft: “Now! ”

Zorg swung viciously to starboard.

Our larboard side oars went in with a speed that clearly told of the slaves’ knowledge of what would happen if they were caught with their blades extended. I saw the cruel beak of the Magdag galley lurch away. It opened out a glimpse of her bows where the varter crew labored at the windlass. I saw the cat head disappear beneath our beak and felt the jolting crunch as our bronze-clad proembolion, fashioned into the head of a charging chunkrah, ripped it away.

Then we were roaring down the larboard side of the galley, tearing away the oars in a vast and horrible splintering of wood, shaving her side as clean as a Magdaggian harbor barber shaves the head of a slave. I knew what was happening to those two banks of slaves aboard the hundredswifter. They were men of Zair, fellows, comrades: they would understand what we were doing now, and regret it, and feel the bitterness, but their acrid hate would be for Magdag.

We shot past the upflung stern of the galley and not a single mailed man of Magdag had got aboard us. After that we lay off on our oars and shot the galley to pieces.

When we boarded, the shambles, blood, and filth had no power to sicken me. After that it was like any other successful action on the inner sea.

Of the eight hundred slaves aboard some three hundred and twenty-nine were either dead or so badly wounded, crushed, as to surely die. Of the Magdaggians we were able to chain to our oar benches a paltry twenty-two. But we outfitted the captured hundredswifter and, with all our reserve of oars used up and many splintered together, we set course for Holy Sanurkazz.

I did all that was necessary in the burial of the slaves at sea. Our decks were scrubbed, our wounded cared for, the rescued slaves happy, now, to labor for just a little while longer at the oars to take us into home waters — and this time with the threat of the whip on their naked backs removed. We sailed past the pharos over by the outer wall of the sea defenses of Sanurkazz. Zolta had, indeed, enjoyed his maiden on the island of Isteria, where we had passed the night. How often I have spent in that snug anchorage, the last before Sanurkazz herself, a night thinking of my return to Felteraz!

The people of Zair welcomed our return, as they always welcomed the return of a successful venture against Magdag. The four fat merchantmen we had taken would provide me with a substantial increase to my fortune. I had my eye on a gown all of gold and silver thread, silk lined, that I felt sure Mayfwy would admire. And, too, after this Zenkiren could no longer keep from me the command of a double-banked swifter, a hundred-and-twentyswifter! She would be called Zorg , of course, the moment I assumed command.

I knew the very ship. She had been reaching completion as we had set sail. Now, she must be ready, brand-new from the shipwrights and fitters, lying waiting for me in the arsenal. Zo, the new king, a man whom I quite liked, would surely not refuse a request from Zenkiren that one of his sea captains should take the command. The high admiral might grumble and Harknel of High Heysh would be sure to interfere and try to prevent me from any success, but intrigue would be met with intrigue. I, too, now had powerful friends in Holy Sanurkazz.

Was I not, after all, the Lord of Strombor, the most successful corsair captain of the Eye of the World?

The formalities were quickly over. The freed slaves, with many expressions of thanks, went to recuperate in Sanurkazz.

My crew was paid off and roaring for a well-earned leave. All the flags of gold, silver, and scarlet floated in the bright air above Sanurkazz and carpets of brilliant color and weave hung from hundreds of balconies smothered in flowers. My agent, wily old Shallan, with his wisp of beard, lined cheeks, and merry eyes, who would charge fifteen percent on a loan and chuckle with merriment as he did so, would see to the disposal of the prizes after the required dues had been paid to Zo, the king, the high admiral, Zenkiren, and to Felteraz.

I sat in the stern sheets of my personal barge, with a crew of sixteen free men to row, Zolta at my side, Zolta’s girl acting as drum-deldar, and Nath steering a precarious course as he upended a bottle at the rudder, as we rounded the curve of coast from Sanurkazz to Felteraz. As we glided into the harbor I contrasted this arrival with that first time when we had rolled up roaring on the asscart. Zenkiren was waiting for me in a tall cool room of tapestries and solid furniture with another man, a man who might have served as a model of what Zenkiren would be like in another hundred years. Mayfwy kissed me on the cheek as her maids brought in wine in chased silver goblets.

“Mayfwy!” I said. Then, “I have a cedar wood chest for you—”

“Dray!” she said, her eyes dancing, her cheeks flushed with my return. “Another present!”

“As I recall,” said Zenkiren dryly, “he can never keep his hands off Magdag gold and silver. If he didn’t bring you a present I would think my Lord of Strombor had sailed a lonely sea.”

“As for you, Zenkiren,” I said, unwrapping the blue-etched and gold-mounted Fristle scimitar I had picked up off the deck of that damned Magdag pirate, “I thought this toy might amuse you.”

“It is magnificent!” said Zenkiren, running his fingers along the curved blade. “I thank you.”

“And now,” he said, and a note of solemn seriousness entered his voice, “I wish to present you.” He turned to the other man, who had remained calm and cool, his old strong-featured face composed, his simple white apron and tunic immaculate, the long sword at his side scabbarded in the fighting-man’s style.

“May I present the Lord of Strombor.” He turned then to me. “I have the honor to present to you, my Lord of Strombor, Pur Zazz, Grand Archbold of the Krozairs of Zy.”

CHAPTER TEN

The Krozairs of Zy point the path

I can remember, even now, vividly, unforgettably, the zephyr of anticipation that blew through my whole being.

In the seasons I had been hunting with the corsairs of Sanurkazz I had heard a hint dropped here, a casual snatch of conversation there, and I had picked up information that must have been the sum total, or nearly that, of what the ordinary idle, happy, careless folk of Sanurkazz knew of the Krozairs of Zy. Now this tall, aloof, calm-faced man was here, in the familiar room of the citadel of Felteraz, at the express desire, as it seemed to me, of Zenkiren — and he was the Grand Arch-bold of the Krozairs!

What followed must have been very familiar to him, for he had been master of the Order for a very long time. From hints I picked up I gathered that Zenkiren himself was in line for the succession, that my friend Zenkiren would become Grand Archbold. Pur Zazz sized me up with a cold and level stare. Instinctively I straightened up and squared those inordinately broad shoulders of mine. He looked me over. I felt that he was stripping my flesh away, was paring my very self down to the essence beneath. I had been roistering and going pirating on the inner sea, I had been living life to the full, I had been amassing wealth, and I had made friends. All that seemed to me in that moment to be petty, a mere preliminary to what this man would require of me.

If I do not go too deeply into what happened to me in the year that followed on that interview it is because I am bound by vows of silence I do not wish to break, even to an audience four hundred light-years distant from the scenes of that rigorous training and selection and adherence to the principles of dedication to Zair and to the Krozairs of Zy.

The Order maintained an island stronghold in the narrowing strait between the inner sea and the Sea of Swords, that other smaller dependent sea opening off southward from the Eye of the World. Like the Sea of Marshes it covered an extensive area, but it lay westward, something less than halfway along the curved southern shore. The island had once been a volcano, but through the geological aeons its crater had smoothed and filled, the subterranean fires stilled, and fresh water had found its way up to rill out in pleasant springs. The outer jagged scarps rose harsh and rocky beneath the suns; within a habitation had been built very little less harsh. The Order took its vows seriously. They kept themselves aloof from other orders of lesser chivalry like The Red Brethren of Lizz; they were dedicated to the succor of destitute people of Zair, to the greater glory of Zim-Zair, and to the implacable resistance to Grodno the Green and all his works.

After the novice had served his novitiate he was ranked Krozair, given the titles and insignia of his station, a man fit to stand in the forefront of the ranks of Zim-Zair in the eternal struggle against the heretic. Only men of worth were ever approached. Many refused, for the disciplines were harsh. Many fell by the wayside and never reached into the inner knowledge.

Once a candidate had become a Krozair, he was entitled, as other orders also conferred the privilege, of prefixing his name with the honorific Pur. Pur was not a rank or a title: it was a badge of chivalry and honor, a pledge that the man holding it was a true Krozair. Then the newly-fledged Krozair might choose a number of paths that opened before him. If he chose to become a contemplative, that was his privilege. If he chose to become a Bold, one of the select brethren who manned the fortress isle of Zy and other of the citadels maintained by the Order throughout the red sections of the inner sea, he would be welcomed. Should he desire to return to the ordinary ways of life, he might do that also, for the Order recognized its mission in the world. But a stricture was laid upon that man, that proved Krozair. Whenever he received the summons to join the Krozairs, wherever they happened to be in need of his aid, then, wherever he happened to be, and whenever it might occur in his life, he was bound by all that he held most holy and dear to hasten as fast as sectrix or swifter might take him to join his brothers of the Order.

“There have been a number of famous and immortal calls in the past, Pur Dray,” Pur Zenkiren told me one time as we came from the salle d’armes where we had been knocking the stuffing out of each other with morning stars. “I have been privileged to answer one such summons, some thirty years ago, when the devils of Magdag came knocking on the very doors of Zy itself. From all over the inner sea the brothers gathered.” He laughed, a faraway look in his bright eyes. “I tell you, Pur Dray: we had quite a fight of it until the Order gathered and the long swords sang above the hated green.”

I had been on Zy long enough to answer, with sincere meaning: “I pray that the summons will come again, and soon, Pur Zenkiren, for the Order to go up against Magdag itself.”

He made a face. “Unlikely.” He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “We are few. Finding men, as it is phrased in the Discipline, of the right caliber, is difficult. We have our eye on men as soon as they don sword and coat of mail. We are a lazy sun-loving lot, we men of Sanurkazz.”

“Agreed.”

The disciplines were strenuous, difficult, and extremely demanding. The use of weapons had become of itself almost a religion. Sword practice was carried out as a religious observance. Every move was sanctified by religious ardor. Like the Samurai, we dedicated our wills and our bodies to the pursuit of perfection, the facing of an opponent without seeing him as though he were there. We tried to make our opponents transparent, as though they were far off. We could sense a blow, the direction of a cut, the movement of a slash, by an intuitive process beyond reason, allied to our sixth sense. We could move into a parry almost before our foe instigated his attack.

Always, even as a young seaman aboard a seventy-four, I was accounted a good cutlass man. I have spoken of the need for such physical prowess, such good healthy cut-and-thrust, to enable me to survive when I first entered Kregen. Since then I have been in many situations where swordsmanship was vital, and I have been accounted a good man with a blade. But I freely admit that I learned from the disciplines of Zy a dexterity in swordplay that turned me into a different kind of swordsman entirely. Only in my own inner feelings about the superiority of the point to the edge could I teach the Krozairs much; and the knowledge was unnecessary, for they fought armored men in mesh iron, where the thrust from a sword would be stopped, where the way to dispose of your man was to slash his head off, or lop a limb, or break in his ribs. The disciplines were, in their way, too far advanced for the style of sword fighting practiced on the inner sea. Breathing, isometrics, arduous and prolonged exercises, continuous dedication, long hours of contemplation, hours of drawing on the will and making of the will itself a single central instrument whereby a man might know himself and thus see his enemy as transparent and removed, a foe he could outwit and outmaneuver and eventually triumph over, endless hours of instruction and devotion — all these were my daily portion during that year on the Krozairs’ lair, the isle of Zy.

I will not speak of the mysticism.

Then came the day when the Grand Archbold put me through the final ceremonies, and, purified, uplifted, I was pronounced a fit Krozair, worthy to hold the honor of Pur prefixed to my name.

“And now, Pur Dray, what will you do?”

I believe they knew what my decision would be. The Order maintained its own small fleet of galleys, and I had now made up my mind that I would aim for the command of the finest of these. This would take time. In the meanwhile, I intended to return to Felteraz, to a swifter command under the aegis of Zenkiren, who was now commodore in the king’s fleet, and to my previous life. I did not want to give up Felteraz.

Any thoughts of becoming a contemplative, or one who actually tended the succored, was, I knew, to my shame, perhaps, not for me. Equally I did not wish to become a Bold, even though this was a sure way to the Grand Archbold’s position. But Zenkiren, a roving brother, was to become Grand Archbold. And, perhaps, the greatest reason for my decision to go again into the inner sea — I had almost said outside world, thinking of my young self in those days, so gullible, so (if Zair will pardon) so green —

was that I had never forgotten the Star Lords and the Savanti. I knew they still had plans for me. I knew they would manipulate me whenever it suited them.

And — my Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains.

Could I forget her?

“I have sent for Zorg ,” said Zenkiren to me as we stood on one of the lookout posts near the crest of one of the long steep slopes of the island. A surprise.

“It has meant a lot to me, Zenkiren, to know that he was here, in these halls, these chapels, these salles d’armes. I sometimes think I can sense his presence here, as we perform the same observances as he performed.”

“They have been observed by the Order, not here, necessarily, but in our many abodes, for hundreds of years. And they will go on, through the years, being thus observed.”

When Zorg made landfall and nosed under the colossal rock arch that led into the inner harbor under the island, I was waiting. I donned my white surcoat with its circled emblem with the hubless wheel within. I saw Nath and Zolta on the beak, perched like gulls on a rock face, ready to jump ashore at the first practical moment. As it was, Nath jumped too soon and would have fallen with a splash had I not hauled him up.

They were all grins and grimaces, dancing around me, prodding me to see if I could still withstand a gut-punch, like in the old days. To them the idea that I was now a Krozair, and they must call me Pur —

on top of the “lord” bit they had been unable to swallow — came as ludicrous nonsense with which I thoroughly agreed.

“Nath! Zolta! You disgusting ruffians! Why, Nath, your gut is so swelled with wine a season on the benches would trim you down to man-size again! And you, Zolta — I could scabbard my long sword in those pouches under your eyes!”

“Stylor!” they crowed and we wrestled affectionately.

Zenkiren stood to one side, his arms folded and one hand stroking his chin. The Grand Archbold, Pur Zazz, made a sound that might have been “harrumph” if that silly way of speaking had penetrated here. There were five other newly-fledged Krozairs, and we were all to go back together on Zorg , which was now under the command of Sharntaz. They, too, didn’t quite know what to make of these two bearded rapscallions in the dedicated, austere enclave of Zy, even if the two specimens of hardy and iconoclastic inner sea sailors were only standing on the outer jetty wall.

But the essential dignity and purpose and a breath of that mystery overawed even Nath and Zolta eventually, so that they quieted down. The laymen kept to the outer courts, those opening off the harbor, of course; only Krozairs and lay brothers, the so-called Zimen, were allowed past the iron doors into the interior of the island. Not all of Zy was austere and given over to the pursuit of the inner light; there was great beauty there, for the Krozairs of Zy believed that Zair was just as approachable through beauty as through devotion and dedication in war.

When the time came for our departure, Zenkiren told me he would be staying on in Zy for a time.

“Pur Zazz is old. There are many weighty matters to be discussed, chapter by chapter, langue by langue, in council. You will come to these in your turn, Pur Dray, one of these fine days.”

I knew that the Order was in general maintained by Krozair contributions from all the free cities of Zair along the southern shore, and they therefore would have their say in council. Back along the Sea of Swords lay large salt pans, as there were off the Sea of Marshes, and Zy gathered much of its revenue from the salt as did Sanurkazz. But without the continuous support of the brothers of the Order scattered throughout the Zair portions of the Eye of the World, the Krozairs of Zy would be in parlous state. Sharntaz greeted me with a kindly word and the necessary formality as one captain going aboard another’s vessel, and also with the sign — I hesitate to call it a secret sign, it was so obvious and lucid a greeting — that identified a Krozair brother.

He smiled. “I have no idea what swifter you will be given, Pur Dray. But I rather imagine you will want to call her Zorg .”

“That is my intention.”

“So be it. We now stand on the swifter Lagaz-el-Buzro .

I nodded. “Also, I shall take those two useless hands, Nath and Zolta.”

He chuckled. “And very welcome to them you are, for their drinking and their wenching. But useless? I would rather have a crew like them than one composed of the spoiled brats of Sanurkazz nobility.”

I nodded again. I agreed. There was no need of more words.

Zorg that was now Lagaz-el-Buzro pushed off. Everything that had to be done had been done. I was going back to report to the high admiral, with a strong recommendation from Zenkiren, and my future in the Eye of the World looked bright. Also, I wanted to see Mayfwy again, and the children, Zorg and Fwymay.

* * * *

We drew into Sanurkazz. I reported to the high admiral, who did not like me and knew the feeling was reciprocated. But Zo, the king, was disposed toward me, for I had never caused him any offense, and, besides, I had brought him during the course of my last season’s activities more gold, jewels, and the precious commodities that are the lifeblood of the inner sea’s trading than any other of his captains. I got my ship.

I have already given some explanation of the controversy then raging in the inner sea over the relative merits of what were called, for convenience, the long keel and the short keel theories.[4]Long keels, that is, a long narrow swifter, are necessary for speed. But the short keel men, those who argued for the same oar-power packed tighter, claimed that a shorter craft for the same beam might lose a knot or so of speed but gave immeasurably greater maneuverability and turning capacity. I had not yet made up my mind. Zo, the king, appointed me to a five-hundredswifter of the short keel construction. Immediately I set about devising ways of improving the speed of my new Zorg . I had two banks of twenty-five oars a side. I carried six hundred slaves, allowing me a reasonable turnover in use and rest periods.

“I thank you, Light of Zim,” I said formally. “Rest assured. I shall bring you in a tail of accursed Magdag broad ships and swifters.” It was a rote speech, but I meant it with all my heart. I went raiding on the Eye of the World.

The seasons slipped by; Felteraz remained as beautiful as ever. Nath grew ever more corpulent. Zolta had a number of narrow escapes from the form of marriage that would have clipped his wings. We sailed and we pulled and we crisscrossed the inner sea with burning wrecks and floating corpses; the totals of our prizes steadily mounted as we pulled in past the pharos of Sanurkazz. Clever distribution of the weights was always the problem in trimming a swifter. A galley that depends on oar propulsion must possess a shallow draft, yet we were packing as many as a thousand or twelve hundred oarsmen in, besides the crew, soldiers, and varters. Sometimes shipwrights went to dangerous lengths to conserve weight. Although all the enormous deadweight of the guns aboard a ship of the line did not have to be carried, the weights were still considerable. Victory ’s longest deck measures a hundred and eighty-six feet in length, and the width is fifty-two feet. She is built of wood. A swifter of that length would measure something like twenty feet beam. The differences make for cranky, unwieldy, and extremely unseaworthy craft. But then, no galley could live in a sea that Victory , or her sisters of my old Navy, could sail with ease.

Galleys are useless on the open ocean. I know.

I had seen the Spaniards out of Cartagena wallowing as we flashed past with our royals set. I could never sail back home to Strombor in Zenicce, or to Vallia, that island hub of an ocean empire, aboard a galley.

Equally, I would not relish the journey aboard a broad ship, what the ancients also called a round ship, of the inner sea.

All my growing fortune, my success, the luxury with which I might surround myself if I so wished, the good friends I was making — to my continual surprise, for I think I have indicated sufficiently that I am a loner in life — meant little. I felt more and more restless as the long days of raiding, cruising, and carousing passed. I hungered for something I was not clearly conscious of desiring. That cunning and politely vicious man, the noble Harknel of High Heysh, continued his attempts at persecution, but I held him off, contemptuously, almost with boredom. He did not pose the kind of problem I was in the mood to deal with. Because he had not been born with the all-important Z either in his name or his place of abode, by which he was known, his resentment of that further embittered him. He had seen that his son possessed the Z in his name. I had found, not without amusement, that my name was taken as Prezcot. It had helped. A man had to have the antecedents or the newly-won right to name either himself or his son with the Z . I often wondered what Zolta’s history was, but he would never tell me. Nath, now, was the son of an illiterate ponsho farmer, who had taken to the sea in revolt against fleeces, dips, and eternal flock-tending.

At the beginning of a new raiding season, when the twin suns of Scorpio were so close they appeared almost to touch as they rose in the sky, we had returned from our first cruise, happy and successful. Isteria had witnessed some carousing the night before and we had left a trail of mayhem at our many ports of call. I had taken my last cruise aboard this swifter, and was due to shift to a new six-six-hundred-and-twentyswifter, one built on long keel lines, as an experiment. She would be Zorg , of course.

Nath wore a bandage around his head.

A Magdag oar blade had welted him nastily during our last fight and he could still hear the bells of Beng-Kishi ringing in his head.

“He’s all right,” scoffed Zolta. “He wouldn’t know it if the tower of Zim-Zair fell on him. He has the skull of a vosk.”

Vosks notoriously had exceptionally thick skull bones, so I laughed, and said: “Maybe, Zolta. He should be thankful. He kept the varters going all through—”

“Vosk skull!” said Zolta, and then Nath threw a wet mop at him and I took myself off to my aft state room. It is not seemly for the captain of a king’s swifter to be seen romping with the crew. But again that nag of dissatisfaction came to me.

