The Suns of Scorpio Page 9

  “That is enough of that!” said Zenkiren. He looked annoyed. “Only through the courage and skill of the Lord of Strombor was Lilac Bird saved.” He made a face. “Both our consorts were lost.” This was true. Their timbers were washed up over the days that followed, with dead bodies. The slaves, where they floated ashore on balks of timber, were still chained to those timbers.

  Rophren was remanded to await judgment by the court of the high admiral. That was what, in effect, he was, although his Kregish title ran for five lines of purple prose.

  Hezron of High Heysh was reprimanded, and then released, on the authority of Pur Zenkiren, and at my behest. It made no difference to Hezron’s attitude to me. I knew I would have to guard my back where he was concerned.

  We ran into the outer harbor of Holy Sanurkazz.

  I have, as I have said, seen many cities, and I was looking forward to the view of the chief city of the followers of Zair. I expected — looking back, it is foolish, I can see, to expect anything until the reality is there before you, living and real.

  Sanurkazz had been sited on the narrow neck of land stretching between the inner sea and the smaller dependent sea, the Sea of Marshes, which formed a kind of blunt arrowhead, the two sharp faces washed by the waters and the base walled off by a girdling wall of six curtains. There were many buildings, some of noble proportions and in a kind of columnar architecture I found pleasant enough. A great deal of warm yellow stone was used that was quarried some few dwaburs along the shore. The tiled roofs were red. Much lush vegetation grew riotously among the houses and along the avenues and streets. There were also many flat walled roofs made into bright gardens, and water mills pumped water to flow into fountains that tinkled tirelessly throughout the city. The markets were exuberant, noisily filled with the clink of coins, the sounds of calsanys, the cries of vendors. In the streets of the crafts there was the eternal noise of the craftsmen’s hammers as they beat out bronze, gold, or silver, or the whir of wheels as they fashioned the pots with the bold red designs, or worked the leather which glistened with strength and suppleness and which was famed throughout the inner sea.

  Oh, yes, Sanurkazz was a marvelous city, filled with life, ardor, and animation. The harbors were cunningly sited so as to obtain perfect protection from the weather and from any corsair attack by sea. The arsenals were cleverly placed so as to be mutually protected. The domes and spires of the temples pierced the brilliant air.

  Oh, yes, Sanurkazz was delightful. It was a city in which to be alive. Magdag was a city of colossuses, of towering buildings marching endlessly into the plain, of work, toil, and a demanding discipline, machinelike, obsessed. Sanurkazz was a city of individuals.

  But — there was not a single central fact about Sanurkazz. It was a collection of individuals. It charmed. It had marvelous byways, courts, and tree-shaded bowers where flowers bloomed in brilliance and perfume; it had marvelous inns, pot houses, and roistering spots. I enjoyed myself in Sanurkazz. But I sensed that it lacked that obsessive single-minded purpose of Magdag.

  The conflict between red and green was not a clear-cut contest between good and bad. Although at that time I was willing to credit all evil to Magdag, I believe I do not flatter myself if I say that I was capable of perceiving that there were grave flaws in Sanurkazz. It was an intensely human place. I suppose the best way to sum up Holy Sanurkazz would be to say that it roistered in the sun. Carousing was a devotedly followed occupation. Then, every sixth day, the whole city gave itself over to the intensely religious observances connected with the worship of Zair, the red-sun deity.

  The women of Sanurkazz were a luscious lot, full-breasted, lithe, sensuous of lip and saucy of eye. To them the idea that a woman should veil herself before venturing on the streets would have smacked of perversion. With Zenkiren’s promise that he would employ me aboard Lilac Bird — in a capacity on which we would agree — I had money to jingle in my purse, a white apron to wear, and a long sword at my side slung from a belt and harness fashioned from that wonderful Sanurkazz leather.

  Out on the fertile fields south of the city and alongside the Sea of Marshes agriculture proceeded on the basis of small farming, with estates of the nobles dotting the countryside. Beyond them, further south, the plains began and here herds of chunkrah roamed. I promised myself I would ride out one day and spend some time with the chunkrah and think of my Clansmen of the Great Plains of Segesthes. Southward again and the climate grew drier and the deserts extended, bleak and orange and harsh. I understood that beyond the deserts lay the coastal lands of Donengil, but almost invariably these would be reached by ship through the Great Canal. Donengil, I guessed, would have a climate very much like the West Indies, on a vaster scale.

  Industry of an essential hand-worked kind existed on a surprisingly large scale. There were iron works, and bronze works, manufactories for the production of swords and the supple mesh steel, mining and logging and weaving, all the necessary facilities to maintain a city-state like Sanurkazz. I visited the extensive forests, and saw lenk and sturm growing, saw the cedars and the pines on the uplands to the southwest, saw the way in which the shipwrights selected timbers from the living tree, and placed forms around them so that they would grow into the required shapes for keel arches, or stern-posts, or any other of the necessary ship shapes.

