Swordships of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #4] Read online

  “Inch!"

  “You have made me break a taboo!” he shrieked. He gyrated in the fire and his sandals smoldered and then burst into flames. He didn't seem to feel a thing. He gyrated around, scattering hot coals, and the guards yelled and scrambled away, beating at their clothes.

  “When the Maiden with the Many Smiles is alone in the sky, she may not shine down upon a Ng'grogan's hair! It is taboo!"

  I grabbed Pando and shouted to the other guards and we cleared off. We knew when to leave a fellow alone with his taboos.

  After that when Inch went berserk, or solemnly took a cup of wine and threw it over his left shoulder, or dropped onto all fours and stuck his rump into the air and beat his head against the ground, we left him to it. It was a chancy business, living with Inch and his taboos.

  Pa Mejab looked most welcome with its streets of wooden houses, some brick ones already shouldering out the earlier timber structures, and its cool groves of fruit trees, its harbor and vista of the sea. We were paid off by Naghan the Paunch, and precious little I had left after I had settled all my debts, what with the preysanys and the zhantil tunic, paid for by the amphora of wine from Jholaix.

  “At least, Naghan, Inch and I can have a cupful of Jholaix with you tonight, eh?"

  “Surely,” he said, patting his paunch. “Naghan is the most generous of men."

  “Ayee!” said Pando, most impudently.

  We walked from the caravansary through the crowded streets to The Red Leem. If we walked with a trifle of a swagger—well, had we not crossed dangerous lands and fought wild beasts and wilder bandits, and brought the caravan safely home?

  A shriek as of a Corybant broke upon our ears as we walked up to the tavern.

  Tilda, trailing a green gown, her glorious black hair swirling about her like impiter's wings, flew down upon Pando. She caught him up, kicking and squirming, against her breast, and smothered him with kisses.

  “Pando! My son, Pando!"

  Then—

  “Pando! You limb of Sicce! Where have you been?"

  And with that, Tilda the Beautiful started laying into him with the flat of her hand, applied to the bottom of that brave new zhantil tunic, until Inch and I winced.

  “He's been all right, Tilda,” I said—like a fool. “He's been out with the caravan, with me—"

  “With you! Dray Prescot! Out there—out there, wild beasts, bandits, drought, hunger, disease—out there—Dray Prescot, I'll—I'll—” She left off beating Pando long enough to scream: “Get out! Get out of The Red Leem! If you show your face in here again, you vile abductor, I'll scratch your eyes out!” She spared a hand to rip off a slipper and hurl it at me.

  “Out! Out!"

  Inch and I walked off, hurriedly and without dignity.

  “Nice class of friend you have, Dray,” was all Inch said.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  How Tilda the Beautiful fared at The Red Leem

  Tilda's anger against me did not last long when Pando managed to tell her what had happened. For his pains he was sent supperless to bed that night, as Inch and I quaffed best Jholaix in company with Naghan the Paunch and Obolya. Inch disappeared for a time and when he came back he winked at me and leaned over, whispering.

  “Climbing the back wall was easy, Dray. That young devil is munching a vosk-pie now, and probably getting disgustingly drunk on a thimbleful of Jholaix."

  “If Tilda catches him and he tells on you, Inch—"

  Inch looked pleased with himself. “Sending boys to bed supperless is against my taboos,” he said, and winked.

  I perked up. Inch was turning into a comrade, rather than a companion. Now, if Seg were here—or Nath, or Zolta. Or, Gloag, or Varden, or Hap Loder...

  I must not think of Seg, I thought then.

  Inch was laughing and telling how a friend's taboos had given him a pair of horns, and Naghan and Obolya were laughing, too, and I could understand Naghan the Paunch, not Obolya.

  If I was asked to describe the Pandaheem succinctly, I would show my interlocutor Naghan the Paunch. He was Pandaheem to the very last nail of him. Built for comfort, the Pandaheem, as were their ships.