I have mentioned the single occasion on which I attempted to alleviate the lot of the slaves aboard my galley, and of how they rose as one man and attempted to cut the throats of all my crew.[5]Both red and green kept slaves: the red only for gallery work and a few personal body servants, the green for every aspect of menial labor they required. I had conceived it that my duty lay with the men of Zair — and I heartily loathed and hated the men of Magdag — but also I tried to remember that perhaps the Savanti had sent me here to the Eye of the World to do something positive about this abhorrent slavery. If they had, if the Star Lords also had their own requirements, I must obey, but I would do so with the clear understanding that I would make for Vallia or Zenicce just as soon as I could. The Proconia, those fair-haired people who dominated all the eastern shoreline of the inner sea, were involved in another of their internecine wars. As I have said, we always kept out of it, for we had enough to do with Magdag. This time Magdag herself had taken a hand in an attempt to dominate the only area of the Eye of the World where neither Grodno nor Zair were worshipped.[6]My new Zorg was directed to join a squadron outfitted for an expedition toward the east. This would be entirely new sea for me. I found a fresh interest in life again and Mayfwy had had made for me a new coat of mail of a fineness almost as supple as the mail worn by that mailed man in the Princess Natema’s alcove. That mesh steel had come from Havilfar, I had learned. The mesh of the inner sea was practical, lumpy, and unsophisticated by contrast.

The Victorian antiquaries who, to do them justice, revived an interest in Medieval artifacts, persisted in their odd usage, a quite erroneous nomenclature, of “chain” mail for the mesh iron coat, or hauberk, for far too long. One even still sees this silly word used of a coat of mail. I sat, I remember, in the stern sheets of my barge, feeling the iron links between my fingers, and thinking deep and powerful thoughts of nothing at all as we rowed back from Felteraz to Sanurkazz. The suns, very close together, were sinking into the sea ahead of us. The water shimmered and sparkled with the most wonderful colors. We drowned in sparkling light. The lighthouse men were climbing up the winding stairs to the pharos. A few fishing craft were sailing out. Some birds flitted against the cliffs. The glow of lamps and torches were lighting all over the city.

Perhaps I was dull, tired, maybe stale. Whatever the cause I was scarcely aware of the abrupt rush of men with dark cloaks swathed over their mail. We had just touched and bow oar had hauled us in with his boat hook and I, as was proper, was first out of the boat onto the steps. The men smashed into us in a fierce and silent onslaught. At once Nath’s long sword cleared his sheath and he was fighting for his life. Zolta, cursing, hurled himself into the fray. My men tumbled up from the barge. We would have had a hard time of it; maybe I would not have survived, had it not been for two men who appeared unexpectedly at the side of the jetty. I heard two whirring thuds, and as two men pitched screaming to the stones of the jetty I knew I was again seeing and hearing the terchick, the balanced throwing knife of Segesthes, in action.

Both victims had been struck in the face where their mail did not protect them. Zolta was yelling like a crazy man. My long sword cleared its scabbard in time to cut down the attacker who pounced on me like a mad graint. I could see the two newcomers and they were going to their work with a will. Swords flashed in the dying light. Men yelled and bodies made heavy splashes as they toppled from the stones. The attackers had been caught flat-footed by that unexpected flank onslaught; and as more of my men came racing up the stairs, green and slippery with weed, Zolta, Nath, and I with reinforcements drove them off. We had been lucky; without those two on the flank, they might have overwhelmed us by sheer numbers. Nath was puffing with his mouth open, his bulk heaving. Zolta, to my surprise, was not making rude comments. He was looking at the newcomers.

“By Zim-Zair!” he said, in wonder. “Is that a sword? Or is it a toothpick?” I knew, then. A light, arrogant, and yet pleasant voice answered. “They don’t like it through their eyes, friend. They don’t like it.”

The man who bent to retrieve his terchick from the bloodied face of a dead man wore buff clothes, short to the thigh and belted in; his legs were encased in long black boots. However, the item that truly identified him for me was the jaunty broad-brimmed hat, with the gay feather, and with those two strange slots cut in the brim above his forehead.

He straightened, the cleaned terchick in his hand. In a single rapid motion it vanished into the sheath behind his neck.

“The little Deldar,” he said, “has his uses, like the Hikdar,” and he slapped the long left-handed dagger at his right side. “And the Jiktar, my toothpick, as you so disrespectfully called the queen of weapons.”

His rapier was long, thin, and elegant, rather too ornate about the hilt, and there were spots of blood about the hilt he had not cleaned off.

Nath and Zolta were over their surprise, now. They had seafared long enough around the inner sea to have learned of the men of Vallia.

The other Vallian, who was older and stouter and whose square-cut face showed a trace of displeasure as he slapped his rapier hilt, said a few words beneath his breath that halted his young companion in his tracks.

The older man scanned us in that streaming dying light, with the dead men and the blood between us. He took a step forward. He did not remove his hat, whose feather was black.

“Which of you,” he said in a harsh voice, at once metallic and flat, “is the man known as Dray Prescot?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Remberee, Pur Dray! Remberee!”

I was going home.

I was going home to a place I had never seen.

What was this Vallia like? This Vallia of the island empire, of the fabled opulence: the ocean-spanning shipping, the fleets of airboats, the wealth and power and beauty. What did it mean to me apart from my Delia, Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains?

I did not forget that my Delia was known as the Princess Majestrix of Vallia. Tharu of Vindelka, Kov, the older of the two Vallians, treated me with a grim distant courtesy that puzzled me. He was icily polite. When I asked him about Delia’s father, the emperor of Vallia, he rubbed a reflective thumbnail along a narrow scar on his jaw. “He is a mighty man, sudden, all-powerful unpredictable. His word is law.”

Tharu had made all the arrangements. Vomanus, his aide, was volatile in his enthusiasm for life with a fetching kind of swaggering arrogance. I gathered from Zolta that Vomanus had a love of love also, for my two rascals, Nath and Zolta, took Vomanus out on the town as a kind of way of saying thank you. Tharu of Vindelka ripped into Vomanus on the following morning. I had insisted that they stay at my villa in the best part of Sanurkazz, and I heard the grim rumbling tones rolling on remorselessly, and the dispirited replies from Vomanus, who badly needed a hatful of palines. We got down to business that very first morning.

Delia, Princess of Vallia had returned home immediately after an exhaustive search of the enclave of Strombor, all the rest of Zenicce that could be searched by parties of allied Houses, the Eward, the Reinmans, the Wickens, and the speediest airboats’ messages and inquiries to the Clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm. Of course I could not be found. By that time I was trying to explain why I was walking naked on a beach in Portugal, some four hundred light-years away.

“Now that we have found you, my Lord of Strombor,” said Tharu in his metallic voice, “we will sail at once for Pattelonia on the southeast coast of Proconia. I have an airboat waiting there. You know whereof I speak?”

I nodded. I could feel my pulses jumping, the blood surging through my veins. Delia had gone home to Vallia and had started a search operation to find me that had turned her world upside down. She had known — for how could she not so well understand? — that a mystery surrounded me. I had not told her of my origin, although I fully intended to. But she had shared with me that eerie experience of being flung in a gesture of contemptuous dismissal out of the sacred pool of baptism in far Aphrasöe, to find herself running on a beach in Segesthes. She must have reasoned that something similar had occurred again, and this time to me alone. So she had set herself to finding me. I heard from young Vomanus of the efforts that had been undertaken. He was very apologetic that he and Tharu had missed me before. I gathered that they had searched Magdag but in all that festering confusion of slaves and workers the discovery of a single man, who bore a name different from the one they sought, was well-nigh impossible and had defeated them. Chance had dictated that they had visited Sanurkazz when I was away at Zy. They had thought they had at last found the man their princess had instructed them to find, and they awaited my arrival, for they would not venture to the Grand Archboldship of the Order. They were thanked by me for waiting; they had almost certainly saved our necks.

“A message must be got back to Vallia as soon as is practicable,” said Tharu. “Then the Princess Majestrix may graciously consent to recalling all the hundreds of other envoys she has sent chasing all over the world in search of you.”

I didn’t much care for his tone.

I saw Vomanus casting an anxious look between us, and as I was conscious of my position vis-à-vis Vallia, I thought it expedient to say nothing. I told Nath and Zolta to take care of Vomanus: I thought he was a friend.

The coldness of Tharu of Vindelka’s attitude quickly made itself understandable as I talked with the Vallians. There, as everywhere, it seemed, intrigues flourished. There were parties of various shades of political opinion, for religion in Vallia was undergoing some kind of psychic upheaval and no one seemed anxious to talk on the subject, and the emperor was acting with his usual autocratic hauteur. I would have to face that man, Delia’s father, and tell him that I intended to marry his daughter no matter what he said or did. Tharu raged with anger that his party had not made the vital match with Delia, and he was forced to bottle all that frustrated resentment, for he acted under the orders, as he put it, of the Majestrix that no man may disobey. At that Vomanus pointed out that many men did disobey, and Tharu retired into that hard cold shell. He didn’t like me. He considered not only had he lost the chance to marry off his favorite son or nephew to Delia but that Delia was marrying far below her station. He was right, of course.

A broad ship had been found by Shallan, my agent, that was sailing to Pattelonia with supplies for the upcoming expedition. I had a nasty interview with Zo, the king, and quite unable to explain why I was suddenly leaving my command, Sanurkazz, and him, I went out in what was in reality disgrace. It did not matter. I was shaking the water of the inner sea from my boots.

I will not dwell on the interview with Mayfwy. She had heard the news and had been crying, but she dried her tears and put up a brave front. I kissed her gently, kissed Fwymay, who was turning into a beauty like her mother, clasped hands with young Zorg.

The problem of Harknel of High Heysh I must, perforce, leave unfinished. My natural inclinations after his last attempt to kill me on the jetty had been to take my men, march to his villa and burn it to the ground, and to hell with the high admiral and Zo, the king. Those jolly fat men of the mobiles would no doubt have gathered round, bottles in hand, and might conceivably have helped toss a torch or two. But I could not do it. I could not risk a vile retribution from Harknel upon Felteraz. Felteraz was important. Very. I had to leave all this ferment in mid-boil. But I was glad to go. I understood what canker had been eating away at me as I went corsairing on the Eye of the World. Nath and Zolta were a problem — a pair of problems.

I asked them to stay with Mayfwy. She would have need of their long swords.

“What, Stylor? Leave you now, our oar comrade! Never!”

Tharu of Vindelka grumbled, but agreed that there would be room on the airboat for the two. Vomanus was openly delighted.

“Anyway,” said Zolta, “the Krozairs will never let harm befall Felteraz. And the king will also protect the citadel, for it holds his eastern flank. Do not fret, old vosk head.”

My good-bye to Pur Zazz, the Grand Archbold of the Krozairs of Zy was formal, and then warmly fraternal. He did not seem at all perturbed that I was traveling better than a thousand dwaburs away.

“When the Krozairs have need of you, Pur Dray, and the brothers receive the summons, no matter where you are, I know you will come.”

I gripped the hilt of my long sword. I nodded. It was true.

“You will be traveling beyond Proconia, which commands all the eastern seaboard of the Eye of the World and extends her varied powers as far to the east as The Stratemsk. Those mountains are said to have no summits, they extend clear to the orange glory of Zim, and form a pathway for the spirit to the majesty of Zair.” He smiled and poured me more wine. “That is nonsense, of course, Pur Dray. But it tells eloquently of the fear and veneration in which men hold the Mountains of The Stratemsk.”

I was aware, of course, that educated men knew that both the green and the red suns were suns and not thinking beings. But many of the illiterate folk of all shades of opinion held that the suns in their majesties were entities in their own rights quite apart from being the abode of the deities of Grodno and Zair. Astronomy was a strange art, on Kregen, twisted by its special circumstances into byways unknown to astronomers on Earth. The astrological lore and amazingly accurate predictions achieved by the wizards of Loh astonished even me at a later date.

“Over the mountains you are going where no man can say.” Pur Zazz was as cultured and refined and intelligent a man as the inner sea might produce. Now he said: “Men say that beyond the mountains, in the hostile territory, there are whole tribes who fly on the backs of great beasts of the air.” He smiled at me again, not ironically, but with the seriousness these subjects merited in an oar-powered geography. “I would welcome news, Pur Dray, of your adventures, and the sights you encounter.”

“I will regard that as a first charge upon me, Pur Zazz.”

When I left him, straight and commanding in his white tunic and apron, with that blazing emblem of the hubless wheel within the circle upon his breast, and the long sword belted in the fighting-man’s way at his side, I half knew, then, I would never see him again.

“Remberee, Pur Dray.”

“Remberee, Pur Zazz.”

Saying good-bye to Zenkiren was not as easy. But I told him that a message to Strombor would always find me, and my vows to return would remain for as long as I lived.

I did not say that if the Star Lords or the Savanti decided otherwise I might not be in a position to return.

“Remberee, Pur Dray, Lord of Strombor.”

“Remberee, Pur Zenkiren.”

We clasped hands the final time, and I went down to my barge.

Nath and Zolta, very subdued, saw to getting us under way.

The hurt looks on the faces of my friends, looks they had tried to conceal, would haunt me for a very long time to come.

Two men had arrived from another world, another place across the outer oceans, mysterious and strange and with nothing to do with the Eye of the World, and I had upped and run panting like a dog running to its master. Who was this strange remote Princess Majestrix who called the foremost corsair captain of the inner sea? This is what they were saying.

But — they did not know Delia, my Delia of Delphond.

* * * *

The broad ship sailed like a bathtub. I endured. I would far rather have preferred to make this little voyage into seas I had never scoured before aboard a swifter, but I was no longer in the employment of the king, no longer in his service.

The Magdaggian caught us as the twin suns, very close together, were sinking in the west and setting long shadows across the placid sea. She pulled toward us, all oars in neat parallel lines, churning the sea, and we could not escape.

“By Zantristar!” I yelled, hauling out my long sword. “They won’t take us without a fight!”

The sailors were running, milling. Nath and Zolta, their long swords flaming brands in the dying light, tried to beat them into a resistance. But the merchantman stood no chance. She carried perhaps thirty crew, with little stomach for a fight they knew they could not win. They were launching a longboat and clearly they anticipated rowing to a nearby island, where we had intended to lay up for the night, and from which the Magdag corsair, lying in wait, had pulled with such sudden ferocity.

“My orders, from the Princess Majestrix herself,” Tharu told me in his flat voice, “are to bring you safely back to Vallia. Put up your sword.”

“You fool!” I said. “I am Pur Dray, the Lord of Strombor, the man the heretics from Magdag will give most to have in their clutches. There is no captivity for me!”

“It is a fight you cannot win,” said Vomanus. He was fingering his rapier, and the look on his lean reckless face told me he would dearly love to join in.

“We are neutral.” Tharu spoke impatiently, abruptly. “The barbarians from Magdag would not dare to harm us. They may kill all their enemies from Sanurkazz, but they will not touch me, nor Vomanus here

— nor you, Dray Prescot.”

“Why?”

The galley’s long bronze ram curled the seas away in a long creaming bow wave that roiled down her sides where her oars flashed down and up, down and up, like the white wings of a gull. She was a hundred-and-twentyswifter, double-banked, fast. I could see the men on her beak ready to board us and others at her bow varters. Her sails had been furled, but her single mast had not been struck. Tharu of Vindelka moved to the rail so that I turned to face him. Nath and Zolta below were frantic in their despairing efforts to rouse the crew. Vomanus walked quietly aft. The longboat was in the water and an oar splintered against the broad ship’s side in the panicky haste.

“They will not take you, Dray Prescot.”

“Why? What will it matter to them that I know the Princess Delia of Delphond? That my every thought is of her? I have never seen Delphond, Tharu, nor the Blue Mountains. But I regard them as my home.”

He let that square, hard face of his relax. I did not think he was smiling.

“My duty is clear, Dray Prescot, who is intended to be Prince of Delphond.” A grimace clouded his face with his inner resentments. “Rather, I think you had best be a Chuktar — no, on reflection, the dignity of a Kov is better suited. It will impress the Magdaggians more. I am, you should know, a Kov myself, although of a somewhat more ancient lineage.”

I stared at him. I as yet did not know quite what he was talking about or where he was driving. Then I heard a light scrape of foot on the deck to my rear. I am quick. The blow almost missed. But it sledged down on the back of my head and dazed me and drove me down, and the second blow put out the lights.

When I regained consciousness I was aboard a Magdag swifter and I was dressed in the buff coat and black boots of a Vallian, a rapier swinging at my side was complemented by a dagger, and I was, so I gathered, an honored guest of Magdag. My name, I was told by Tharu, was Drak, the Kov of Delphond.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Princess Susheeng meets Drak, Kov of Delphond

Because the vessels of the inner sea almost invariably put either into port or were dragged up onto a convenient beach at night they were seldom provided with bunks or hammocks. I was lying on a kind of hard wooden settle covered with a ponsho fleece dyed green.

Green.

It is difficult for me, even now, to recollect anything coherent out of my thoughts then. Suffice it to say that I simply lay there for a space while the whirling thoughts crowded, mocking and vicious, through my still-dazed head. My skull rang with the blow.

Tharu, Kov of Vindelka, leaned over me so that his stiff beard bristled against my cheek.

“Remember who you are, Drak, Kov of Delphond! It is our heads as well as yours that depend on your memory.”

“I have a good memory,” I said. I spoke dryly. I was thinking of Nath and Zolta. “I remember faces and names and what people say.”

“Good.”

He straightened up and I could see a little of the cabin, that of the first lieutenant as I judged, having some skill in reading the infinitesimal touches that mark rank from rank upon the sea — any sea — and despising the lot of them.

“Wait.” I caught his sleeve. He thought I wanted assistance to rise and began to draw haughtily away, but I looked him in the eye. Vomanus came into view, his lively face now sadly apprehensive. “Tharu —

Delphond I understand, and Kov, because you told me. But Drak? Where did that come from?”

Tharu’s square face darkened and he cast a malevolent glance up toward Vomanus. Vomanus said: “I called you that, Dray — ah, Drak — as the first name that popped into my head.”

“Once this young fool had named you, I could do nothing less than accept it. The Magdaggians are not fools.”

It seemed that Vomanus was lying, judging by his face.

Tharu went on speaking as I let him go and levered myself up. My head rang like those bells of Beng-Kishi.

“Drak was the name of the emperor’s father when he ascended the throne. Also it is the name of a being half-legendary, half-historical, part human, part god, that we may read of in the old myths, those from the Canticles of the Rose City, at least three thousand years old.” He spoke impatiently, a cultured man telling a peasant.

Well, and wasn’t he right?

I stood up.

Beng-Kishi clanged a trifle less discordantly.

“You’ve done it now,” I told them. “If these devils from Magdag find out who I am, they’ll fry you over a fire, chip you into kindling, and feed you to the chanks.” Vomanus looked a trifle sick. Mention of the chanks, the sharks of the seas of Kregen, made me think of Nath and Zolta again.

“We saw them pulling for the shore in the longboat,” said Vomanus, swallowing.

“They either drowned or were saved,” said Tharu. “It is no matter. They were unimportant.”

He made a mistake, saying that to me, their oar comrade.

I brushed past him and, ducking my head, went out onto the deck. We were drawn up in the lee of the island; fires blazed as the watches kept a vigilant lookout. The stars of the Kregan night sky blazed down, forming those convoluted patterns the wizards of Loh can read and understand, or so they say. A cooling breeze blew and stirred the leaves ashore. Sentries stood on the quarterdeck and I caught the flash of gold as an officer moved. Only two of the lesser moons were up, and they would soon be gone in their helter-skelter hurtling around the planet.

The thought of conversation with a man of Magdag was nauseating to me. I looked hungrily out to the shore. Perhaps Nath and Zolta were out there, waiting to pounce. But what chance would we stand, three against a swifter crew? I knew an arrow would feather into me if I dived overboard; I decided that I would chance that. I would dive and swim to the island, and the devil take the chanks. If I was to walk the length of the central gangway and try to jump down to the beach I would be stopped. I knew the habits of Magdag captains, as I knew those of Sanurkazz. I knew what I would do were I the swifter captain.