  Obolya, now, while he had changed since I had knocked that Rapa off him, was still as surly and vicious as ever to everyone. To me, he maintained a watchful respect, the result, I imagined, of our fight. He did not, to me, fit in with the men of Pandahem at all. I had discovered that the island of Pandahem, which lies to the east off the coast of Loh, due south of Vallia, was divided up into a number of separate nations, most of them governed by kings jealous of their own power and prestige, continually at loggerheads with their neighbors. They seldom united even against Vallia, whose single mighty empire operated from the secure base of an island under one government. This division weakened Pandahem. Pa Mejab, which lay well to the north of Ventrusa Thole and just tucked into the bay south of the great promontory projecting from Turismond into the Sunset Sea, was a colony city of the human nation of Pandahem called Tomboram.

  Tomboram, as I learned, is a pleasant place in almost every respect, situated in the northern and eastern part of Pandahem, with Jholaix as a smaller country to the northeast. The Tomboramin are a happy folk, they had made me welcome, and although they would fight their neighbors, and Vallia, and the mysterious pirate ships that sailed up out of the southern oceans, they much preferred to sit in a tavern and drink, or watch and applaud a great dramatic performance. Industrious when working and idle when playing, the Tomboramin were people with whom I got on well.

  And yet—I could not forget the bitterness with which Thelda, of Vallia, had spoken of the Pandaheem, of how she had sworn by Vox that they must all be destroyed one day.

  My Delia was a Vallian—she was the Princess Delia, Princess Majestrix. These people among whom I sat and drank and sang were her bitter commercial rivals, and deadly foes upon the seas.

  Even now a great deal of talk was in the air of the next expedition to probe southward to attack the Vallian colonial port city of Ventrusa Thole.

  My distress you may imagine; my determination to reach Vallia, I assure you, was in no way impaired by all this newly-found good fellowship as we drank and roistered in The Red Leem and watched the incomparable actress, Tilda the Beautiful, perform so gracefully and movingly for us.

  When Vallia was mentioned by the Tomboramin, it was with a curse and a bitter feeling of betrayal, a sense of dejection and doom. No, these good people of Pa Mejab did not care for Vallians. Listening to them, hearing tales of treachery and deceit, I absorbed some of that feeling. Vallia was overbearingly powerful, omnipotent, almost. Vallia scorned all other nations. Vallia made treaties and broke them, contemptuously, careless of good faith. Vallia was as perfidious as, I suppose, the England of my day was considered by France.

  Albion Perfide was now Vallia Perfide—indeed!

  These days I habitually left my long sword in my room and in deference to local custom wore only the rapier and dagger about the town.

  Tilda, in conversation one day, mentioned that political difficulties were growing worse every day with the Pandahemic nation immediately to the west of Tomboram, a nation she called The Bloody Menaham. I took little notice, although I knew that Menaham had sited a colonial port at what appeared to be perilously few dwaburs to the north, being more concerned over my own problems and being a trifle irritated that the wrangles on one island of Kregen were preventing me from reaching another.

  In this I should have been more careful; for The Bloody Menaham, no less than Tomboram, was to play a large part in my life before I found Delia again.

  We discovered that it was taboo for Inch to eat the tiny and delicious fruit called squishes and Pando took a fiendish delight in bringing in great baskets of them from the orchards, for they were in season, and leaving heaping bowls of them everywhere in The Red Leem. Inch doted on squishes. This convinced me that his taboos differed radically from what is considered a taboo on Earth; there, had the squishe
s been taboo, he would never have eaten one in the first place. As it was, whenever we came upon Inch standing on his head, his face expressing the greatest anguish, we knew he had broken his taboo and gone munching squishes.

  And Pando, the imp of Sicce, would laugh.

  “I wonder, Dray,” he said to me, very solemnly, with Inch on his head in a corner close by. “If I had to stand on my head every time I ate vosk-pie, would I go off vosk-pie?"

  “Such gratitude!” said Inch, and succulent squish juice dribbled down into his eye.

  “Stick to palines, Inch,” I said. “There is nothing more sovereign."

  He groaned, and shut his eye, thus winking at us when he had nothing in his head to warrant a merry wink—at all.

  The time was fast approaching when the armada might be expected in from Pandahem and the caravans would be loading again and Naghan the Paunch would be hiring guards.