Vomanus joined me, and then a Magdaggian Hikdar, who turned out to be the man whose cabin we had taken. He didn’t seem to show his annoyance. I made an excuse, and went below again. The stink of the slaves and their eternal and infernal moaning and clanking of shackles and fetters made me irritable. I believe, now, looking back, that I had not lost my nerve. There have been times in my life when I have followed a course of action that the casual onlooker would feel smacks of cowardice. I answer to no one, of course, for my actions — except to Delia. If I got myself killed, Delia would be alone, and more and more I was coming to the conclusion that she would need me by her side in the days to come. There were great forces moving implacably and with incredible cunning, somewhere. . . We sailed with the rising sun and headed west.

The news was bad. Pattelonia, the city of the Proconia where the flier had been left, had been raided and left in flames. The men of Sanurkazz had suffered a defeat. This swifter, My Lady of Garles , a five-five-hundred-and-twentyswifter, had sustained some damage and lost some oarsmen. She had been entrusted with dispatches for the admiralty in Magdag and her smart capture of the old broad ship on which we had been traveling had come as a pleasant diversionary tidbit. Tharu, bowing to the inevitable, had consented to be taken back to Magdag. Without a flier, travel across The Stratemsk and over the hostile lands beyond to the place where we could pick up a ship for Vallia, Port Tavetus, was impossible. Ergo, we must go to Magdag and wait for a ship from Vallia, which was due, so Tharu told me, sometime soon.

The impression I gained was that Tharu, Kov or not, was mighty grateful not to have to fly back over The Stratemsk and that weary length of hostile territory to the Vallian empire port city. The realization made me tremble. I acknowledged something I had not even allowed myself to think from the moment I had arrived, naked and despairing, on the beach of that Portuguese shore. I felt a profound sense of thankfulness and gratitude. My Delia still loved me! How often I had almost allowed myself to think that she had forgotten me! I knew how unworthy I was, and how I had dismayed and disappointed her in our brief dealings. But she had not forgotten me. She had summoned the strength of her island empire, the only important area of land on this planet that was under the sway of one government, to search for me and seek me out and bring me home to her. Also I felt a strange kind of humbleness in my pride. How puffed up I was, how vaunting in my ambitions, how comical in my aspirations!

Delia’s orders had sent this harsh, proud noble, the Kov of Vindelka, to seek me, had caused him to fly over uncharted realms of savages and mythical beings, to risk a neck he must consider the next most-important neck in the whole world. I had him summed up now. He was a king’s man. In this case, an emperor’s man. For the emperor of Vallia he had an obsessive drive to duty, and that extended to the emperor’s daughter, and, faute de mieux , to the daughter’s betrothed, much though he might dislike and feel contempt for her choice.

If I had been a vain man, a proud man in the evil sense of pride, how I would have rocked with glee!

As it was, and I would ask you to believe me in this, I felt like falling to my knees and thanking the god of my childhood, and also throw in a kind word or two to Zair, the red-sun deity, just to be on the safe side. With that comically impious thought I knew that I was finding my old self again. While medicine and surgery and knowledge of the proper care for the sick were in a state far advanced of what I had been used to on Earth, the doctors of Kregen were a bunch one did well to give a wide berth to. They had not, and still have not, reached anywhere near the recent achievements of Earthly medicine and surgery — in the matter of heart transplants, for instance. They leaned heavily on herbal drugs, which could obtain seemingly miraculous cures, and their surgery also had developed techniques of acupuncture I found nothing short of miraculous. It was nothing for a patient undergoing a serious operation with his head, or his insides, exposed to the knife — his earlobes or the web between his thumb and first finger quilted with needles — to be given a mouthful of palines to munch, and to keep up a bright conversation with the surgeon. I admit, the first time I saw that, I had a vivid mental picture of the cockpits I was used to, with the aprons caked with blood, their saws, their tubs of boiling tar. So I did not have the slightest desire to consult a doctor when I began to feel a little of that impatient drive to go to Vallia making me feverish. Since that dip in the sacred pool of baptism in the River Zelph in far Aphrasöe I had never had a day’s illness. I did not intend to succumb now. Pulling into Magdag was, as you may readily imagine, a disorienting experience for me, ex-Magdag galley slave.

My first impression was that the walls did not rear as I remembered them. This came because of the low freeboard, a necessity on an efficient galley, bringing my oarsman’s viewpoint down much below that where I now stood on the quarterdeck.

Magdag reared her piles of stone heavily into the bright air. Gulls wheeled and shrieked, but with all my Krozair training I heard them only as croaking magbirds against the tuneful sounds of our own gulls in Sanurkazz. Flags and banners floated on the breeze. The twin suns shone mingled upon the smooth water. My Lady of Garles pulled steadily in past the outer breakwater, past the forts with their bristling varters, past the inner breakwater with the forts where always a Sacred Guard, composed on five days of the week of Chuliks and on the sixth of young and high-spirited Magdag nobles, were ready to vent their warrior-like high spirits on anything weak and unable to resist that might come their way. Many a fisherman went back to his quarters with a broken head and his fish baskets full of holes and cuts, having been used by the Magdag nobles for sword targets in their fun.

We rounded to in an inner basin, one of the many harbors of Magdag into which I had never previously been.

Vallia kept no consuls in the cities of the inner sea, presumably, I thought at the time, so as not to become embroiled in the politics of the area. The Vallians are above all, even above their warlike proclivities, a trading nation. But Tharu was quickly able to arrange accommodation for us, through a contact, in what I regarded as a senselessly luxurious palace.

His comment was frosty.

“You are now moving in areas somewhat removed from your usual purlieus.” I liked that word even when he used it, but I had gone past the period of wanting to bait this Tharu for all he said in his pompous aristocratic way. If all the nobles of Vallia were like him I was in for a boring or headily exciting time, depending on how much I was prepared to put up with them. “I am a Kov of Vallia — as are you, for my sins — and we demand style in our living. Anything less than this would be unthinkable; in itself it is barely good enough, as I have told Glycas in no uncertain terms.”

“Glycas?”

We slaves of Magdag knew little of the upper crust “A most powerful force, a man who has the king’s ear. We are renting this palace from him—” If he was about to say words to the effect that I should be careful how I comported myself in case I damaged the furnishings, he thought better of it. Vomanus had taken off his buff coat with a sigh of relief and now wore only a white silk shirt with his breeches and black boots, a shirt, however, whose overlong sleeves were wristed by a mass of ruffles which he liked to flourish up and down his brown and muscular arms as he gesticulated in his talk.

“The place is well enough, Tharu,” he said. Tharu glared at him, but let the matter drop. We were all anxious to leave and return to Vallia, and soon news came that a Vallian ship had been signaled. I guessed the Todalpheme of Akhram would have a hand in that business. We passed the days in walking about the city, patronizing wineshops and taverns in the evening, watching the dancing girls and the various varieties of sports available. The girls were slaves, dancing girls clad in bangles, beads, and precious little else. They were totally unlike the girls who danced so gaily for us among the wagon circles of my Clansmen.

I was back in the snuffle of slavery, with beasts half-human, half-animal for guards, and I didn’t like any of it.

I scarcely used the suite of rooms assigned to me in the palace rented from Glycas. When I had been taken unconscious aboard My Lady of Garles with a glib explanation, Tharu, with his accustomed harsh authority, had quickly persuaded the Magdag captain to take aboard our baggage also. Tharu’s own iron-bound chests stood in his rooms. So it was that, with the exception of deviced clothing, I had all that I had brought from Sanurkazz — silks and furs, jewels, coins, weapons, my own long sword, and the coat of mail Mayfwy had had made for me. I could clearly see the danger these represented. They were soaked with the traditions of Zair. They would make me a marked man if discovered. So I had them hidden away beneath my bed, the three bronze-bound chests of lenken planks a nail in thickness. Then I took pains to explain to my Magdaggian hosts how I had picked up a long sword and a coat of mail as mementoes of a pleasant visit to their city, and when comments were made that the hauberk was unmistakably of Sanurkazzian cut I forced myself to laugh and said that no doubt this was the booty of a prize made to the greater glory of Grodno. That pleased those men of the green sun. Mind you, it was refreshing once more to stroll about with a long rapier at my side. Glycas was a dark-visaged man on the threshold of middle age, which on Kregen meant he must be turning a hundred or so, and his black hair was still crisp and fashionably cut, his hands and arms white, his fingers loaded with rings. But he was not a fop. His long sword was hilted plainly, with a bone grip that I, personally, would not have tolerated but which I knew was much favored on the inner sea. He was short and squarely built and he possessed a temper that had made him notorious. He was, truly, a dangerous man.

His sister, the princess Susheeng — plus a score of other pretentious names denoting her exalted rank and the broad acres of her estates, the thousands of slaves she owned — was lithe, lovely, and dark-haired, with eyes that tried to devour me with amorous glances from the moment we met. I was forced to contrast her with the gay reckless simplicity of Mayfwy, and had to acknowledge the animal vitality of this woman, her burning gaze, the intensity of the passion with which she took anything she wanted. All her noble honorifics amused me, through their pomposity. I realized afresh how lightly my Delia carried all the ringing brave titles to which she was heir, how subtly and how surely, with what courtesy and quiet gravity — shot through with her own elfin irony at life — she fitted the role of Princess Majestrix of Vallia.

The Princess Susheeng made a dead set at me. I was aware of this, and it annoyed me, through the complications that inevitably must ensue. Vomanus openly envied what he called my good fortune. Tharu, with a darker vision, contained his own resentment and annoyance.

I told her, one day as we stood on the third-level ramparts overlooking one of the harbors that opened out below the palace in which we were lodging, that I was looking forward earnestly to returning home.

“But, my Kov of Delphond, what has your vaulted Vallia to offer you that you cannot find in far greater quantity and quality here in Sacred Magdag?”

I winced, covered that lapse, and said: “I am homesick, Susheeng. Surely you understand that?”

With incongruous pride, she said: “I have traveled not for one single mur outside the lands of Magdag!”

I made some empty reply. That a person would boast of that kind of chauvinism appalled me.

“Well, Princess,” I said, and saying it realized how incautious I was, “I intend to return home as soon as possible.”

The woman nauseated me.

I had my mind on other women. Put this Princess Susheeng in the starkness of the gray slave breechclout, teach her the humility that is the only sure path to serenity, and she would turn out well. Slaves had no chance to reach to anything beyond their slavery, except those who escaped physically, by running or by death, and the humility a slave learns is corrosive and corrupting; but this girl might profit from it, if she knew she was to learn by her experience.

I wanted to travel to Vallia — and at once.

She saw all that in me; she saw my utter rejection of her.

The next day Vomanus and I were wandering through one of the high-class jewelry streets, a kind of open-air market, when we bumped into the Princess Susheeng with her body of retainers, blank-faced Chulik guards and a group of swaggering popinjay show-off Magdag nobility all fawning on her. She treated them all like dirt, of course.

“And what is that trinket you are buying, Kov Drak?”

She used the familiar tone of address to infuriate her attendants, of course. I held up the jewelry. It was a beautiful piece of cut chemzite, blazing in the suns’ light. It was work of Sanurkazz style and skill.

“I think it a pleasant piece,” I said.

“It is of Zair,” she said, her mouth drawn down. “It and all like it should be broken up and refashioned into more seemly work of Grodno.”

“Maybe. But it is here.” I forced myself to go on. “No doubt it is the booty of some successful swifter captain.”

She smiled at me. Her mouth was ripely red, a trifle too large, soft, and rapacious with overfed passion.

“And is it for me, a parting gift, Kov Drak?”

“No,” I said. I spoke too sharply. “I intend to take it to Vallia as a keepsake of the Eye of the World.”

That was half of the truth, as you will readily perceive.

She pouted, and laughed gaily, as at a joke, and made some flighty and, in truth, slighting, remark, so as to retain her composure before her toadies. Then she walked swiftly from the market to her sectrix, which she rode well enough, I grant you.

I know, now, that that scene saved my life.

That evening the Vallian ship was sighted rounding the point. She would tie up in Magdag this night. So far I had not set eyes on a ship of Vallia, for they were rare enough in the inner sea, tending to make armadas of their voyages to take advantage of the prevailing seasonal winds, and I had always been raiding when they had called at Sanurkazz. I had once tried to set course to intercept a Vallian I knew to be due off Isteria; however, for a reason that I did not then comprehend, I missed her. I looked forward to the encounter.

Vomanus took himself off to the harbor to greet the Vallian captain, and then he was back cursing and swearing, to saddle up a sectrix and ride off to a more distant anchorage to which the Vallian vessel had unaccountably been assigned by the port captain. I shouted some jovial remark after him. I had wanted to ride myself, but Tharu had sternly vetoed that.

“A Kov does not ride down to the jetty to greet the mere captain of a ship,” he said, and that was that. I had gathered that a Kov was what we on this Earth would call a duke; the information depressed me. I had often found that empty titles mean nothing, and that intermediary ranks are stifling and frustrating. There is a board game played a great deal on Kregen called Jikaida. As the name implies it has to do with combat. The squared board is, in shape, like an elongated chessboard, and with a touch of Halma about the moves, as one army of Jikaida men clash with the others. If you expect the colors of the men to be red and green, you are wrong. They are blue and yellow, or white and black. The red and the green, it seems, are reserved for real battle. So to take my mind off waiting, Tharu and I settled to a game of Jikaida.

I make it a practice whenever it is practicable never to sit with my back to a door. When the door to our room smashed open and the mailed men burst in, their faces covered with red scarves, I jumped up. Tharu, whose back was to the door, was knocked flying across the table. Jikaida men went flying in a shower of blue and yellow. The table tangled my legs. My rapier was lying on the floor at my side, casually in reach but scabbarded — for this was a great city and who would expect attack within a palace? — and by the time I had the blade free a poniard stuck its tip into my throat and a single move would mean my instant death.

At that moment I felt that I was growing old — I, Dray Prescot, who had bathed in the sacred pool of Aphrasöe and would live a thousand years!

I was trussed up like a vosk and between two of the burly thugs was carried like a roll of carpet out and through a secret passage behind a full-length portrait of some arrogant Magdag swifter captain in the midst of a hypothetical destruction of a Sanurkazz fleet. Naturally, I had had no idea of the passage’s existence. Far below I was carried out and flung into a dung cart which reminded me of the galley slaves’

benches. We bumped along cobbles. I had had no sight of my attackers. I could hear no sound from them. I was gagged, and so I did not expect to hear from Tharu.

They threw me down in a stone cellar where green slime ran on the walls. I looked at their red scarves concealing their faces. Only their eyes, bright and quick, like rasts’, shining at me over the red cloths, were visible.

Afterward I learned I spent five days in that cellar, bound loosely but sufficiently to prevent escape, fed on slops, without exercise and with a bucket for toilet purposes, and with two men on guard at all times. Tharu was not with me.

On the sixth day I was rescued. My guards stood up with a casual air as mailed men entered; then they stiffened and although I could not see their faces I could imagine the sudden terror there as they scrabbled to draw their weapons. The newcomers cut them down without mercy, even though the last man attempted to surrender. As he sank onto the floor, his blood oozing from the deep gash smashed through his mail, his killer snatched up the red scarf.

He held it up, and spat on it.

“See!” he cried. “It is the work of those vile heretics of Sanurkazz! The stinking vosks of Zair have done this—”

He bent quickly and slashed my bonds free. Others of his men helped me rise. “But now you are safe, Kov of Delphond!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I return to the megaliths

“My Lord Kov,” said Glycas to me, formally. “I make the most profound apologies. It is unthinkable that such indignities should happen to an honored guest in Magdag. But—” He spread his hands. His dark eyes were most bright upon me. “These are troublous times. The vermin of the red swarm everywhere—”

“Drak should be thankful we saved his life,” said the Princess Susheeng. She lolled in a hammock-type chair of silk and fringing tassels of gold thread; one of her arms was thrown back over her head, drawing up her body into a sensuous curve. “Those sea-leem of Sanurkazz will all be destroyed and put down one day. But I am happy that we saved you from them, Drak.”

The high balcony overlooking the harbor received a cooling breeze for which we were grateful, the heat being excessive at this time. Magdag, being north of Sanurkazz, is somewhat cooler, but neither basks in the strong bracing breezes that sweep in over the Sunset Sea to cool Zenicce, far to the east. A long and powerful warm current, the so-called Zim-Stream, sweeps up from the south past the coasts of Donengil, the southernmost portion of Turismond. Driving in an arc toward the northeast it pushes in a clearly demarcated line of differently colored water through the Cyphren Sea between Turismond and Loh and so washes all the western and southern shores of Vallia. Its southern branch retains enough energy on occasions to reach Zenicce on the western coast of Segesthes.

“I do thank you,” I said. Then, holding myself tightly under control, I said: “It seems they took everything I possess.”

Glycas nodded. “Everything you had with you. Strange things, I have no doubt.”

“From Vallia,” said Susheeng.

I quivered alert.

“Hardly any,” I said, offhandedly. “I have been collecting curios from the Eye of the World, artifacts of Magdag — and of Sanurkazz.”

“Ah — of course,” said Glycas, in a silky murmur I didn’t trust.

“Had your Vallian ship captain not taken his ship to so distant a berth, no doubt your gallant companion, Vomanus, would have been here.” Vomanus had been enraged to a purple fury when he had at last seen me safe. Tharu, that harsh, stern man, Kov of Vindelka, had not been seen since the attack. Everyone considered him to be dead. I felt that if he was not dead, then he might look upon that state as something to be desired if he had been sent to the rowing benches of a Magdag galley.

“These stupid uprisings continue to occur,” Glycas said smoothly. “The slaves on the buildings to the greater glory of Grodno seek to invoke the vile heretical worship of Zair, the misbegotten one. We shall make inquiries and punish the guilty.”

“And meanwhile?”

The Princess Susheeng rose like a graceful and deadly leem from the hammock-chair. She smiled on me and her red lips were moistly sensuous. “Oh, we shall, of course, accept entire responsibility for you, my dear Drak, until another Vallian ship calls.”

“It will not be wise for you to continue on in this palace, alone,” said Glycas briskly. “We hope you will do us the honor of taking apartments in our own palace — it is the Emerald Eye Palace, after all. Only the king, above whom no man dare seek to lift himself, has a finer palace in all Magdag.”

“So be it,” I said, accepting the inevitable. Then I had the wit to add: “I thank you most sincerely.”

So it was that I moved in with Glycas and his rapacious sister Susheeng into the Emerald Eye Palace. The place was large, ornate, not particularly comfortable, noisy — and it had been built with slave labor. At every opportunity I would clear out of the place and stroll about the city. Although Vallia was my objective, I still looked at the defenses of the city with the eye of a raiding Krozair from Sanurkazz. Glycas had insisted that I take with me an escort of half a dozen Chuliks. I had protested, but the manner of his insistence indicated that he would not have me say no. I thought of that scorpion I had seen on the rocks of the Grand Canal; that was how this man Glycas appeared to me: quick, sudden, and deadly. The city smoldered under the lambent fires of the twin suns. I walked about the paved streets and avenues, studied the architecture, patronized a few drinking dens and amusement arcades. I even forced myself to look in on a small arena where groups of drug-inflamed slaves fought each other for the shrieking enjoyment of the Magdag nobility. Sickened, I left. Sectrix racing, I thought, might tempt me. But horse racing as it is practiced on Earth has never appealed to me — the degradation of man and beast and the motives thus revealed do no credit to Homo sapiens — and the men of Magdag had evolved no different method. I yearned, then, for the free ranging races with my Clansmen as we sped over the Great Plains, joyous in the race, astride our zorcas or voves. So it was natural that, saddling up a sectrix and with my bodyguard similarly mounted, I rode out from the Magdag city gate on the landward side and headed for the megalithic complex of obsessive building. On several occasions I had spoken to architects, often at one of the many intimate dinner parties Susheeng delighted in arranging, hurling shrill abuse at her slaves as they scurried about doing the actual work of preparation. These scented and elaborately coifed men had assured me that the buildings were essential for the soul and spirit of Magdag. Only through this continual erection of stupendous monuments of stone and brick could Magdag find a purpose in life. I heard talk of the Great Death, of the time of dying, and now I knew this to mean the period of eclipse, when the green sun was eclipsed by the red. This astronomical event would in the very nature of things have a tremendous significance for the men who worshiped the green-sun deity Grodno. It would, in truth, be a death. When the green sun passed before the red, and being smaller it did not thus create an eclipse but rather a transit, was the time for the Magdaggians to break out in another of their surges of violence and upheavals of conquest. During those times the men of Zair looked to their defenses, sharpened their swords, and sailed the inner sea in strength.

What the men of Magdag did during the green sun’s eclipse, during the time of the Great Death, I was to learn. . .

* * * *

The massive buildings were as I remembered them.