  Due to the depredations of pirates—call them corsairs, rovers, buccaneers, privateers, as you will, to honest sailor-men of Kregen they were renders all—abroad on the outer oceans ships tended to sail whenever they could in great convoys called armadas. I heard Naghan shaking his chins and his paunch and saying, “The swordships make life hard for a merchant, may Armipand drag ‘em down by the short and curlies. I sometimes make myself remember, when my caravan is attacked, that I am lucky not to be a ship's captain."

  “Come now, Naghan!” I protested, out of my ignorance. “Surely the Sunset Sea and the Cyphren Sea do not harbor so very many swordships?"

  “Enough and to spare, Pandrite rot ‘em!"

  Well, I had been to Segesthes and I was now in Turismond; but I had never traversed the seas that lay between.

  When the bells began to ring and the people streamed out of their houses and ran in wild excitement down to the harbor you may be sure that Pando was well up with the leaders and I not far behind.

  Everyone looked out over the sea, toward the southeast and a great cry went up when we saw that armada of sails.

  The commotion and seething rushes, the fluttering scarves, the hats tossed into the air, the cheering, the ringing of bells, the frenzied scamperings of children and the mad gyrations of dogs through the crowds, the gusts of happy frothy laughter—all were prodigious.

  With a somewhat more cynical eye, I, an old sailorman, looked at that distant white-glinting armada of sails, and the sea between, and felt the wind, and I remembered days hanging around in the Downs, and said to Pando, “I am thirsty, Pando, and am going back to The Red Leem for a drink."

  “But the fleet, Dray! You'll miss the ships!"

  “They will still be in the offing when I return, never fear.” He wouldn't budge. “If you fall in,” I told him, “apart from realizing that I told you so, swim to the steps and take your time. The seawall breaks the force of the waves."

  After I had sunk a couple of glasses of the local red biddy—not for me the best of Jholaix when I needed every ob—Inch joined me and we strolled back to the harbor. I was surprised. The first ship was already entering the stone-built entrance past the pharos, gulls swinging whitely about her three masts, her sails coming down, her crew gathering on her forecastle with ropes. A band was playing and the music lolloped into the air as this broad-beamed ship lolloped through the sea. I studied her lines critically.

  The Pandaheem called these high-charged ships of the outer oceans argenters. They were rigged with square sails; had they been rigged with lateens they would have looked remarkably like caravels, with their high forecastles and their half decks, quarterdecks and sterncastles. As was to be expected they were decorated lavishly with much gilding and carving, fine gingerbread work that glittered in the opal glare.

  They were broad in relation to their length, solid, heavily-built, comfortable ships—and, therefore, slow. They carried courses and topsails on their fore and mainmasts, and courses—a crossjack—on their mizzens, with a spritsail on the bowsprit. I gained the impression, watching the argenters glide solidly and squarely into port, of rolling argosies of sail, dependable, unimaginative, lofty as to hull, cautious as to sail area and plan.

  As you know it has been my custom not to jump about in this narrative but, rather, to attempt to tell you of what happened to me on Kregen beneath Antares in as good a chronological order as I can contrive. Maybe that skyjacking has loosened up my time-sense. I will, therefore, quickly say that when I—at last, at long last!—saw the ships of Vallia I saw immediately how like galleons they were. And I mean a real galleon, the type of ship invented by the English: low, streamlined, fast, daringly sparred, superb sailers. Despite the plethora of names the Vallians use for their ships I have always thought of Vallian ships as galleons, and will so refer to them when the time in this narrative is ripe.

  By contrast—and I thought of it then, as I stood with Pando and Inch and saw the Pandahemic argenters without knowledge of the Vallian galleons—these ships of this armada sailing into Pa Mejab were reminiscent of Portuguese and Spanish caravels and carracks. Maybe history does repeat itself, even though it takes place on different worlds separated by four hundred light-years of interstellar space.

  To finish this anachronistic comment, the reason—or one of them—why I could never seem to catch a Vallian ship on the inner sea lay simply in the galleon's superb ability to drive on in wind that would have overset a swifter in a trice.