I felt my heart move with pity and anger as I saw the slaves in their thousands laboring beneath the suns. Progress had been made on the buildings that I recalled as being half finished. I saw gang overseers lashing on the slaves to faster and faster work. The Chuliks would not let me approach too close. They had their long swords half unsheathed. They were not happy. I could smell the tension on the hot air.

“They are behind their schedules,” I was told by a rast-faced guard commander, an overlord of the second class. He was the first I had met since my second arrival in Magdag. I had been moving in the company of overlords of the first class and of nobles — Zair forgive me.

“The time of the Great Death approaches,” he said. He seemed happy to spend the time talking to a noble. “We must have at least one new hall finished by then.”

“Assuredly,” I said.

He nodded with his own driving conviction. “We will,” he said. He held a whip and ran the thongs through his blunt fingers. “We will.”

Choked by the redolent memories of the slaves and workers, with sudden brilliant images of Genal, Holly, and Pugnarses in my mind, I looked over the fantastic scene. I could see it with a new eye, now, from a different perspective. The place swarmed with men and women. In their gray garments, or naked, they moved over the buildings on their scaffolds like a confused army of insects. Huge masses of stone were hoisted into the air as the shrieked commands of the whip-masters cut through the air as their whips cut through the sweating skins of the slaves. The piles of bricks grew under the sun, and were carried away by endless streams of slave children. The shouts, the bedlam, the smoke of dust and chips that hung over everything, the stinks of the thousands of people, rose like an evil miasma. This was what Babel might have been; although here everyone could understand his neighbor. This convulsion of perverted energy smoked to high heaven upon the plain of Magdag, there on my adopted world of Kregen. Making it my business to inspect every part of the work, I visited places I had never seen before. There were the smiths, working miracles of beauty in scrolled iron and brass. There were the masons cutting stone to delicate perfection. The artists painted their frescoes, their friezes, working with the sure speed that had painted this figure in this position in these colors a hundred times before. A strict and formal routine held the decoration into ritual patterns. Inside some of the lofty halls with their plethora of columns and innumerable images and paintings, I sometimes felt I had reentered the hall I had left only moments before.

The production lines stunned me with their expertise set up or the development of some of the artifacts used. Earth did not reach that state of expertise until the automobile assembly line indicated what mechanical effectiveness might be obtained from this breaking-down of function into separate work-quanta.

Men in long lines labored to produce, for example, barrel after barrel of the iron nails used in fixing wooden fasciae. They worked with a kind of numb professionalism, slaves chained to their benches, the only sounds the eternal clinking of the hammers, the bellow of the forges. I saw the way masses of slaves were yoked to the gigantic stones ferried down from the mountains of the interior. They could sort themselves out into their gangs and tail onto ropes and haul away under the lash with a skill I remembered.

Down by the sludgy banks of the sluggish stream that bore the ferried stone from the interior — a blackish-gray basaltic stone and quite unlike the yellow stone used in the construction of the city’s noble houses — I saw the wide extent of the kitchens. Holly had cooked for the workers on a small scale, by the gang. The slaves had mass cooking. The place stank and crawled with flies and vermin. Down by the river, which ran red here, I saw immense piles of bones, and tall stacks of vosk skulls, too thick and strong to be easily disposed of. The rubbish dumps stretched, it seemed, for miles. Pollution, something I had hardly expected to experience on Kregen, had come to Magdag with a vengeance. My Chulik guards made no effort to show me the warrens, and I had enough sense to know I could never enter there dressed as I was and with a mere six Chuliks. Glycas had invited me to what he termed a hunting party. When I had gathered that this meant that a group of his friends would be riding, mailed and with long swords in their hands, into the warrens to chase, and cut down and rape what fell in their path, I declined, pleading a fever.

My life had become, again as it had so often done in the past, intolerable to me. Something must be done, something could be done, and if I, Dray Prescot, thought anything at all of myself and what I was here for at the express command of the Star Lords, then I would have to do it. I would have to do it

I wanted to do it.

The Princess Susheeng was becoming tiresome. My door was kept locked at night, but she scratched on it two or three times. I knew it was her, for I could smell her perfume, thick and odoriferous and liberally applied. I fancied she would begin a more obvious attack soon and, remembering the Princess Natema, I put in hand a little scheme. Away inland, to the north, beyond the chain of factory farms similar to that one where I had been captured by the men of Magdag, lay broad pastures, lush plains covered with head-high grasses. Here big game hunts were a pastime I might welcome. I recalled with a pang the Savanti, and of how Maspero had apologized for the atavistic behavior of himself and his friends as they had led me out on a graint hunt that would lead, if any danger and harm there was, to them alone. Away beyond the plains of Turismond lay lands that were colder and colder until at last they vanished beneath the mist and ice. So the Magdaggians said. They never cared to venture there, seldom went other than a few dwaburs into the plains. They were essentially an inward-looking people: the Eye of the World aptly named for them.

Arrangements for my expedition were made and Vomanus, who I thought had a permanent girl waiting for him in some palace or other of the city, was dug out to accompany me. I managed to avoid asking either Glycas or his sister. We had a few Chulik guards, a safari of slaves for porterage, and mounted aboard our sectrixes we set off. Very quickly I lost the safari. I had told Vomanus to carry on as though expecting to meet me out on the plains. I dumped the sectrix and my gear, and donned the gray breechclout I had stolen from a slave of the palace. I crept by night into the workers’ areas by the buildings.

I was not home, but I felt a queasy sensation of homely familiarity grip me. At that point I almost called the whole stupid venture off. But I went on. This, I remember thinking, is a part and parcel of what the Star Lords wish me to accomplish.

As the familiar odor of the warrens rose about me and I saw again that crazy skyline of tumbling walls and leaning towers, the sacking-draped flat roofs where the workers would lie out in the heat of the night, the dark mouths of alleys where the streaming pink moonlight fell aslant the dust and the cobbles, I had to restrain myself from picking up my heels and running. Even then I could not be sure which way I would run.

The old familiar hovel looked the same.

A worker who had found a bottle of Dopa lay propped against the wall snoring lustily. I could hear the restless sounds of thousands of people all about me, people crammed into hovels compressed into narrow streets of tumbledown buildings. I pushed open the familiar door. Genal sat up on his sacking bed, blinking like an owl.

“Who—?” He squinted in the parallelogram of pink moonlight. “No — Stylor? Stylor!”

I moved in fast and gripped his hand.

“Lahal, Genal. You are well?”

He looked at me, swallowed, closed his mouth.

“Lahal, Stylor.” Suddenly he jumped up and ran across the packed earth floor with its bit of sacking carpet, knocking over an earthenware pot on the way. He bent over another pallet that I had not noticed. He shook the sleeper.

“Pugnarses — wake up, wake up! It is Stylor, returned from the green radiance of Genodras!”

I chilled.

Pugnarses awoke in a foul temper, cursing by Grakki-Grodno, the sky deity of beasts of haulage, and looked blearily at me. He tumbled up from the pallet. His shaggy hair and eyebrows, his malevolent look, all coalesced and I put out my hand to cover my feelings, and I said: “Lahal, Pugnarses.”

“Lahal, Stylor.”

I felt out of place. They both stood looking at me as though I were a ghost. In a way, I was. But they were both acting in a natural way, both cursing by and calling on Grodno, the green-sun deity of Genodras.

What, I wondered then with a dizzying feeling of helplessness, would Pur Zenkiren, or Pur Zazz, make of this situation?

I pulled myself together.

“I cannot stay long,” I said. “And I cannot venture outside the warren.”

Genal said, at once, hotly: “You may stay here as long as you wish, Stylor. Here, you are safe.”

He bent and picked up a gray tunic. I saw the green and black badges of a worker overseer, he of the balass stick. “I wield the balass now, as well as Pugnarses. We can offer you help, Stylor.” He eyed me keenly, looking at my shoulders and biceps. “Was it the galleys?”

“Aye, Genal, it was.”

“And you escaped!” Pugnarses whistled. I suspected he was annoyed that Genal had aspired to the balass while he, Pugnarses, still stayed as a worker overseer, and had not yet reached his coveted ambition, the white loincloth and the whip of the overseer of overseers.

“What of Follon the Fristle?” I asked. It would be as well at first to let these two believe what they willed.

Pugnarses let rip with a disgusting sound. Genal made a face and an obscene sign. I had forgotten the manners of slaves; this was a salutary reminder. I had best not forget. . .

“He, too, is of the balass. He gave information about an escape — when you disappeared — he was rewarded.”

“I’m glad you had the sense not to become involved, Genal.”

“But we will rise, one day—”

“Yes,” I said.

Their heads lifted as I spoke.

“And — Holly?”

Their reactions were interesting. Both cast a swift look at each other, then away, and their faces went blank.

“She is well, Stylor,” said Genal.

“She is more fair than all the painted women of the palaces of Magdag,” said Pugnarses with some vehemence.

So that was how it was.

I had not come to the slave and worker warrens to see Holly, although I hoped I would see her soon. I had to establish an identity with these men. Already they believed I was an escaped galley slave, coming to them for help. That was a start.

“I may have to ask your help in concealing me,” I said. “From time to time. For I have great plans.” I broke off. A slim shadow broke the parallelogram of pink moonlight. Soon, that moonlight would silver as the night wore on, but the shadow now hesitating in the doorway was surrounded by a pink halo. A low voice breathed a single word.

“Stylor!”

Holly was still incredibly lovely. She had matured, but I knew those innocent lines of naïveté concealed an iron resolve. Beside her the Princess Susheeng was an overblown, raddled bloom of autumn.

“Lahal, Holly—” I began.

But she rushed toward me and flung her arms about my neck. Her slender lissome body pressed all nakedly to mine. Her lips, hot and moist and overpowering with a passionate ardor that shocked through me, crushed down on my mouth. And as she kissed me with such abandon I saw over her shoulder the faces of Genal and Pugnarses, staring at me, stricken.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The plans of Stylor

Life thereafter became exciting and interesting and extraordinarily rewarding. I spent many nights out among the warrens. After I had rejoined the safari and had then returned after a quick hunting trip to Magdag with a few leem as trophies, I arranged a cache near the warrens, adjacent to the river, where I could reach by sectrix easily from the Emerald Eye Palace. I had a cache there of weapons, clothes, and money. I would ride out from the palace without the Chulik escort, having disposed of them by a straight deception, change into my gray breech-clout, and glide silently into the maze of alleyways and courts. Long before dawn I would return.

On the sixth day I could often manage to spend the entire time with the slaves and workers, as Glycas and Susheeng were devoted in their observations of the rites of worship owing to Grodno. Particularly at this time, when the time of the Great Death approached, everyone of Magdag was punctilious in their religious life.

The business of Follon the Fristle was completed in a strange way that turned out to my advantage. To say that all Fristles looked alike to me would not be true. I could recognize individuals when necessary. One evening as the last of the suns vanished in the sky and the Maiden with the Many Smiles sailed clear above clouds I rode down to the river and hitched my sectrix to a tree branch. Away beyond the bank the warrens stretched, orange in that ruddy reflected light, and I took heart from that. In only a few moments I had stashed my Vallian gear, wrapped the gray breechclout around me, drawing the ends up between my legs and tucking them in. In the belt that held the clout was a sharp and gently-curving knife snug in its sheath. As I padded toward the first sprawling line of shacks and mud-brick dwellings, I heard a scream, muffled but close.

Screams were common in the slave warrens of Magdag.

Then, forcing itself on my attention, a struggle reeled out into the moonlight: two Fristles locked together. It took me a moment or two to decide that this was a male Fristle attempting to rape a female. She couldn’t scream anymore for the man had his arm locked around her throat. I could see her slit eyes, painfully twisted, and the way the blunted fangs of her mouth champed against her thin dark lips. Then I saw the male Fristle was Follon.

I recognized him well enough.

I loped over and took him around the throat. Fristles habitually wear a kind of leather jack, brass-studded. Those employed by Magdag had dyed theirs green. It was with some considerable force that I kicked that green color. Follon tried to yell and my fingers clamped on his windpipe. He couldn’t get his curved scimitar-like sword out. I bore down on him.

The female Fristle sagged to the ground, whimpering. She wore no clothes. Her body, with its light dusting of fur, gleamed golden in the pink rays of moonlight. Another Fristle, older, with a dun-colored hide, slipped to the fallen female’s side, held her head, and began to croon strange half-hissing, half-sobbing words in native Fristle. Then:

“He would have used my Sheemiff, and discarded her, killed her!”

It suddenly became easy to think of these half-human, half-cat people in fully human terms. The old woman glared up with a lift of her narrow chin and her slit eyes blazed red. The girl Fristle moaned again. I saw blood on the fur of her legs.

Follon gave a tremendous wrench, but I held him and leaned back and then, as Zair is my witness, whether it was his own lunge, or my impassioned grip, or my subconscious desire, I do not know. But, audibly, I heard his backbone snap.

I had been given a thousand years of life without consultation or request and now I could see a long, dark, and exceedingly narrow tunnel before me, delimiting a life in which it seemed my fate would go on facing up to the consequences not only of my own actions but also the reverberations from the natures of other peoples and other beings. It was in the nature of that scorpion to try to kill me; it was in my nature to defend myself. What was natural about this Fristle trying to rape a young girl of his own kind, and was it natural for me to prevent him? I think it was then, as I let the dead limp form of Follon slip through my hands to the ground, that I first began to sense the dim and awful doom that overhung me. I was doomed. Oh, yes, everyone is doomed in the sense that everyone will eventually die. But I began then to feel the clinging strands of a doom outside of time and space drawing about me, and with every step I took, every decision I made, I would merely encompass my own destruction the more securely. I cursed the Star Lords, then, hating them and all their works.

Follon’s body had to be disposed of and so I carried him down to the river that flowed so sluggishly through its retaining banks of granite through Magdag to the sea. Here the banks were of mud, and in the shadow of a toppling tower of vosk skulls, I hoisted the dead Fristle, ready to cast him into the flood. The old Fristle woman, with a cry, darted forward. She made her intentions plain. I stopped most of the mutilation, but she divested the body of all its clothes and money and she took the curved sword.

“These I will keep,” she said, looking up at me. She was crouched, bent with age. “My Sheemiff is yours for the asking, for you are a great Jikai.”

I shuddered, and the two women Fristles eyed me speculatively. Jikai! How often, lately, had that great word been debased!

With some formal rote of acknowledgment, I bade them farewell and took myself off. Truth to tell, the sleek furred body of the girl Fristle, with its human outlines, stirred me. I half ran through the pink-tinged shadows into the warren.

As I had asked during my last visit, the Prophet had been found. Now he was waiting for me. It seems fairly clear that Delia’s loving actions in setting her whole empire in action to seek me out had upset the plans of the Star Lords. I had no way of knowing just what problems Delia had overcome in instigating this search: Tharu would not broach the subject and Vomanus shied away from it. He was a good and likely lad and, with a little discipline of the sort that gives a man an eye to survival, would turn out well. But the Star Lords — for, as I have said, I had by this time convinced myself that my presence this time in Magdag was of their fashioning — had drawn me here from Earth, four hundred light-years away, and here must lie the labors to which I must put my hands.

What those labors were blazed painfully obviously to me.

The Prophet looked just the same, with his white hair and beard fierce in his righteous rebellious ardor.

“The workers will rise, Stylor,” he said in his rolling sonorous voice. “Too long have we suffered. The time is ripe and we know the secrets of the overlords’ hearts.” He stared at the assembled workers with an exalted look, an expression of dazed fanaticism on his face, drawing the gaunt lines into sharper and more hungry wedges of skin and muscle.

“We know!” said Genal, with a reflection of that dedicated fanaticism uplifting him.

“Yes, we know the time,” said Pugnarses, and the hunger on his face glared bleakly out upon the gathering of those men and half-men who would lead the revolt.

We made plans. I listened. They had accepted me as one who had proved himself, and when I had promised to secure them weapons as proof of my intentions, I was a brother rebel. But the talk consisted of high-flown sentiments, of passion, hatred, and anger, of long detailed descriptions of what the rebels would do to the overlords once they had them in their power. I fretted. At last I stood up. They fell silent.

“You chatter,” I told them. They reacted angrily to this but I quieted them. “You talk of chaining the overlords in the gangs and making them haul stone, and of the whips you will wield. Have you forgotten?

The overlords wear mail, and they carry long swords! They are trained fighting men. What are you?”

Genal leaped to his feet, his dark face flushed and furious.

“We are workers, slaves, but we can fight—”

“I can bring you swords, spears, some coats of mail, but not enough. How, my gallant Genal, will you fight the overlords?”

Such were the dark torments, the passions of frustration twisting in that hovel as I faced them with the truth, that they had no time or energy to spare to wonder — then — where I would find weapons for them. I had brought food, so as not to be a burden on them, and already half a dozen long swords lay hidden in a pit beneath straw, closely wrapped in oiled sacks, below the beaten earth of Genal’s and Pugnarses’ hovel.

The talk buzzed, coiling, endlessly repeating itself. I let them talk this out. They had to face the truth of themselves.

At last, a silence fell. Pugnarses was knotting his fists together, and every now and again he would smash his fist into the earth of the floor. Genal, I saw, was close to tears, but he did not break down. He was looking at me. I saw that look. I knew the time for hard facts was near. Bolan, a giant man with a head that gleamed all naked and shining in the light, grunted. He had been shaved as a slave once, and his hair had never grown back. He could lift stone blocks that took three other men to shift.

“What do you say, Stylor?” he asked me directly, without artifice, like a charging chunkrah. “You have only dismay and doom for us — can you prophesy to any more effect?”

“Yes, Stylor,” cried Genal and one or two of the others. “Tell us a plan.” I noticed that Pugnarses did not join in.

Well, he would confirm and conform, for this was the only way he could achieve his heart’s desire as to an overlordship. I told them.

There was nothing clever about the plan. It’s only dreamers who believe they can develop something so entirely new that the suns of Kregen have not shone down on it before — always excepting, of course, the men of science and art.

“The merits of the plan are obvious,” I said eventually. “And its drawbacks, too. It will take longer than we would wish.”

Pugnarses started up. “Long! Yes, too long! Give us the weapons and we will kill the overlords and all their beast guards!”

“But, Pugnarses,” Bolan said, rubbing his naked skull. “Stylor has just told us, and I believe what he says is true. You cannot beat the overlords and the mercenaries by a mob of workers and slaves with a few swords and balass sticks!”

“You must train,” I said, and I put force into my words. “We will forge an army from the workers and slaves of Magdag so that slavery can be abolished from Magdag.”

They nodded, still only half convinced. I enlarged on what I wanted to do, and I admit that it is all elementary and obvious, but to a man who slaves in the sun the thought of a single extra day under the lash between him and freedom is intolerable.

“Give me your help and backing; bestow on me your authority so that I may so order and organize that the workers will rise as a strong and keen weapon.” I stared challengingly at them. I was beginning to feel alive again, and the shame of that reawakening as to its means may not be mitigated as to its ends; but it is in my nature to rise to a challenge and to strike down first he who would seek to kill me.

“I will fashion you a cadre of men who will use the weapons I shall bring, and the weapons we will make. I want production of certain weapons that I shall designate, and no others. I value freedom and liberty more than most men, for I have been deprived of freedom — in ways you cannot comprehend —

but if I tell you that a galley slave knows about slavery, you will not argue with me, I know.” I was jumbled, garbled in what I said, but I convinced them. I obtained total authority over the fashioning of this military weapon from the slaves. I had to. I could see this struggle only in military terms, now; for that was the only way to keep a sense of sanity and proportion. I wanted a small well-trained little army that could blitzkrieg the overlords so that the great mass of slaves and workers might follow and devour the struck-down carcass.

Sentiment had gone. I had seen the misery of the slaves; I had experienced it. I knew of the aspirations of the laborers and artificers — and I was well aware of possible conflicts of interest between slave and worker. I was born, you will recall, in 1775 and this year, I venture to believe, has a certain significance on Earth. On Kregen there were more complex antagonisms even than those surrounding, say, the combatants and theorists caught up in the French Revolution. I determined now to look at the revolt of the slaves of Magdag in purely military terms. Then, I would see that they turned their successful rebellion into a true revolution. That, as I conceived it, was what the Star Lords desired. Also — my Krozairs of Zy and all of Sanurkazz would benefit.

In the days and nights that followed I took greater and greater risks in sneaking out of the Emerald Eye Palace. I would climb out of my high window and use the ropy vines of the ivy-like plants that clothed the walls to clamber down and so over the wall and astride the waiting sectrix. Vomanus, of course, had to be a party to my mysterious disappearances, and he sweated out many a sleepless night waiting for my return. He thought I had a girl somewhere in the city. While cursing me for my stupidity in not sipping from the flower under my lips, he had a grudging admiration for my foolhardiness in taking wing to sip elsewhere.

The cadre began to train with wooden staves. I had them cut to a modest twelve-foot length. A number of soldiers slaving on the buildings were spirited away by Holly, who used her underground route to good purpose, and these men were only too happy to join us. Their vacancies had to be explained. A death of a slave was a common event in Magdag, and even though the overlords were aware, as Glycas often complained to me, that there were slaves hiding in the workers’ warrens, the expeditions to rout them out had to be undertaken with due military care. Glycas loved to ride into the outskirts of the ghetto warrens. He and his sectrix-mounted friends would cut down the workers and slaves not clever enough to run at the first sounds. I suppose between them they killed a thousand or so slaves a season; this was a number scarcely missed in the hundreds of thousands who labored on the buildings of Magdag. Then the overlords would ride out in their mail and their glory and raid adjacent cities who owed them suzerainty. They had a jolly old life of it, the overlords of Magdag. The slave soldiers we took in were sworn to secrecy with vows that made their hair curl and their bowels turn to water. They were set to work to drill and discipline the volunteer workers. I personally scrutinized every man at this stage. The soldiers — men of Zair mostly, but there was a sprinkling of the fair-haired men of Proconia, and a number of Ochs, Fristles, Rapas — could make little of the twelve-foot staves. They called them staves, thinking that was their function. I did not disillusion them at this stage. That would come later, and as staves they would also serve a purpose. Soon a small group gathered around me, men I ventured to think would stick to the last.

“You have an overlord of Magdag charging down on you,” I said to them as we sat around the hovel, on the beaten-earth floor in the flickering light of the candle. “He is clad in mail. He sits upon a sectrix, which means he towers over you, on foot. And he is bringing his damned great long sword down to cleave your skull to your neck bones.” I stared at them, these dozen or so men on whom I must rely. “I don’t want the answer, ‘Run,’ when I ask you the question, ‘What do you do?’” We weren’t past the joking stage yet. Genal, for sure, would have said “Run.”

They coughed and shuffled, and Bolan said viciously: “Leap on the sectrix’s back and jab your dagger into the vosk’s eyes.”

“Fine. How do you get past the sword?”

We argued on. I saw that Genal had the right idea when he said sturdily: “Throw something — a rope weighted with lead — around the sectrix’s legs.” He laughed nastily. “That should bring the overlord to earth.”

“Fine. You’ll have to get close to do that with any accuracy. The overlords will be in squadrons and platoons. The ones following will cut you down—”

“So?”

I spread my hands. “Talking in military terms there are two methods of dealing with armored men, and these overlords wear hauberks of mesh iron, link mail. Some wear leg mesh; most do not. Some wear solid helmets; some rely on their coif. There are still two main methods of dealing with them, of dismounting them.”

“Kill them,” grunted Bolan.

“Yes. You can drive a relatively small hole through the mail, or you can bash a great wedge of it in, cutting it or not according to the opposed strengths.” I thrust my rigidly outstretched forefinger at Bolan. He flinched back, but not by very much. He would be a useful man. “To punch a hole you need an arrow, a dart, a javelin or—” I hesitated, found Maspero’s genetic language pill had failed me, and so used the English word. “Or a pike.”

I opened out my other three fingers rigidly alongside the first finger and I slashed down in a quasi-karate blow at Bolan. This time he did not move a muscle — but, of course, he blinked. “To slash a man’s guts in half you need a long sword, an ax, a—” Again the pill failed me in the exact meaning I required. I went on: “You can bash with a mace or, if you have the requisite skill, with a morning star.” Again I used English for the elusive words. “To slash, you can also use a species of bill, a halberd, a glaive, a fauchard. And these weapons are those on which we will concentrate our production.”

We spent the rest of that session going over and over the weapons which, to these men, were new. Just before it was time for me to leave, and these men had no idea where I went when I disappeared from their sight in the warrens, I put the final indignity to them.

I have mentioned that the men of Segesthes considered the shield as the cowards’ article, a weak, treacherous, miserable item of warfare, one to which they would not deign to give the name of weapon. They had never seen an offensively-used shield. So I took a break and then, when we had drunk a little wine, I said: “Finally, the production lines will make shields.”

I quieted them. The men of the inner sea, also, disregarded shields. Only Ochs used shields, a tiny round targe clasped in one of their six limbs with which they attempted to counter aggression. Men derided the Ochs for their little shields. I spent some time arguing; finally I said: “It is settled. When I give you the patterns for the pikes, the glaives, and halberds, you will also receive patterns for shields. These will be manufactured. It is ended for now.” I stood up, looking down on them.

“I will see you tomorrow night. Remberee.” I left them.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Vomanus takes a message to Delia of the Blue Mountains

The Princess Susheeng of Magdag was a vibrant, alluring, sensual creature. There was no doubt of that at all. It was all too clearly apparent as she reclined on a low divan covered in ornate green silk, the lighter green of the silks partially covering her white body seductive in their flowing curves and hidden shadows. Poor Vomanus in his buff coat and black boots looked gauche and out of place; essentially I felt the same way, no matter that I wore a lounging robe of that detested green. I had felt it politic to do so; now, clearly, it had been a mistake. The intimate little supper party was over and now Susheeng was devising ways of getting rid of Vomanus. I was countering them with a suaveness I had to admire in myself.

“Oh, Vomanus, my pet,” said Susheeng in a dripping-honey voice. “I wish to speak with Drak alone.”

She could have said, simply: “Vomanus, clear out.” Since she had not, it was obvious that her brother Glycas’ warning of the importance of Vallia had got through to her.

Vomanus, casting me a dirty look, rose and, with a graceful farewell speech, left. Susheeng turned her bright eyes on me. Her breast rose and fell beneath the scrap of green silk.

“Why do you always avoid me, Drak? Time after time I seek you out — and you are not there. Why?”

I was astonished. This proud and haughty woman, a beauty in any man’s eyes, was in effect begging me. She leaned gracefully toward me, and the green silk moved again tumultuously.

“I keep myself busy, Princess.”

“You do not like me!”

“Of course I do!”

“Well, then. . . ? If you knew how lonely I am. Glycas is forever busy about matters of state. The campaign in Proconia does not go well.” I had to keep from shouting aloud my joy. She went on, slumping back now, her feelings of neglect beginning to stir different emotions. “All he can talk about are the pirates from Sanurkazz. Everyone is wondering when that arch pirate, that evil devil’s spawn, that cramph, the Lord of Strombor, will strike again. He cost me a cool three merchantmen last season. Money of mine, lost to me, in his filthy hands. This Pur Dray, this Lord of Strombor, why, he is a worse Krozair than that mangy Pur Zenkiren.”

I felt drunk.

I had quaffed but little wine, for I had to keep my wits about me. But — this was how the enemies I had sworn to oppose talked about me, about Zenkiren, about the Krozairs of Zy! I felt suddenly strong and liberated, rejoicing in the powers that Sanurkazz extended across the Eye of the World.

“I feel sorry for you, Princess,” I said. “But I believe you also raid the men of the southern shore. Is this not so?”

“Of course! They deserve it; they are rasts before Grodno.”

Then, shaking those creamy shoulders, she reached for her goblet and drank deeply. Her face was more flushed than usual. I thought of Natema. I tensed myself, ready for what might come. There would be no ghetto warrens for me this night.

The work of preparations was going well, and already the production lines were turning out long, beautifully shaped shafts of pikes and halberds, and the smiths were forging the heads to fit. Grindstones were being stolen and if a Rapa guard was found with his throat slit, wasn’t that what they hired themselves out to expect?

“My dear Drak,” said Susheeng. “I swear you are thinking of something else.”

A naturally gallant man might have mumbled that no man could think of anything in the presence of Susheeng except her; that way lay dragons. I said: “Yes.”

“Oh?” Her eyebrows lifted. That cruel look flashed over her face.

“I was thinking how strange it is that neither you nor your brother, the noble Glycas, are married.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “You — would—?

“Not me, Princess Susheeng.” I took a breath. “I am spoken for in Vallia.”

“Ah! ”

I thought that would finish the matter. She had known that my urgent desire to return to Vallia — as she thought of it as a return — had cooled lately. She had thought it was on her account and now she knew otherwise. I made a big mistake then.

The next night I was able to slip into the warrens with the pattern I had worked out for the shields. They were large, rectangular, curved into a semi-cylinder, and I insisted that they be built to withstand an arrow from the short straight bows of the overlords’ mercenary guards. If this meant they must be backed with metal, then the metal must be stolen from the building sites where it was being fashioned into masks and wall-coverings to the greater glory of Grodno. I overrode all obstacles. The weight of the shields thus produced, I said, was not important. I had in mind their use as a kind of pavise. I showed how they might be used in the testudo. I got through to my men in command. Susheeng was waiting for me as I climbed back in through my window.

“I have been waiting for you all night, Drak.”

I kept my composure.

“I was restless, Susheeng. I have been walking — to clear my head.”

“You lie!” She flamed at me then, passionately. “You lie! You have a girl out there in the city, a whore for whom you deny me! I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!”

“No, no, Princess! There is no other girl in Magdag.”

“You swear by Grodno that what you say is true?”

I’d swear anything by Grodno; false deities mean nothing. But there was no girl — and then I thought of Holly. I said, harshly and with an acrid contempt: “I do not need to swear, Princess. There is no other girl in Magdag.”

“I do not believe you! Swear, you rast! Swear!”

She lifted her white hand on which the green rings flashed. I caught her wrist and so for a space we stood, locked, looking into each other’s eyes. Then she moaned softly and sagged against me, all the rigidity gone from her body. She leaned into me and I could feel her softness. “Tell me true, Drak. There is no other?”

“There is no other, Princess.”

“Well, then — am I not beautiful? Am I not desirable? Am I not fair above all other women in Magdag?”

What had Natema said, and what had I said, when I thought Delia was dead? Now I was by that span of years more mature.

“You are indeed the finest flower of Magdag, Susheeng,” I said, and felt shame at the vicious irony of my words.

A crisp knock at the door followed by a Vomanus who concealed his chagrin at sight of Susheeng, who was smoothing down her hair now, effectively chopped off that scene. When Susheeng had left with a long lingering glance at me, Vomanus said enviously: “Well, you lecherous old devil! So you managed it in the end!”

“Not so, good Vomanus.” I looked at him, and I found he ranked favorably with those other young men who had followed me to death. “And aren’t you supposed to treat a Kov with some kind of respect, hey, young lad?”

He laughed delightedly.

“Of course. But I told poor old Tharu not to tell you who I was, and I don’t intend that you should find out now. Just take it from me, Drak, my friend, Kovs are Kovs and Kovs to me.”

I glowered at him from under lowered eyelids and he, despite that he had known me for a little while now, started back and I knew I wore that corrosive look of pure authority and domination on my ugly face that I despair so much of.

“And are you going to tell me you aspire to the Princess Delia yourself, good Vomanus? That I am a rival?”

“Drak — Dray! What are you saying?”

I never apologize. I turned from him. Then: “Vomanus — I thank you for your help and comradeship. But I fancy that she-leem Susheeng will set spies on me. I am going to have to disappear.”

“What!”

“There is work waiting for my hand. I love the Princess Delia as no man ever loved a woman before in all this world of Kregen, aye! and all of Earth—” He stared then, thinking me going off my head, I shouldn’t wonder. “But before I can return to her and clasp her in my arms again I must discharge the obligations laid on me. A Vallian ship was signaled last night — you did not know?” For he had started and his face had lighted up. “Listen carefully, Vomanus. I take a great comfort from your comradeship and your ready wit and help — now, hear me out! I want you to return on the ship, go to Delia, and tell her I am well and dying for her and that I shall return just as soon as certain business has been conducted here. She will understand, I know. I know she will!”

“But, Drak — I dare not return without you!”

“Dare not? When your Princess Majestrix awaits news of me, thinking me dead, perchance, suffering. Go back to Vallia, good Vomanus. Give the good news to your princess. Tell her I shall return just as soon as I am allowed. She will understand.”

“But what keeps you here? Not Susheeng of a surety.”

“Not Susheeng, nor any other girl. I cannot explain. But you will return to Vallia and give my message and my undying love to Delia of the Blue Mountains.”

Besides, I wanted him well out of the way when my slave army struck. I didn’t want his head stuck on a pike and paraded along the harbor wall.

He shook his handsome head, and thrust his fist down on his rapier hilt so that the scabbard stuck up into the air, arrogantly. “But, Drak, to return without you!”

“Go! For the sake of Zair, go now! Tell Delia I long to clasp her in my arms — and I will, I will, but go, now, before it is too late!”

He stared at me as though, at last, I had taken leave of my senses. I calmed myself. “All will be explained. And, too, you could return with an airboat to Proconia. I know Vallia does not like using the airboats in the inner sea. I can join you there.”

He frowned. Then: “Very well, Kov Drak. I will do as you ask.”

We made the final arrangements and then I said “Remberee” to Vomanus and went back to my room that evening to collect all that I might need. I was about to leap onto the windowsill when Susheeng called. It was weak of me, I know. But I felt I could not leave without a kind of warning. After all, she was acting of her nature, like them all. So I went to the door and let her in. She was magnificent.

She was dressed as barbaric murals showed Gyphimedes, the divine mistress of the beloved of Grodno, to be dressed in the old legends. Kregen is a maze of myth and legend, some of it beautiful, some horrible, all of absorbing interest. Storytellers weave their fantasies in every marketplace and on favorite street corners beneath the sturm trees. The very air of the world breathes a scented miasma of romance and wonder. Now Susheeng stood gracefully before me dressed as a living mistress from one of those old legends.

Her hair was coifed and ablaze with jewels. A thick rope of it had been left free and this hung down, coiling lushly over one rounded shoulder. Her body was clad in strings and ropes of emeralds. A priceless fortune glowed against her white skin. The rosy hue in her cheeks was not entirely artificial. Her eyes gleamed and sparkled from lotions. Barbarically bedecked, more nude than if she had been naked, she glided toward me, the golden ankle bells chiming. The breath clogged in my throat.

“Drak — my Prince — do I not find favor in your sight?”

It was a rote question, as old as man and woman.

“You are exceedingly beautiful, Susheeng.”

She swayed toward me. My mind was a jumbled amalgam of Holly, and Natema, and Mayfwy — and then, swamping them all and clearing my head and setting my whole being blazing, came the vivid memory of my Delia of the Blue Mountains stepping so lithely down the rocks clad in those magnificent white ling furs, her figure perfection, her eyes glowing on me, her every aspect so far more beautiful — so

— words fail me here. I thrust Susheeng from me so that she staggered. She dropped to her knees. She amazed me even more. In one hand she had hidden a crumpled gray cloth. Now, moving with a frenzy I found fascinating and appalling, she stripped the emeralds from her so that the strings broke and the gems rolled and scattered wildly about the room. Stark naked she stood, her hair down and the jewels shaken from it. Then — then she wrapped the gray cloth about her thighs, drew it up between her legs, and knelt before me clad in the gray breechclout of the slave!

I didn’t want to touch her.

But I didn’t want her crouching there at my feet, dressed up as a slave girl, demanding from me what she must know I would not give.

“Get up, Susheeng!” I said. I made my voice harsh and she jumped and flinched, and her naked shoulders shook. “You look ridiculous!”

It was, of course, the end.

Slowly, she stood up. Her breast heaved and she gulped to control herself. She succeeded. Calm, icy, deadly, she stood before me, naked in the gray breechclout.

“I have offered you everything, Kov Drak of Delphond. You have seen fit in your folly to refuse me. Now—” Her eyes glowed molten on me in the lamplight. She was incredibly beautiful and evil now that her pretensions had been stripped away. On Kregen there is an expression which means roughly what

“my dear” means on Earth, with all the sinister, hating, murderous connotations involved. She used that now, as she turned like a she-leem and glided toward the door.

“You will be sorry, ma faril Drak. Oh, so sorry!”

I knew I had less than a handful of murs to get clear. The mailed men she was even now whistling up would not know I had a sectrix saddled and waiting; and so I stood a chance. But it was a near thing. As I clattered out of that secret court where a sleepy slave padded his way back to his quarters, I heard the sounds of the hunt rising behind me.

As it was, I got clear away. I belted hard for the warrens and, with the die cast, felt a great lightening of my spirits. Susheeng would no longer enter my calculations to ruin all that I was attempting. So I thought as I reentered the ghetto.

The first person I met as I ducked into the familiar hovel was Holly. She stood up as I went in and her slight figure in the rustling light from the candle sent a quick pulse of futile anger through me. She smiled. We had scarcely seen each other alone since that first greeting. Now she came toward me shyly, but with the firmness of character and resolve I knew she possessed.

“You’ve been avoiding me, Stylor!”

The incongruity of it all hit me. I gaped at her.

“Stylor! What—?”

“Holly, dear Holly. I have work to do here. The plans must go on—”

“Oh, fiddle the plans! Can’t you see—” She stopped herself. The direct approach was not, in general, Holly’s way.

Then, thankfully, Genal, Pugnarses, and Bolan stalked in. They were annoyed because a good smith had been whipped since his production of iron nails was down — because he had been forging pike heads for us.

“We will have to spread the load,” I said. “There are, after all, enough slaves to make production light enough—”

“But he was good! ”

“All the more reason to use him carefully, Pugnarses!” I spoke sharply. Pugnarses gave me an ugly look, but I stared him down. “We are a band of brothers, Pugnarses. We must fight together, or go to the galleys together!”

“We will never do that!” flared Genal.

“Very well, then. Now, listen. We come now to the single most important weapon in our armory.” I held their attention; even Holly stood, her hands pressed into her breast, listening. I told them, then, what the sleeting hail of the arrow storm could do.

“We have a few archers,” Pugnarses said. “But few men know the bow. We can make them easily enough, and arrows.”

“That is the small straight bow,” I said. And I laughed. You who listen to these tapes will know I do not laugh lightly.

It is not exactly true to say that the long English yew bow is the peasants’ weapon. Of the famous longbows, only about one in five were made from yew, the others being mostly ash or elm or witch hazel, and only the best and most experienced archers were issued with yew bows. I wished I had the men to use those bows. Their deadly accuracy, their armor-piercing piles, would have laid low the overlords in great droves. As it was, I must make do with what a slave economy could provide.

“It takes years and years of training to make a longbow-man. You must start almost before you can walk to pull a bow, to draw it to the ear, to attain that instinctive accuracy and that uncanny speed. Do not think of the longbow, my friends, unless there are men of Loh among you.”

“We have a few — some are redheaded, most are not.”

“Good, Bolan. We will make longbows for them. But for the main archery strength I shall use crossbows.”

My wild Clansmen with their own curved compound reflex bows had some respect for the powerful crossbows of the citizens of Zenicce. I would not be making bows quite like that, not yet, here in the slave warrens of Magdag. I had handled and used the crossbows of Zenicce many times. I knew their virtues and their weaknesses.

“Crossbows?” said Bolan, wonderingly.

“Crossbows,” I said. I spoke firmly, decisively. “We will make crossbows and with them we will smash the overlords of Magdag into the dust!”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Of pikes and crossbows

The mere manufacture of crossbows and the quarrels they would shoot would not, of course, as with any other weapon, settle the overlords of Magdag.

The men who would use them must be trained.

I insisted that the training be carried out with a great deal of the efficiency and spirit of emulation and success, if without the rewards for failure, that I had applied training my guns’ crews aboard the seventy-fours and frigates that sailed other seas four hundred light-years away from Kregen. Volley shooting would be a necessity. Sufficient accuracy should be obtained from individual marksmen so that a wide swathe of the bolts would fall upon the charging overlords’ cavalry. Production was begun as soon as the first crossbow I had designed and seen through its development stages, helped by the slave and worker craftsmen without whom the venture would have been impossible, had been tested and had passed. We began with a simple hand-spanned bow. Once those whom we selected for training had grasped its essential principles, and could put a group of bolts into the targets set up in the alleys of the warrens, we progressed at a jump to bows spanned by windlasses. As a sailor I could handle the simple calculations necessary to arrive at a satisfactory ratio series. The biggest innovation, and one I felt some pride in developing, was what I called the sextet. One of the main problems with the crossbow is its slow rate of discharge. I have previously mentioned that bows do not fire their arrows or bolts. In every respect the crossbow is inferior to the expertly handled longbow. So men believe. I had so to arrange my crossbowmen as to nullify as many of the disadvantages as possible. We would be fighting from behind barricades. That was essential, as I saw it. So I took a group of six people. The sharp end was the shooter, he who actually loosed the bolt at the foe. To his rear stood or knelt the hander. He took the discharged bow from the shooter and handed him a loaded bow. To his rear were stationed two loaders. They took the spanned bows and loaded them with the bolts, ready for the hander, alternately. Finally, in the rear, were placed the spanners whose task it was to hook on the windlasses and wind like fury until the bows were spanned, when they would hand them to the loaders.