  As well as varters—the ballistae as used by swifters of the inner sea—these ships carried catapults powered by many twisted strands of sinew and hair. Watching critically the evolutions of the ships as they lost way, brought their canvas in, dropped their hooks, and swung to, I was reasonably satisfied that they were seamanlike enough. They were not in a hurry. The reason they had gained the mouth of the harbor before I had expected was explained by their use of sweeps thrust through a few ports cut in their sides. People around me commented on this, giving as their judicious opinion that great news was carried aboard the ships, for using the sweeps meant hard work, and the Tomboramin only worked hard when a definite end lay in view.

  The wind was free, was it not, dom? So why sweat at the oars?

  If these men were in a hurry—I shuddered to think what their customary seamanship would be like.

  With the taking in of the fore and main courses disappeared the huge and gorgeously painted devices of Tomboram. Tomboram proudly flaunted the pictured representation of a quombora, a mythical monster of devilish aspect, with much fangery and toothery and clawery, spitting flames and smoke, as her symbol. The fore and main topsails carried the painted devices of the individual ships and owners. Many bright blue flags fluttered.

  A swarm of boats put off to the ships, and the first pair were being warped alongside the jetty to begin unloading. The show was over. My next and most immediate plan was somehow to arrange a passage on one of those ships when she returned to Pandahem. I would have to sign on before the mast. That procedure must—given the physical facts of sailing-ship travel in relatively primitive ships across many dwaburs of open ocean—entail prodigious suffering and discomfort which meant nothing, of course, beside my determination to seek out Delia.

  In a directly straight line from Pa Mejab to the chief port of Tomboram the distance is approximately eight hundred dwaburs. Distances of this order might be covered by a ship without calling in for water and supplies; normally the armada would make port somewhere in northern Loh, along the coast of that great thrusting promontory of Erthyrdrin. As I understood it ships of many nations shared port facilities here, docile under the constraint of the sufferance of the Erthyr. From thence a journey due east or northeast would bring a ship to Vallia. For Pandahem the course would be southeast, either outside or inside the long chain of islands that parallel the northeastern coast of Loh.

  Inch and Pando went back to The Red Leem, for there would be new customers to care for and probably, if old Nath was lucky, passengers to be accommodated, while I went to find Naghan the Paunch and explain that I would be unable to go with
him on the next caravan. I knew he would shout and swear and call me an ingrate; but my purpose was set.

  Naghan the Paunch did all these things. In addition he threw a wine bottle at me, for I found him soaking in the small room of The Marsilus and Rokrell. I ducked.

  “Peace, good Naghan. Oh man of the Paunch, I have served you well and taken your silver dhems, let us then part in friendship."

  He glared at me. Then he pulled up another glass and bottle, and poured, and lifted his glass to me, as I did to him. “You are the finest bowman I have ever engaged, Dray, you and that great Lohvian bow of yours. I have seen many bowmen, and some almost your equal.” He drank and wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “But never, no never, have I seen anything like that damned great cleaver of yours!"

  I drank to him, and said, “I shall not forget you, Naghan the Paunch. Care for young Pando, if you can, and Tilda the Beautiful, his mother."

  “That I will always do. By the glory of Pandrite, I swear it!"

  “Remberee, Naghan the Paunch."

  “Remberee, Dray Prescot."

  I went back to The Red Leem.

  People were moving about the streets, all of them still excited over the arrival of the armada, and passengers were already coming ashore. I saw a cart trundle along, the two calsanys drawing it impatiently goaded by the imp in charge, the cart's master dragging them by their stubborn jaws. Bundles and bales and casks and kegs would be coming ashore, and Pa Mejab was coming alive again, fed through all those dwaburs of sea by the mother country. It was a gala day. Pa Mejab was not forgotten by the king and the nobles and the merchants and soldiers and all the people in their far-off homeland.

  As you may well imagine, I had made all my usual inquiries, but no one had heard of Aphrasöe, the Swinging City.

  About to put my foot on the fantamyrrh, the habitual unthinking act performed by every Kregan entering a house, I paused. Pando shot out of the doorway, wild-eyed, his hair tousled. He did not see me at once and just as his eyes fell on me a hand at the end of a long arm reached after him, clapped around his mouth and neck, jerked him back. He disappeared.