Six men would use six crossbows — and the end result of their labors would be the discharge of a single quarrel. The big difference between that and having the whole six discharge at once was that the rate of discharge could be kept up. And I would naturally place the best shots as shooters. When necessary, say at the final moment of a charge, the entire six could rise and shoot what would be a devastating broadside.

I say men — there were women and girls and young boys in the ranks of handers, loaders, and spanners. Holly, with her tenacious obduracy, insisted on being taught how to handle a bow through all its phases, and she turned into a fine shot.

With the arme blanche I felt we could not expect even a solid phalanx of pikemen to meet and beat down an overlord charge. But once the slaves and workers understood the problems they insisted that they be trained as though they would have to face the overlords in the open. Accordingly, in the inner squares and plazas of the warrens, where overlords and beast guards ventured only in overwhelming mailed strength, and that only when they chased runaway slaves, we drilled and marched and pointed and lifted pikes. The front ranks contained halberdiers on the Swiss model. When I first saw that forest of eighteen-foot long pikes moving steadily across the square I own to a pang of pride and despair and choked affection.

Those men out there, marching with a swing and a tramp through the dust, their throats parched, their lips dry, were slaves and workers, beaten men, whipped cramphs, despised and derided by the scented overlords of Magdag. And here they were marching in ranks and columns together, brothers in arms, shoulder to shoulder, disciplined and dedicated to a freedom that depended on their discipline. And once they had obtained their freedom — what of their so hardly-won and proudly-vaunted discipline then?

That was a problem for revolution, not rebellion. It must come later. It would come — I had vowed myself that — quite apart from the duty I conceived the Star Lords demanded from me.

We forged a weapon, there in the miasmic odors and the odoriferous mud of the ghetto. We drilled and trained. We built barricades from which we practiced hurling a sleeting storm of crossbow bolts. We devised tricks and traps, things like loops of rope hung between houses, balks of timber to be thrust hock-high across from door to door — for I believed we would have to call down the wrath of the overlords upon us and meet them in the confines of our warrens.

In this, I found to my surprise, I stood alone.

“Soon,” said Genal with the lust for battle kindling unpleasantly in his eyes, “Genodras will disappear. The accursed Zim will, for a short space, prevent us seeing the true light of the sky.”

I had to stand and take all this without a murmur.

“The overlords retire into their great halls during this time of the Great Death as they await the Great Birth. We workers must grovel in our shacks and hovels, condemned to the warrens. We are not permitted in the halls during their times of use, when all they stand for becomes revealed.”

“Aye!” growled the listeners, rough, bearded men, their hands horny with labor.

“Then is the time to strike!” declared Genal. “We are debarred from the great rituals of Grodno, when sacrifices are made so that Genodras, the all-mighty green sun, will reappear. We may never witness the sacred ceremonies. Then, my brothers, then is the time to rise up in our justified wrath and strike down the oppressors!”

Genal, it was clear, had been spending a lot of time with the Prophet. He had caught the intonation as well as the words.

It was a good plan, in the sense that we could sweep up into the city in a great wave of iron, steel, and bronze, and find no overlords to bar our path. I felt sure we could deal with the mercenary guards in the confident strength of our newly-won military skill. Then it would be a matter of driving from one great hall of mystery to another, routing out the occupants at their rituals and slaying them piecemeal. I had no objection in principle to this wholesale killing of the overlords of Magdag; you must remember that at that time I was, besides being very young, thoroughly steeped in the precepts of Zair who hated and detested all things of Grodno. I felt it my binding duty to the Krozairs of Zy to destroy everything green on the inner sea, no less than my more nebulous demands from the Star Lords. If I have given the impression that I am an easy person to live with, then the impression is false. I know I am an exceedingly difficult person to get along with. I know this. I have been told. Poor Holly and Genal found that out, and Mayfwy had been marvelously understanding and undemanding. My Clansmen, chief among them Hap Loder, had of course other reasons for submitting to my ill humors. Sometimes I felt a sensation I knew must be a cold terror as I contemplated what I would do to my Delia, my gentle, fierce Delia of the Blue Mountains when at last we settled down to a form of married life in distant Vallia. As far as killing the overlords of Magdag was concerned I was again brushed by that feeling of doom spreading shadowy wings over me. I had to shrug it off. Didn’t I hate everything green about the inner sea, about Magdag and its slavers? I rallied to the plan. It was good. We would catch the overlords with, as the saying goes, their pants down.

“This means we must wait even longer,” Holly pointed out.

“Yes.” Genal eyed her and, as I had noticed whenever he looked more than casually at Holly — which was almost always — he became hot and most un-Genal like in his reactions. Now he said: “We must wait just that little longer beneath the lash; old snake will cut our backs open for just that little longer. But the waiting will be more than worth the pain! For we will squeeze these Grodno forsaken overlords, we will crush them, hall by hall we will tear them apart, sweeping over them like the rashoon of Grodno himself!”

Holly looked at me. Pugnarses looked at Holly, and then swung to glare at me. Genal stared. “Well, Stylor?”

“It is a good plan,” I said. “We will wait.”

There would be more time to train my little cadre and begin to show them what tactical fighting was all about. I thought of my projected barricades with a twinge of regret, but I have always been, like the men of Segesthes, an attacking fighter except when I may gain an advantage by fighting in defense. Genal had mentioned the rashoon, the sudden treacherous storm wind that blows up on the Eye of the World, and for some reason this reminded me of Nath and Zolta, my old oar comrades. Were they even now, perhaps, battling a rashoon on the heaving decks of a swifter? I felt a stifling choking in the warrens of Magdag. How I longed to stand once more on the quarterdeck of a swifter — that huge swifter to whose command I had never reached!

Then I saw the solid phalanx of my friends, the slaves and workers of the warrens of Magdag, marching steadily across the plaza. The pikes all slanted at a single angle. They marched solidly, close-packed, yet there was about those men a swing, a lilt, almost, that lifted me back to reality again. Bolan roared a command and the pikes swung down into their hedgehog of points, neatly, swiftly, as the men had been trained. Once the philosophy of the pike has been shown a man who must fight on foot, and once he grasps the thick haft with its iron bands in his fists and stands shoulder to shoulder with his comrades, he rapidly understands why he is there packed into the pike phalanx.

Bolan’s bald head gleamed in the twin suns’ light. Some of the men had fashioned caps of leather. Most were bareheaded and their shaggy manes troubled me. Leather — there is no leather so highly prized as the leather of Sanurkazz, the Magdag efforts being quite inferior; but the Magdaggians have the knack of beautifying leather, of adorning it with stampings and colors that make it beautiful and valuable. A lucrative two-way commerce was viable, there, if the red and the green were not opposed. Sheemiff, the girl Fristle, strolled onto the plaza and stood idly watching the parade. She had, I knew, become a fast hand at loading and handing and was now training hard to become a first-class shooter. In military matters hierarchies of command and order are perhaps at their loosest in a rebellious army whose men all subscribe to the fight with everything they possess. But I had instituted ranks, for I wanted orders given in the heat of combat to be passed rapidly and to be obeyed instantly. Mind you, even then I believe I would far rather have been sitting on a sun-drenched terrace, with Delia by my side, munching a handful of palines and laughing in the fresh air.

But a stricture had been laid on me.

Bare heads and Sheemiff mingled in my mind. I saw myself once more down by the muddy, bloody banks of the river, where the piles of vosk skulls lay hard and obstinate in the sun. “Old vosk skull!”

Zolta would call Nath. Yes.

“Sheemiff!” I called. She ran to me eagerly, her slit eyes lighting up, her golden fur sleek and brushed.

“What does my Jikai desire?”

When I told her she looked surprised and disappointed, but she ran off willingly enough. There were some men who swore that a Fristle virgin knew more about the arts of love than a temple maiden from Loh. I wouldn’t know about that — then — and dismissed the idea. When she returned, Holly, Genal, Pugnarses, and Bolan, who had dismissed the phalanx, with some of the other leaders, were talking about all the plans we were maturing. Sheemiff walked up to me in the center of the group and held out the vosk skull on her hands.

The uproar around me, as you may imagine, was comical in the still center of the tragic situation brewing. Vosk skulls! What had they to do with the glorious revolution?

I showed those slaves and workers of Magdag just what the skull of the vosk did have to do for us. I lifted it high in the air. Then, having seen that Sheemiff had washed it thoroughly in the river, and cleaned it, and dried it, I brought it down over my head. I felt the weight come on my own skull. I stared out through those two blank orbits. The nose bone joined them and projected down like a nosepiece of a helmet.

“The overlords call us vosks!” I shouted. “They call us fools and mangy cramphs, and calsanys — and vosks — stupid, obstinate vosks. Very well. The vosk has a skull of a thickness, my friends. Of a redoubtable thickness, as everyone knows, for the piles of skulls by the river attest this and the broken grindstones in the bone mills. So! We take on with pride all the stubborn thickheadedness of the vosk!” I banged the flat of my long sword against the skull. “We are the vosk-helmets, my friends! Vosk-helmets who will smash into the green halls of Magdag and destroy every last overlord!”

They took it very well. Even as some debated and others ran to the river for their own skull-helmets, I felt the ringing in my head. These vosk-helmets would have to be well-padded, with grass and rags and moss.

We set up a vosk skull on a rock and took turns in smashing at it with a variety of weapons. Even I, who had surmised that nature would take care of so stubborn and stupid a creature as the vosk, was surprised at the resistance offered by the skulls. I remembered when we had let loose the vosks in the Marble Quarries of Zenicce — they had been Segesthan vosks, larger than these of the inner sea. These vosk skulls fitted a man’s head like a tailored helmet, and they thrust two upcurving horns forward, arrogant now that all the flesh and skin had been stripped away.

Holly grabbed my arm.

“Oh, Stylor — you are clever! They will save many a poor man’s life—”

Genal and Pugnarses looked on.

I said: “We are downtrodden, Holly, like the vosk, considered stupid. So we take as our badge of pride the old vosk skull; we are the Vosk-Helmets! From the lowly comes forth the victory.”

The Prophet was standing nearby and I had not been able to resist the magniloquence. Afterward, I felt ridiculous. But the people responded, as they do, and the work went on. Most of the crossbows were fashioned with a bow of horn and wood; some we made of steel. But quantity, for the moment, had to take priority over quality. I put the steel bows into a corps and made sure the best shots were assigned there. We colored our vosk-helmets yellow, purloining the paint from the paint masters on the great friezes. I gave colored scraps of cloth as badges of rank. We drilled. Gradually we were turning into an army.

And all the time the slaves and workers continued their labors on the great halls. Now work was concentrated on just finishing the nearest-completed hall. It was necessary, as I understood, that at least one new hall be finished for this time of the Great Death. It took season after season to complete a hall, of course, within the complex of the massive buildings that could have swallowed all the pyramids at a gulp.

Having discussed the question of overlord spies among us, I had been reassured by my group leaders. We could carry on our work within the complexes of the warrens and lookouts would warn us of any onslaught from the overlords. Of spies, the slaves had experience. A man, acting the slave, acts differently from one who had felt old snake on his naked back, or so the men said. I was not so sure, but in this had to trust those on the spot.

I was aware that despite their willingness to drill and march the slaves were irked by the enforced discipline. Their ideas of rebellion consisted of snatching up a sword and a torch and running like crazy through the streets. Clearly, they became more difficult to hold in check as the time for the Great Death approached. It was also apparent that Pugnarses and Genal were irked. They had drawn closer together of late, and this pleased me. They were often in long, involved, passionate discussions, which would break up as soon as I appeared. I was glad they were more friendly now than they had seemed to be. Bolan was a tower of strength, his bald head covered by a massive yellow-painted vosk skull. He was manipulating the pikemen into a force I considered might just have a chance against the overlord cavalry. Just a chance, before they were cut to pieces, but that single chance would be all we would have. Although I had felt it desirous not to use either red or green as colors for the slave army — yellow and blue and black were the symbols and badges we used — the aspect of a religious war was fading. I did not see this clearly then. Zair forgive me — I actually thought I was extraordinarily clever in thus turning the Grodno-worshiping workers against their Grodno-worshiping masters. As the majority of the slaves were for Zair I had even further vague and nebulous plans I could not even acknowledge to myself, and as a consequence I completely overlooked the character of class war that had taken over. I was for Sanurkazz and Zair and the Krozairs of Zy. In that, I failed. I should have taken the longer view. . . One night, returning after a crossbow session with the sextets handling the steel bows, I halted on the threshold of the hovel. Genal was grasping Holly in his arms, pushing the shush-chiff she wore down over her shoulders, his lips seeking her soft flesh. Why she should wear a shush-chiff at this time I did not know, but apparently it had inflamed Genal. Holly was gasping.

“No, no, Genal! Leave off! Please—”

“But I love you, Holly! You know that — you’ve always known it. I’ll do anything, anything at all, for you, Holly—”

“You’re tearing my shush-chiff!”

Genal’s voice broke into an impassioned sob. “And was it for Pugnarses—”

“No — no! How can you say it! I don’t love either of you!”

I made a noise outside, and shuffled and dropped my long sword — a thing a warrior only does if he is troubled or scheming or dead — and then went in. We all acted as though nothing had happened. I am sure they did not know I had eavesdropped on their pitiful little scene. If I had taken more notice. . . But I considered this affair none of my business. They were both adult; they should be able to handle their amorous problems like adults. Perhaps I was too concerned over trivia like steel crossbows instead of looking at the springs of motivation of those around me, on whom the success of the revolution would depend.

We were all waiting now with a heightened expectation, for daily the green sun Genodras dropped lower and lower toward the red sun Zim, and the time of the Great Death was at hand. Each day brought the two closer together with an almost visible rate of closing. The moment Genodras dropped out of sight behind Zim would be the time we would rise. The workers had no care, now, in their passion, that they, too, were thought to own allegiance to Grodno. For them the seasons of oppression at last were to be broken. The whip and the chain were to be banished. No superstition would prevent that.

On what we all knew was the last night, Holly came to me. She had donned her shush-chiff, and oiled her body and hair, and she looked very delectable. She laughed at me in her own seemingly modest way, and all the blood surged into her innocent face.

“Why, Holly,” I said rashly. “You look charming.”

“Is that all, Stylor? Just — charming?”

The hovel did not seem to stink quite so badly in the sputtering, fluttering light of the candle. Genal and Pugnarses were out somewhere. I knew we were making last-minute attempts to create a line of underground communication with the slaves in the dock areas, where the bagnios would provide stalwart fighting-men once the initial attack had begun.

I felt uneasy and put that down to Holly’s presence.

A foot scraped at the door, but Holly did not hear, for she came to me, pouting, forcing herself to declare something that her nature made of tremendous difficulty and tremendous significance for her. I moved away, as though casually. I had no desire for Genal or Pugnarses — or Bolan, for that matter —

to stand in the role of eavesdropper on me as I had on Genal and Holly.

“Oh, Stylor — why are you so blind?”

Her gentle birdlike movements made me step back again, away from the bed where my mail coat and my long sword were hidden beneath the straw, but with the hilt of the long sword ready to instant hand.

“It will soon be time, Holly,” I said.

“Time for war, yes, Stylor. But is war all that obsesses you?”

“I should hope not!” I said.

I looked at her, at her bright eyes, the soft and supple figure beneath the shush-chiff, and the men who entered almost had me. They wore the slave gray, but they had fierce faces of overlords with the down-drooping Mongol moustaches, and they carried swords in their hands. There were four who had wrapped gray cloths about their faces so that only their eyes showed. My lunge for the long sword was made — I was on my way when the first arrow thunked into the wood

— and I did not stop then. I whirled with the long sword — and froze.

“That is better, cramph.” The overlord sneered the words.

The bent bow, the nocked arrow, the barbed head — they did not stop me, for the Krozairs make religious sport of striking flying arrows from the air with their swords. No — the arrow aimed directly at the heart of Holly, who shrank back, her hands to her mouth, her eyes enormous, choked with horror. I dropped the long sword, kicked it under the straw. They took me then, without a struggle, and all the time that merciless arrow remained pointing at Holly’s heart.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“A Krozair! You — the Lord of Strombor!”

I have sojourned for a spell in many prisons in my long life and the one beneath the colossal Magdag Hall na Priags was no worse than most and a lot better than some.

Stripped naked, spread-eagled out against a damp wall, my wrists and ankles clamped in rusty iron rings, chains dangling infuriatingly from the iron hoop about my waist, I waited in the half-darkness partly lit by a ruddy radiance streaming in through the iron-barred grille. All thought of the rebellion had fled from my mind. This was not because I despaired, but because I had seen a jumbled pile of my group commanders outside my hovel, dead, hideously dead. Bolan, I had seen, running shrieking into the warrens, his bald head glistening in the streaming radiance of the fourth moon, She of the Veils, and with the arrow striking through his left shoulder. All revolt, surely, would be crushed when the green sun reappeared.

The jailers took me up to judgment. They were men, for no half-human, half-beast mercenaries were allowed in the sacred halls of Magdag during the time of the Great Death and the Great Birth. Overlords of the second class, they were of a kind with that Wengard who had so viciously ordered me a touch of old snake.

The room into which I was conducted — pushed and shoved and pummeled — was walled and roofed in uncut stone. A sturm-wood table crossed an angle. Behind this the guard commander sat, all in mail, his long sword at his side. He stroked that ugly drooping Magdag moustache as he spoke.

“You will tell us of the final plans for the rebellion, rast. Otherwise you will die unpleasantly.”

I suppose he saw that this did not convince me; he knew as well as I that they would kill me out of hand. In this, as you shall hear, I was wrong.

“We know of your schemes, you whom the slaves call Stylor. We have samples of your pitiful slave-made weapons. But we would be more exact.”

They had been incautious enough to leave me with a bight of chain between my ankles. The chains around my bound wrists would, of course, serve as a weapon. I did not bother to kick the guards next to me. I went straight over the table, wrapped my wrist-chains around the guard commander’s neck, and hauled back.

“I will leave you enough air to tell these cramphs what to do,” I said, in his ear, low and venomous. He gobbled out a shrieked order to his men to stay back. Impasse.

The door opened and Glycas walked in.

He was speaking in his abrupt, authoritarian way before he was fairly through the opening.

“Send for the prisoner, Stylor. There is a mystery about this slave I would—” Then he saw me. His breath hissed in his throat. His long sword flashed clear of his scabbard.

“I shall cut you down, slave, whether you strangle that miserable guard commander or not.” He laughed, his silky, snakelike laugh. “Perhaps I will have him strangled, anyway, for allowing you this much effrontery.” He glared around at the paralyzed jailers. “Seize him!”

The death of this Magdag overlord of the second class would benefit no one. I let him go, regretfully, to be sure.

My brown hair had grown long, my trim moustache and beard a trifle shaggy, I was filthy, grimed and mucky with sweat. I stood clear before the table. Glycas kept his sword pointed.

“I am Stylor,” I said.

“Your friends have told me a great deal. But they know little of you, slave. You will tell me all I want to know.”

“Like, perhaps, where I came from? Where I vanished to? Like, perchance, that you are a foul green-scummed risslaca, Glycas?”

He gaped. For an instant, his composure deserted him. With a jerky strut he bore down on me, the long sword pointed at my breast. He took my filthily-bearded chin in his hand and twisted my head up into the lantern light. Again he drew that hissing breath between his teeth. His fist gripping my chin shook.

“Drak, Kov of Delphond!”

“And now, perhaps, you will free me from these undignified chains, let me have a bath and scented oils, and then provide me with an explanation and an apology—”

“Silence!” he roared. He stood back and still he did not lower the long sword. He would not risk his neck in the same position as the guard commander’s. “Enough. That you are Stylor, the wanted slave traitor, is enough for me. What else you have done to my sister, is between us, not of Magdag.”

“I have done nothing to the Princess Susheeng,” I said, before he hit me. “That is her trouble.” Then he hit me.

I was to be used in the rituals to insure the return of the green sun, Genodras, and the rebirth of Grodno. A medley of emotions tortured me. If I say that in some odd and hurtful way I was glad that this was to happen, I do not believe you will understand. Since this, my third period on Kregen, I had not been myself. Always, I had felt the unseen compulsion of the Star Lords — possibly, I thought then, of the Savanti also — forcing me into actions and deeds that were not truly of my nature. The suffocating sense of that shadowy doom I knew was reserved for me had inhibited me. Strange and mysterious powers had torn me from my own Earth, and I had responded eagerly, gladly. But the doom-laden feelings I could not shake off had soured all my thoughts and actions. Clearly, here in the great Hall na Priags of Magdag, I had been abandoned by the Star Lords, their plans for me betrayed, my usefulness at an end. I felt, suddenly, free, lightened, ready to be once again plain Dray Prescot, of Earth, and to face that menacing doom with all the callous courage I could summon up.

Captives of the highest rank were used in the ritual games of Magdag to propitiate, entreat, and insure the return of Genodras. We were bundled into iron-barred cages overlooking the great Hall na Priags so that we might see what awaited us and shudder at our fate. I stood gripping the bars, staring out on that fantastic scene as the lamplight and torchlight flickered and flared on the massive walls with their festoons of paintings and carvings, their murals exalting the power of Magdag, their sculptures of the beast-gods, the overwhelming decorative detail.

What I saw astonished me.

Around the cleared area where we would be tortured to death in manners weird and horrible to the mind of a sane man the rows of Magdaggian overlords waited. They waited for the entrance of the high overlord of this Hall na Priags, who was Glycas, in ceremonial procession. A sigh went up as the smoke swirled and lifted and the priests and the sacred guards walked sedately into that vast chamber. Glycas, as square, as hard, as corrupt as ever marched with the sacred golden covering held above his head by four nobles. I looked about. I was astonished.

Every single person present wore red.

Clad all in red, they waited or walked in a rhythmic swing toward the dais, all in red, and at their sides swung long swords, broken in half, their jagged edges protruding past the ripped-away ends of split scabbards.

All in red.

Here, in the heart of Magdag, stronghold of Grodno the Green!

Here, then, was part of the secret, part of the reason why only overlords and nobles were allowed to witness these rituals to insure the return of the green sun. We sacrifices, of course, were not expected to live. And I guessed at a part of that secret.

The green sun Genodras had been swallowed by the red sun Zim. What more natural, therefore, since there was now only a red sun in the sky of Kregen, that the worshipers of Grodno should seek to placate Zair, the deity of the red sun Zim! What, indeed! But, how shameful a fact to own in the world. How they must hate what they now did, clad in the hated red, parading to the glory not of Grodno, but of Zair. Begging, pleading, entreating, not Grodno, for the return of Genodras — but Zair!

“The blasphemers!” A naked man with the marks of the whip on his back clawed at the bars, cursing. The others with me in the sacrificial cages shouted and yelled, but the men of Magdag were accustomed to that. They ignored us.

In that moment had I any pity in my heart for the men of Magdag surely, then, I would have felt a pang, condemned as they were by the laws of astronomy to lose their godhead at each eclipse. But very quickly they were taking the sacrifices out, poking them with sharp swords, forcing them into the center of the cleared area where the torturers waited. What was done was fiendish, diabolical; and it was all done in the name of religious superstition.

The stink of incense, which has always sickened me, the noise of shouting, the resonant chanting rising ever and anon, the shrieks of the victims, the harsh feel of the iron bars in my fists, all melded into a hideous series of concussions in my brain. Around the hall were sited huge banners, of red cloth, embroidered with the devices and blazons of Sanurkazz, and of other southern cities, Zamu, Tremzo, Zond, and of citadels like Felteraz, and of individuals like Zazz, and Zenkiren — and Dray, Lord of Strombor! — and of organizations and orders like The Red Brethren of Lizz, and the Krozairs of Zy. Then I noticed the diabolical cunning in the thinking. As each victim fell to his death one of the red banners was removed, torn into pieces and cast upon the sacrificial fire. Here was an example of the twisted logic available to the fanatical mind in pursuit of a single desired object. And yet each ritual test was designed so that there was a chance, a slim one, perhaps one in a thousand, for the victim to escape and come through safely. If he did so the banner he had saved from the fire was relegated, but he was returned immediately to the cages to await a further trial. This was leem and woflo with a vengeance!

I had a hope I might come through safely.

My test was devilish and simple.

Over a gangway beneath which a series of razor-sharp knives moved jerkily, I had to run carrying a squirming half-grown leem. The leem is furry, feline, vicious, with eight legs, and sinuous like a ferret, with a wedge-shaped head equipped with fangs that can strike through lenk. When full-grown it is of a size with an Earthly leopard. This one was about the size of a spaniel; at once it sought to sink its fangs into me. I gripped it about the neck and started ruthlessly to choke it to death even as long swords prodded me over the gangway. I ran. Men and women of Magdag, laughing, swayed the gangway about so that I staggered and almost lost my footing to plunge bodily onto those circling scythe-like knives. But I gripped the leem which struggled and flailed its eight legs. It could not shriek, for I gripped it. Oh, how I gripped it! And I ran. When I reached the far side men with swords met me and I flung the leem full at them. They cut it down instantly, and sword points prodded my breast, forced me back to the cage. But I saw the deviced banner of Pur Zenkiren moved away from the sacrificial fire, and I exulted. I would await my next ordeal.

Feasting, singing, and ritual dancing went on all the time the sacrifices underwent their ordeals, and died. Slowly but remorselessly the victims and the brave red banners lessened in number. The hideous burs passed.

Then, as though in a daze, I saw, sitting at her brother’s side, laughing and drinking wine from a crystal goblet from Loh, the Princess Susheeng. Barbaric and gorgeous, she looked, clad all in red, the blood coloring her face, her eyes brilliant with kohl and her mouth a scarlet pout of sensual desire. She had seen me run. She had seen me, naked, the sweat pouring down my chest, my muscles bunching with frenzied energy, as I gripped the leem and ran above that pit of death. When I looked again, after the agonized scream of a poor devil who had failed to draw his head back in time so that the buzz-saw-like wheel of knives had decapitated him, Susheeng was gone. The sacrificial cages opened by small and well-guarded barred gates onto the great hall. To the rear lay the entrances through which we had been escorted. Beyond them lay the complex of this megalithic structure, one with possibly a score of halls like this, where even now other rituals were being played out in death.

Within the structures, used only during these times, lay kitchens, bedrooms, dressing rooms, and all the facilities the overlords would need. The rear door opened and more sacrifices were thrust in at the points of swords. An overlord in mail gripped my arm. He jerked me back from the bars.

“This way, rast. And quietly.”

I followed him. We left the cage and, with six other guards, walked along the stone corridor. I understood then that someone who knew me had sent these men. Seven guards, overlords all, had been considered essential. Along the corridors guards and sacrifices moved, with personal slaves, pampered pets of the palace household, scurrying about their business. They would never be allowed into the great halls at this time.

The leem I had carried had managed to rake one of his clawed pads down my chest. The blood oozed. The seven guards were overlords of the second class. Their drooping moustaches were extravagantly long. They carried their swords naked in their hands. They had been told about me. We entered a high, narrow room, hung with brilliant tapestries depicting the hunt of Galliphron when he discovered the succulence of a vosk rasher grilled over an open fire. The guards went out; they backed away from me and the last I saw of them was the tips of their swords. The other door opened and the Princess Susheeng entered.

She looked pale, the spots of color burning in her cheeks. Her manner was frightened, wild, inflamed, jerky.

“Drak — Drak! I saw you—” She bit her lip, staring at me. I regarded her calmly. She held out a gray slave breechclout and a tunic embroidered with the black and green device of the overseer of the balass. Beneath her arm she carried the balass stick. She was still clad all in red, and her bosom heaved uncontrollably. Her eyes were large and hypnotic upon me.

“Why, Susheeng?” I asked.

“I could not see you die thus! I do not know — do not ask me. I cannot explain. Hurry, you calsany!”

I put on the gray slave clothes. I took the balass. I did not strike her with it.

“You must hide until Genodras returns—”

“It would be better, Susheeng, if I left now, would it not?”

“Ah, Drak! Cannot you stay, even now! Even after I have risked—”

“I thank you, Princess, for what you have done.” I looked at her. She was exceedingly beautiful, in her lush overblown way. “I think you have forgiven me for what happened in the Palace of the Emerald Eye.”

“No!” She flamed at me. “I have offered you everything! Yet you ridiculed me. Oh, how I rejoiced when those two cramphs betrayed you to my brother! How I thought I would glee in your death, in agony! But

— but—”

“Who?”

She shrugged those full shoulders, pouting. “It does not matter. Two cramphs of workers. They have been condemned now—”

“Who!”

My face must have worked its usual havoc. She shrank back. “Two overseers of the balass —

Pugnarses, I believe, and Genal—”

“No!” I said. I felt the hurt, the agony, there, that I had never felt when a sword bit, when a leem’s claws struck.

She saw that. Triumph spurred her on. “They betrayed you! Pugnarses, because the fool thought to wear the mail and sword of an overlord! And the other, because Pugnarses talked him into it, made him out of jealousy of a girl—”

“Holly!” I said.

“Yes,” she said, the venom biting. “A disgusting girl — cramph, Holly, who even now awaits my brother’s pleasure.”

“And the two — Pugnarses and Genal?” Again she moved those rounded shoulders, indifferent to their fates. She had always taken what she wanted; she still believed she could take me if she tried hard enough. “They are to be sacrifices. It is just. They presumed.”

“Just! Is that Magdaggian justice?”

“What do you, a Kov of Vallia, know of Magdaggian justice?”

I gripped her shoulder.

“I would like to find those two—”

“To kill them? To take your revenge?” She let me grasp her and swayed into me, clasping me in her arms. “Ah, no, Drak. No! Let them go. Escape. I have it all arranged. When Genodras returns and the world is green once again — then we can ride!”

“Where to? Sanurkazz?”

She shook her head against my chest. “No. I have wide estates. No one will question the Princess Susheeng. I will create a new identity for you, my Drak. We can return to Magdag. I have wealth enough for us both, and to spare—”

I had had, for the moment, enough of new identities.

She had been clever in not attempting to find a hauberk of width enough to encompass those shoulders of mine, and an overseer of the balass was nicely balanced to move about the megalithic complex without question within the hierarchical structure. I moved to the door. My face was set.

“Where are you — Drak! No! Please — NO! ”

“I thank you for your help, Susheeng. I do not blame you for what you are. That is not of your manufacture.” I opened the door. “If you wish to call the guards, that is your privilege.”

She ran to me, caught the gray slave tunic. Outside, a guard detail passed with a sacrifice screaming between them.

“Drak! I will come with you!”

We went out together. She preceded me, as was proper, and she led me through the maze of corridors, avoiding the halls from which floated the horrid sounds of the rituals. There was nothing I could do for those men of Zair now, here in a hive of mailed Magdaggian might. But my blood boiled and my heart thumped the quicker, and I had to hold myself very stiff and straight as we passed those men of Magdag. Genal and Pugnarses were chained together in a cell, awaiting their call to the sacrificial games. They looked miserable and woebegone and defeated. I was glad to notice they did not look frightened. They had had time to think, chained naked in a Magdag dungeon.

They saw me over the shoulder of the guard. Their eyes popped and they would have spoken out and so betrayed me once again had I not struck the guard on his chin, above the opened ventail. I took his keys and his sword.

I stood looking at them, as Susheeng hovered uncertainly at the door, peering with frightened eyes into the corridor. I shook the keys before them.

“Stylor—” Genal swallowed. He looked sick. “If you are going to kill us, do it now. I deserve it, for I betrayed you.”

Pugnarses, in turn, swallowed. He stared at the sword as a man stares at a snake. “Strike hard, Stylor.”

“You pair of fools!” I said. I spoke fiercely, hotly, angrily, feeling all the hurt in me. “You betrayed me because of Holly. Did you not see the pile of corpses — of our own men? The group leaders dead, the glorious revolution finished?”

“We—” croaked Genal.

“I persuaded Genal,” said Pugnarses. “I wanted to be an overlord! I thought they would believe two of us more than one alone. I must take the blame, Stylor—”

“And see what the men of Magdag do in return, how they repay your treachery!” My face, I could see, made them believe all was over for them. “I can understand either of you doing anything for love of a girl, and I suppose you thought she must choose one of you! Betraying a rival is a small thing to a man so obsessed with a girl. But you betrayed everyone and everything we worked and struggled for. You betrayed more than me, Stylor!”

I lifted the sword. Both of them stared at me, unflinching.

I reached across with the keys, threw down the sword, and snapped open the locks.

“Now,” I said. “Old vosk heads. We fight!”

But first — there was Holly.

I handed the sword to Susheeng. She hesitated. A party of guards moved past a cross corridor. I motioned to them. “A shout, Princess, and how do you explain this?”

She flung herself around, taking the sword, and almost, I believe, the impulse to cut us down mastered her. Then she led us on. The swing of her hips as she walked ahead of us made a fascinating sight

“Wait here,” she said outside her brother’s palatial apartments within the megalith. “I will bring the girl.”

When she had gone, Pugnarses said: “Can we trust her?”

Genal said: “We have to. She, and Stylor, are our only hope.”

“And when we get back to the warrens,” I said, “what is to become of her then?”

Genal looked at me, and away. He felt his disgrace keenly. Pugnarses, uncharacteristically, said: “At another time, Stylor, I would have counseled: ‘Kill her!’ But I do not think you will do that.” He eyed me.

“Do you love her?”

“No.”

“But she loves you.”

“She believes so. She will get over it.”

“And — Holly?”

“Holly,” I said, “is a sweet child. But my love lies far away from here, in another land, and I remain here only because it is a stricture laid on me. As soon as I have finished my work, then — then, believe me, I shall leave Magdag and all its evil ways far behind me!”

I spoke with a passion that forced them to believe. Holly, following Susheeng meekly, came out then, and she saw me and the color flooded her cheeks.

I merely said: “Hurry, Princess.”

There was no time, as I saw it, for a traumatic and emotional outbreak. I wanted to get back to the warrens. We all knew what would happen as soon as Genodras reappeared in the sky above Kregen and the overlords of Magdag were freed from their superstitious imprisonment in the megalithic complexes.

Susheeng, it was clear, still believed she could persuade me to accede to her plan. To her it would appear the only sensible plan, indeed, the only and inevitable one.

Why would a man, a Kov of Delphond, choose to return to a stinking rasts’ nest of workers and slaves?

We hurried through the corridors. Truth to tell, I was beginning to think we would break clear away without trouble.

“This way,” panted Susheeng. “Up this narrow staircase lies a bridge and then a descent to the outside. I dare not venture out while Genodras is gone from the sky. We can wait.”

I did not say anything to that. I would not wait.

At the top of that steep flight of stairs, walled with enameled tiles depicting fantastic birds, animals, and beasts, two mailed guards were descending. Torchlight struck back from their mail. Between them they marched a captive, a fresh sacrifice for the ritual games. He was haggard, bearded, filthy. But I recognized him. I moved aside to let them pass.

But Rophren, that certain Rophren who had been first lieutenant aboard Pur Zenkiren’s Lilac Bird and had failed in the rashoon, recognized me too.

A shout lifted from the foot of the stairs. More torches spattered lurid orange light upon the brilliant tiles.

“Hai! Princess! Princess Susheeng — that man is Stylor! They are escaped slaves! They are dangerous!”

I took the first guard’s sword away and chopped him over the back of the neck. He pitched forward and tumbled all the way to the bottom. Pugnarses and Genal dealt with the second guard, who joined the first in a tumbled heap at the feet of his comrades. They started up.

“Run!” screamed Susheeng.

We now had three long swords.

Rophren reached out a hand.

His haggard face looked uplifted, lightened. He squared his shoulders with a gesture at once instinctive and defiant.

“Lahal, Pur Dray,” he said. His voice sounded thick, drugged. “Give me a sword. I would be pleased to exchange hand blows with these Zair-benighted rasts of Magdag. You go on and take the women with you.”

He knew I could not do that. But he meant it. I looked at him.

“Lahal, Rophren,” I said.

“I am of the Red Brethren of Lizz,” he said proudly, with a lift of his head. “I wished to be a Krozair of Zy, but the rashoon stopped all my hopes there. Give me the sword. I will die here, and none will pass until I am dead.”

“I believe you, Rophren. I will stay with you.”

I reached for the long sword Susheeng held. She was looking at me with a wild light in her eyes and she shrank back. “What—?”

Rophren took the sword. He hefted it. The mailed overlords of Magdag were hurrying up the stairs toward us. “It is good to feel a sword in my fist again,” he said. “I have been captive too long.” He laughed then, and swung the blade. “Stay, as you will, Pur Dray, my Lord of Strombor, you who are a Krozair of Zy. It will be a great fight. Stay and you, a Krozair, may see how a Red Brother of Lizz can die!”

Susheeng was staring at me with all of horror and hell in her eyes. “A Krozair,” she whispered. “You —

the Lord of Strombor!”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

My Vosk-Helmets greet the overlords of Magdag

Truth to tell, all during this imprisonment in the colossal structures of Magdag where I was a sacrificial victim in the ritual games to insure the return of Genodras, I had been half hoping against all reason that the workers and slaves of the warrens would continue our plans, would mount the attack despite the catastrophic loss of their leaders. If ever there was a need for them to put in an appearance, it was now. Even while the Princess Susheeng shrank back from me, her face a white mask of fury and despair, a seething agony of acrimony I could well understand impelling her to turn from me at last and finally, the mailed men ran up the flight of stairs.

“A Krozair!” she said. Her fists struck again and again at my chest. “A pest-ridden rast of a Sanurkazz pirate! The vilest Sanurkazzian Krozair of them all, Pur Dray Prezcot, the Lord of Strombor!” She was laughing and shrieking now, mad and wild with the frenzy that tore her. Holly came up and took her shoulders and wrenched her away. Holly’s face was as blanched and set as those of Pugnarses and Genal. To them it was inconceivable that an escaped galley slave hiding in the warrens might be a Krozair. Krozairs, they knew, fought to the death.

“They come,” grunted Rophren. He had wanted to be a Krozair of Zy, and his crisis of nerves during the rashoon had blasted his hopes. But the Red Brethren of Lizz were a renowned order. He had redeemed himself; he would die well. I do not subscribe to the view that a single act of courage can wash out all a man’s crimes, as is so often said; but Rophren, for me, had committed no crime save that of being unfit to be a sailor.

We stood, Rophren, Pugnarses, and I, with our long swords eager to smite down on the coifs of the advancing overlords. We fought. There were only ten of them and in accounting for five of them I felt I had betrayed my comrades, for Pugnarses was wrestling his sword out of the cranium of one while Genal struggled hand-to-hand with another who sought to cut down Pugnarses from the side — and Rophren was down, on his knees, bending over with his life’s blood bubbling through his fingers. But there were ten dead overlords littering the stair.

We stepped back from the carnage. Pugnarses, with a curse, kicked the bodies down the steps. I knelt by Rophren. He tried to smile. “Say Lahal and Remberee for me to Pur Zenkiren,” he whispered, and so died.

Pugnarses and Genal were collecting the swords.

“Why burden yourself with them?” I asked. Susheeng was vomiting all over those brilliant tiles. I knew it was not because she had seen men die.

“We can give them to the slaves!” snapped Pugnarses. “They will fight—”

“As you have just done, Pugnarses? With your blade wedged in your opponent’s head? The skill, Pugnarses, the skill.”

He swore vilely, bitterly, but he kept the swords.

I approached the Princess Susheeng. She looked up. Her cheeks were stained with tears, vomit slicked on her ripe lips.

“Will you stay here, Princess? You will be safe, for none know now how we escaped.”

I felt sorry for her. She had suffered exceedingly; and now she had discovered that the man for whom she conceived she bore a lifelong love had turned, at a single disastrous stroke, into a hereditary enemy. Truly, I think she had suffered enough.

“And are you truly Pur Dray, Krozair, the Lord of Strombor?”

“I am.” Did I speak boastfully? I do not think so. Did I speak pridefully? Ah, there, I think I did.

“How can I love a man of Zair?” she wailed.

“You do not love me, Susheeng—”

“Have I not proved it?” she flashed back at me.

I could not answer that. There was no answer.

Holly made a small movement, and I turned, and she stood there, clad in the gray slave breechclout, with a sword in her little fist. “We had best be going, Stylor.”

“Yes,” I said. I turned back. “Susheeng — try not to think ill of me. You do not understand the compulsions that drive me. I am not as other men. I do not love you — but I think you have touched a chord in me.”

She stood up. In that moment, with the tears and the vomit smearing her face, her hair unbound and disarrayed, she looked as close to a human being as I had ever seen her. I thought, then, that if she had the luck to fall in love with the right man she would turn out well. But that is something not of that pressing moment when we stood on the stairs with their florid tiles, in the megalith of Magdag.

“I cannot go with you into the warrens, Drak,” she said.

“No. I did not expect you to. Try to think well of me, Susheeng, for red and green will not always be in conflict.” I bent and kissed her. She did not move or respond. I suspect that she was trying to hate me, then, and failing. Her emotions had been drained from her, her will power exhausted. “Go down to your friends, Susheeng. As long as we live, we will not forget this moment.”

She started to walk down the steps. She moved like a mechanical doll of Loh struts, jerkily, almost tottering at each step. She halted. She looked up. “You will all be killed when Genodras returns to the sky.” The words seemed hardly to mean anything to her. “Remberee, Kov Drak.”

“Remberee, Princess Susheeng.”

She walked away from us, her hated red dress draggling on the flight of stairs, under torches, between those brilliant tiles of winged birds and horned beasts.

We descended the opposite flight and passed out into the brilliance of a day on Kregen when only Zim, the red sun, shone in the sky.

With our news, and with what they suspected, and the wailing over the pile of corpses of their group leaders, the warrens were in uproar.

“The overlords will ride in and destroy us all!” shouted Bolan. His bald head gleamed orange in the light. We had avoided the half-human guards on our way in. But I knew they would happily fulfill their contracts with the men of Magdag and charge into warrens to discipline us. We faced the kind of decision I think must face any man, any group of men, if he or they wish eventually to taste their rightful portion of life.

Because the orbit of Kregen is slanted steeply to the plane of the ecliptic the green sun during this eclipse appeared to descend at a sharp angle on the red; it would appear at the opposite side at the same angle. I looked about. Were there green tints returning to the orange colors of Kregen?

Soon men and women were running and screaming through the alleys and maze of courts.

“Genodras is returning! Woe! Woe!”

By reason of the place where the green sun was appearing from the red I knew what the men of Zair would say was happening. How that information, that I was a Krozair, had shattered Susheeng! Genal and Pugnarses had little conception; I was still Stylor to them. And I was still their military commander. I ordered the Prophet to be found.

He came up, his beard as defiant as ever. Holly, Pugnarses, Genal, and Bolan gathered at the head of slaves and workers from all over the warrens. I climbed onto the roof of our hovel to harangue them. What I said was a long series of clichés about liberty, freedom, what we had planned, vengeance for our dead. I roused them. I pointed out that from our barricaded warrens we stood a chance of defeating the mailed men.

In the uproar and the driven dust, a furry form glided to the front, leaped up beside me. Sheemiff, the girl Fristle, screamed for attention. When some quiet returned, she shouted:

“We must fight, or we must die. If we die without fighting, what better off are we if we die having tried and struggled to win? This man Stylor, he is a great Jikai — follow him! Fight!”

“My comrades!” I shouted. “We will fight. And we can win by using the weapons we have made and trained ourselves to use. We will fight — and we will win!”

After that there followed all the bustle and hectic activity attending the preparations for a siege as we dragged our clumsy barricades across the mouths of alleys, set our rope and spike traps, brought out the pikes and the shields, the crossbows and the sheaves of bolts. Finally, like a field of daffodils opening all together in the yellow sun of my old Earth, we donned our yellow-painted vosk-helmets. Then, accoutered, ready to fight and die, we took our posts.

Other leaders were appointed to take command of the groups. We four — Bolan, Pugnarses, Genal, and I — would each take a point of the compass, north, south, east, and west, and hold it. We swore to hold until death. We gripped hands, and went to our posts.

I looked up into the sky and saw a white dove circling up there. I swallowed down a knot in my throat. The Savanti, then, had not forgotten me. It had been a long time.

The mailed men, the overlords of Magdag, rode out to crush the slave revolt. With them marched their half-human, half-beast mercenaries: Fristles, Ochs, Rapas, Chuliks, all bent on our destruction. I placed Holly in command of the sextets of steel-bowed crossbowmen. The shields were raised, carried by lads whose task it was to shield our men from the shafts of the foe. The pike phalanxes waited, ready to thrust out on my command. I intended to leave the Prophet to handle a great deal of my post, that facing away from the city, for I wished to be everywhere the attack was most hotly pressed. Pugnarses had insisted on taking the post facing the city of Magdag. He licked his lips. Though he wore a long sword scabbarded to his hip, he carried a halberd.

We had all snatched time for a little sleep, but a sailor’s life had inured me to working through long periods of sleeplessness. The last of the youngsters, boys and girls both, returned from scattering the caltrops in the spaces before the alley openings into the warrens. Various ugly chevaux-de-frise had likewise been fixed across openings. Horses would not face them and I did not think the sectrixes would, either. I would not have dreamed of lifting a zorca against them, and I would have thought twice of the ability of a vove to surmount them. Behind our crude but, I hoped, effective barricades, our weapons in our hands, our eyes bright, and our breaths hard and short, we awaited the onslaught from the mailed men, the overlords of Magdag.

A little wind lifted the dust. Birds were singing with incongruously cheerful notes into the early air, and a gyp — a brown and white spotted gyp, I recall, very like a Dalmatian — lolloped yelping and alone between the caltrops.

The overlords, confident in their muscle, might, and habitual authority in riding down at will the workers and slaves, attacked firmly and in strength and directly. They knew we had made weapons for ourselves, for Genal, not without the agony of remorse burning him, told me he had shown them an example of a halberd and a glaive. Getting a pike and a crossbow out of the warrens and into the palace had not been possible, for obvious reasons. I sensed that Genal, if not Pugnarses, had regretted his weak decision to betray us for love of a girl at a very early stage. Pugnarses — and I believe he could not rid himself of the sight of Rophren dying on the stairs — remained sullen and hating and determined to prove himself what he truly was: a worker, never an overlord.

That first furious onslaught when the overlords tried to charge into the warrens in their usual fashion foundered on the cruel iron spikes of the caltrops and the chevaux-de-frise. The mailed cavalry drew off, surprised but undaunted, and the half-human mercenaries ran forward to remove the obstructions covered by a brisk barrage of arrows. Looking down from our barricade I could see the quick movements of the Ochs and the Rapas. Chuliks, of course, would be reserved for more positive and noble kinds of fighting. Pugnarses stood next to me. He looked haggard, lean, and wolfish. He said: “Shall we shoot them down?”

An arrow sailed past our heads, to carom from the upraised shield of a young armor-bearer. I looked at him and, instinctively, he straightened up from his flinch and his jaw set stubbornly.

“No. I want to reserve the bows for the overlords.”

“Hah!” said Pugnarses. He looked extraordinarily mean.

When a lane had been cleared through the caltrops the mailed might charged again. They came straight for us in a great thundering roll of mail and upraised swords. I lifted my own long sword, the one I had retrieved from the straw of my bed, the long sword that was the gift of Mayfwy. I slashed it down. At once the shooters of the crossbows discharged their bolts. With a smooth and practiced flow of action the shooters handed the discharged bow to the hander, took a freshly-loaded bow, and let fly with that. Behind the shooter his loaders and spanners worked like maniacs to maintain the rate of discharge I demanded. Bolts whickered through the hot air. Mailed men reared back in their saddles. Quarrels struck through their mail, pierced their mounts, lanced into their faces. A shrill screaming arose. The mailed charge lashed in confusion, like a sea running all crisscross on a rocky coast. And all the time the crossbows twanged and clanged and scattered their death upon the overlords of Magdag.

The overlords had never experienced this before. They reeled back. Their sectrixes galloped away. Dismounted men ran after their comrades and my marksmen shot them down without mercy, for we expected none.

Six times they charged.

Six times we cut them to pieces.

Because there was nowhere near enough mail to equip all my men, I disdained it. Also, I felt a savage affection for people and places and things long past. So I wore a scarlet breechclout strapped around with the leather belt from which swung the long sword. I fancied old Great Aunt Shusha would have smiled could she see me in that moment on the barricades of the warrens. And Maspero, too — for this was a pale replica of the Savanti hunting leathers I had grown to know so well. On my head I wore a yellow-painted vosk skull, like my men, for there were vosk skulls to spare. On the seventh charge, just as it was falling back in confusion, an uproar began over on the flank of the warrens fronting the river. Here Genal commanded. And here the overlords while keeping us in play with their own mailed cavalry had sent in the Chuliks. Those savage and prideful warriors with their yellow skins and their uprearing tusks had fought through the arrow storm and were now at hand-strokes all along the barricades linking the alley mouths. I had known, given the extent of the warrens, that complete defense at every point would be well-nigh impossible, but the Chuliks had stormed through more rapidly than I liked.

With a shout of good cheer to Pugnarses I hurried off toward the river flank. The Chuliks met me in a plaza, scattering before them a spray of running slaves who dropped their weapons the better to run.

Everything happened very fast, as is the way during moments of crisis. I shouted to Holly as her crossbows fanned out.

“Fast and accurately, Holly!”

She nodded. Her breast heaved beneath the gray tunic with its mailed coat beneath — a hauberk I had insisted she wear — and the yellow and black badges flashed bravely. She rattled out her orders; the sextets formed, like a series of wedges, and then they went into action. I watched, filled with suspense, for this was a severe trial for my bowmen.

“May Zair shine on you now!” said I. “Shoot straight!”

Over the open plaza the Chuliks, strong and agile, should have reached the slave and worker bowmen with ease. But, for a reason those in command could not at first understand, the Chuliks were falling, lying in heaps and droves across the dust and the bloodied mud. Those that did pass through the arrow storm were met by the halberdiers and the swordsmen of the support groups, protecting the bows. We shot and shot. The Chuliks hesitated; they turned — Holly shouted: “Up, all! Loose! ”

And every sextet let fly with six bolts.

The Chuliks were never a force in the battle after that.

It raged, that battle; slowly we were forced in, past one barricade after another as the mailed overlords dismounted from their sectrixes and went at it as infantry, with flashing swords. We held them off. The issue hung for some time in the balance.

But the morale of our men, our slaves and workers, grew and increased even as they were being pressed back. For they saw the death toll they were taking. They saw how our armor-bearers, our lads carrying shields, could protect us from the arrow storm until the moment when the arme blanche men stepped out to throw back yet another attack. It went on for a long time, for the overlords could not understand, they could not conceive, that their habitual authority could no longer be imposed. They were used to riding bravely into the warrens and harrying anything they saw. Now, what they saw wore a yellow vosk-helmet and shot a crossbow, or speared with a deadly pike point. They could not understand; but as their losses mounted and they saw their friends writhing in the dust with their mail pierced or shattered, the blood spouting, as they heard the frenzied shrieks of their brothers or cousins in the throes of death, they had to believe they could not subjugate the slaves and the workers. And still the sleeting hail of the crossbow-shot bolts and quarrels burst about them. There were very many slaves in the warrens of Magdag, and many workers. We had manufactured a great many bolts for the crossbows — a very great many.

The body of longbowmen from Loh performed stoutly, and I used them as snipers and sharpshooters. I did not know how many surprised Magdaggian overlords pitched from their saddles with a cloth yard shaft in them — surprised in the few moments left before they died.

All over the city-end of the warrens slaves and workers were pushing back the overlords and their hired mercenary beast-men.

I sensed the victory within our grasp.

We had fought our way back toward the original line where the conflict had begun. I ordered my pikes to form phalanx ready for what I hoped would be the final charge. Holly prepared to march in the intervals to give cover. I was covered in a thick paste of sweat and mud and blood. It was not my blood; I looked past the torn-down barricade, out onto the open area from which the overlords had begun their attack and where now a mass of overlords on foot and mercenary beast-men milled. They were saddling up, out there, taking their sectrixes from their slave grooms. Was this their final charge, as we marched out?

I smiled, then, at the thought of mailed men charging my pike phalanx covered by my steel crossbows. That, as a sight and a terrible retribution, would repay me much.

A single figure rode out toward us. Clad all in white, a long white trailing robe, the Princess Susheeng rode her sectrix out to parley with me, Dray Prescot.

“What can I say, Kov Drak?”

She could not bring herself, I could see, to use any other name for me. She was pale, her moist red lips now thinned, almost bloodless, shrunken. Her eyes glared out on me from deep bruised wells. Her hands fidgeted with her reins.

“There is nothing to say, Princess Susheeng. You and your brother, all the overlords of Magdag, you merely reap what you have sown.”

“Do you hate me so much?”

“I—” I began. Then I hesitated. I had hated this woman. I still believed I hated all the men of green. I was young, then, and hatred was easy, Zair forgive me.

“You are a Krozair,” she said, with some difficulty. “A Lord, a man of Zair. You could arrange a truce with Sanurkazz — you yourself said the red and the green would one day cease to fight.” She leaned over toward me from the high saddle. “Why should not today be that day, Dray Prezcot, Kov Drak?”

“You still do not see. It is not between red and green. It is between the overlords and their slaves.”

A harsh discordant shriek shattered the waiting silence as the two armies faced each other. I looked up, shading my eyes. Up there, wheeling in lazy hunting circles, a great scarlet and golden raptor swung on wide cruel pinions.

“Slaves!” Susheeng made a dismissive gesture. “Slaves are slaves. They are necessary. There will always be slaves.” She looked down on me, and a spark of her old fire returned. “And, ma faril, you look ridiculous, standing there with an old vosk skull on your head!” She had not forgotten and she was paying me back.

“The old vosk skulls will win this fight, Susheeng.”

“I appeal to you, Drak! Think what it is you do! Please — you owe me something, after all — Zair does not hold your true allegiance, you are not of the inner sea, the Eye of the World. Make peace between the red and the green, and we will settle the problem of the slaves—”

Now, in that shining sky as the twin suns of Kregen slanted, close together but separate now, toward the horizon, the scarlet and golden hunting bird was circling with a more deadly intent. A white dove was matching its moves, dive for dive, volplane for volplane. They circled and maneuvered like two fighter planes of a later age. Once again I sensed my own helplessness as the phantom forces of the Savanti and the Star Lords clashed in this world so far from the planet of my birth. Susheeng saw my face. She moved irritably and I saw that she wore mail beneath that white robe. She twiddled her riding crop and the reins. She said: “I have appealed to you, Drak. Now hear the message I have brought from my brother, Glycas. If you do not all return to your warrens and lay down your arms you will all be destroyed—”

I moved back a pace.

“There is nothing left between us to be said, Princess. Tell Glycas my message is the same as I called him in the dungeon of the great Hall na Priags. He will understand.”

A handful of overlords, impatient, were riding out toward us. They carried bows. The bows were bent and strung in their hands. Pugnarses began to walk out to me, tall and ugly with his mop of hair and his sprouting eyebrows. Susheeng lifted her crop.

An arrow arched from the overlords. It struck Pugnarses in the throat. He fell sideways, retching, clawing the arrow that had killed him.

“There!” I shouted, impassioned, savage with anger. “There is your answer to your foul brother!”

She brought the crop down hard on my face, but I turned my head down and the blow glanced harmlessly off the vosk-helmet.

When I looked up she was spurring back to her own kind.

I had to run, zigzagging and dodging, through a pelting rain of arrows, but I stopped to carry Pugnarses back to his friends. Holly bent over him, weeping.

“Prepare to move!” I yelled at my men — my men who were workers of the warrens, and slaves from the gangs, and girls like Holly, and youngsters with their shields. The phalanx stiffened. Holly looked up from Pugnarses’ dead body. Genal was at her side. He lifted her up. “Yes!” I shouted at them. “Yes! We fight now in the last battle. We will utterly destroy the evil of the overlords of Magdag.” I lifted the long sword. “Forward! ”

Beneath the measured tramp of the phalanx of slaves the ground shook. The phalanx advanced. The pikes were all held in their correct alignment, angled forward and upward. The yellow of the vosk skulls glowed in the streaming opaline light. The steel bows of the crossbowmen winked back brilliant reflections. All — everyone in my little army — all moved forward. With us now were the thousands of other workers and slaves, men and women with snatched up weapons or implements to use as weapons in their hands. The dust rose chokingly. Trumpets shrilled and called. I strode on, wishing I had Mayfwy’s mail coat about me now, but moving on, moving on. . . I knew, as nearly as a man may know anything, that now we had these arrogant overlords. Against the new weapons of the phalanx and the pike, supported by the crossbows, they would be swept away. Exultantly I strode on. Shouts and rallying cries echoed. Arrows and bolts began to crisscross in the air.

“Krozair! Krozair!” I yelled, swinging the long sword and pressing on, the pikes all about me. Holly’s sextets were lavishing loving care in their shooting. “Jikai! Jikai!”

We would win. Nothing could stop that.

In all that uproar, all that bedlam, with the pikes seeming to lean forward in their eagerness to get at these hated mailed overlords of Magdag, I looked up. I looked up. The scarlet and golden hunting bird circled up there — alone. The dove had gone.

“Against Magdag!” I yelled and my sword caught that falling streaming light and blazed like a flaming brand.

The light was changing. Blue tints crept in around the edges of my vision — and I knew what was happening. Arrows fell about me; the pikes were surging forward, stabbing; the halberdiers were hacking and cutting; Holly’s bolts were swathing through the mailed ranks and the Prophet and Bolan and Genal were urging the men on. Even as we smashed solidly into that surging sea of armored men and moved on over them, so the blueness limned everything about me. I felt light. I felt myself being drawn upward.

“No!” I shouted. I lifted the long sword. “No! Not now! Not now — I will not return to Earth! Star Lords! If you can hear me — Savanti — let me stay on this world! I will not return to Earth!”

I thought of my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains. I would not be thrust through the interstellar void away from her again! I could not.

I struggled. I do not know how or why or what happened, but as the blueness grew and strengthened I fought back at it. In some way I had failed the Star Lords. Something I was doing was contrary to what they wanted to accomplish. I had vaunted that I would serve them in my own way — and this was my reward.

“Let me stay on Kregen!” I roared it up at that indifferent sky where the suns of Scorpio cast down their mingled light. Now I was scarcely conscious of the fight raging around me. Men were dying, heads and limbs were being lopped, bolts were piercing through mail, blood was being spilled on a prodigious scale. I staggered. I was encompassed and floating in blueness. I gripped my long sword with the clutch of death. I felt myself falling, all lifting and exultation gone, falling and falling. . .

“I will not go back to Earth!”

Everything was blue now, roaring and twisting in my head, in my eyes and ears, tumbling me head over heels into a blue nothingness.

“I will stay on Kregen beneath the suns of Scorpio! I will! ”

I, Dray Prescot of Earth, screamed it out. “I will stay on Kregen! I will stay on Kregen! ”

About the author

Alan Burt Akers is a pen name of the prolific British author Kenneth Bulmer. Bulmer has published over 160 novels and countless short stories, predominantly science fiction. More details about the author, and current links to other sources of information, can be found at www.mushroom-ebooks.com

The Dray Prescott Series

The Delian Cycle:

Transit to Scorpio

The Suns of Scorpio

Warrior of Scorpio

Swordships of Scorpio

Prince of Scorpio

Havilfar Cycle:

Manhounds of Antares

Arena of Antares

Fliers of Antares

Bladesman of Antares

Avenger of Antares

Armada of Antares

Notes

[1]A bur is the Kregan hour, some forty Earth minutes long. It is divided into fifty murs, the Kregan minute. Discrepancies in the year caused by the orbit of Kregan about a binary are ironed out at festival times. There are forty-eight burs in the Kregan day and night cycle. I have omitted much of what Dray Prescot says of mensuration on Kregan and have considerably amended his account of the technical activities of the tide-watchers, the Todalpheme. A.B.A.

[2]I have left Prescot’s use of the Kregish “dwabur” here. A dwabur is one of the standard units of measurement and is approximately five Terrestrial miles. Its origin, according to Prescot, comes from the sunset people’s army marching disciplines: they would continue for two of their hours, that is, burs (the Kregish word for two is dwa), with a halt. Their speed must therefore have been something over three and a half miles an hour. More usual are the local lesser fractions of the dwabur. A.B.A.

[3]This is the point where at least one cassette is missing, as I have written in A Note on the Tapes from Africa at the beginning of this volume. It is clear from internal evidence that Prescot achieved command of a four-sixtyswifter and the next consecutive cassette picks up his story when he had spent probably three, at the least, seasons as a galley captain on the inner sea. What is lost we do not know, but from our knowledge of Dray Prescot I think it evident it was lurid, violent, and vividly colored in the extreme. A.B.A.

[4]Clearly, here, Prescot is referring to passages in the lost cassettes. This is a great pity, for any light he can shed on galley propulsion and crewing is of the greatest academic interest to scholars. A.B.A.

[5]Further information lost to us from Prescot’s narrative in the missing cassettes. A.B.A.

[6]Idem. A.B.A.