  The people of Kregen are not all in the same stage of evolutionary industrial or social or political growth, of course. Steam bending of wood was known: indeed, for the building of galleys such as Lilac Bird, it would be essential. The ancients of Earth without knowledge of steam bending were forced to use green wood with the sap in so that they could bend the timbers to shape. The wood warped and very soon the ships leaked and became useless. The galleys of the Greeks were essentially light craft, with one man to an oar, designed to ram. The Romans with the corvus, the studded gangplank for boarding, attempted to bring land-fighting techniques to the sea, but their ships were still slightly built. With Earth’s Renaissance and the galleys of the Catholic powers against those of the Muslims, the galley reached a new development. It is hardly correct to say, as so many do, that these last galleys were the direct descendants of those of ancient Greece and Rome.

  With one man to one oar, as was universal among the ancients, with the trireme’s sets of seats in threes, slanting back toward the stern, with oars of from about fifteen feet in length to about eight feet, with the thranites, the zygites, and the thalamites pulling those oars, with their everlasting baling caused through warping timbers consequent on the use of green wood, and with all their early effort concentrated on quick ramming, rolling the sinking galley off the ram and a smart backwater, the ancient Greek triremes must have been finely tuned instruments. The confusion attendant upon a single oarsman losing his stroke must have worried the trierarch as much as anything else. One man to one oar set a very definite upper limit to the power it was possible to transmit. These sailors of the Eye of the World had gone for the later system, the arrangement alla scaloccio; but, with a daring I found admirable, had concentrated their propulsive power into two or three banks. While technically correct to call Lilac Bird a bireme, and the other large galleys of the inner sea triremes, I shall stick to what the Kregans themselves called them — swifters.

  Wind scoops of a pattern I was familiar with directed fresh air below decks, and many gratings and openings gave free ingress for ventilation. Despite that, the lower rowing deck, where the thalamites sat and sweated, presented a spectacle of hell on Kregen I had no wish to suffer again. If I have not made it clear that for Zorg, Nath, Zolta, and I, fresh out of the thalamite deck of a Magdag swifter, the open pulling benches of Grace of Grodno came as a taste of reprieve, I can assure you this was so.

  At that time and for some time to come, I was still unsatisfied that the best arrangements for oarsmen had been found.

  With my head full of galleys and swifters and triremes I accompanied Nath and Zolta to their favorite drinking haunt, The Fleeced Ponsho — Kregans some
times have a warped sense of humor — where buxom Sisi apparently was prepared to favor these two unlikely cutthroats without overpayment merely because they happened to have escaped from the Magdag galleys.

  “With one man one oar,” Zolta was saying, rubbing his chin where his black beard was growing enough to itch, “even with the apostis — for which we must give credit to the Archbolds of Zair—”

  “Huh!” interrupted Nath, as we swung into the low doorway of the tavern, out of the pink moonlight from the two second moons of Kregen. “Those rasts of Grodno-gasta claim the credit for inventing the apostis!”

  “May Zair rot them!” rumbled Zolta. He pitched his body onto a bench and yelled for Sisi. “Anyway, friend Strombor” — they had taken to calling me that, now, and both could not really stomach the “lord” bit — “as I was saying before Nath opened his black-fanged wine-spout — Sisi! Hurry up, you lecher’s delight! I’m as dry as the Southern Desert! As I was saying, one man one oar, even with the apostis, is fine for small handy craft. I’d not care to be aboard when a hundred-and-eighty swifter got on her tail! Ho! She’d be hoicked clear out of the water!”

  They still had to convince me.

  Sisi’s arrival with three leather tankards brimming with wine from Zond, rich and dark and potent, silenced our argument as we quaffed. Then Nath belched and leaned back, brushing the back of his hand across his lips.

  “Mother Zinzu the Blessed! I needed that!”

  We talked and drank and argued, and got into a gambling game with some ponsho farmers up from the country, and with Nath’s uncanny ability to manipulate the dice we were doing very well indeed, when a fight broke out — there always seemed to be fights following Nath’s dice manipulation. Laughing and roaring and throwing tousle-headed ponsho farmers from us, left and right, we roistered from the tavern. When I say that Zolta being the smallest of those four of us who had labored on the oar took the outboard, do not infer he was a small man. He could pick up his groundling and hurl him into the bar display with the best.

  Sisi came yelling and running, the bodice above her red gown billowing with her outraged anger, but Zolta swept her up in his arms and bestowed on her a wet and bristly kiss and then we went whooping out of The Fleeced Ponsho. The mobiles, the Sanurkazz equivalent to a police force, fat and jolly men with swords at their sides rusted into their sheathes, hallooed into the flower-draped little square before the tavern as we went dancing out at the other side. Nath had a bottle of wine in his hand and he was laughing and dancing, and Zolta was grinning a great big foolish grin and obviously thinking of Sisi. I had to laugh at my two ruffian companions. But we had pulled an oar together in the galleys. That made us comrades with inseparable bonds. We had been four. Now we were three. I believe my laugh was no laugh a civilized man would recognize.

  We scampered up the moon-drenched alley.

  “We must find another tavern, and that right soon,” declared Zolta. “I am primed.”

  “And what of Sisi, oh man of little faith?” demanded Nath. He pulled the cork out of the bottle with a single jerk.

  “She will keep, fat and juicy. I am primed, I tell you, Nath, you nit that crawls upon a calsany.”

  “As to that—” said Nath, and then paused to upend the bottle and down four hefty slugs: glug, glug, glug — and glug. “Nits are of a size more suitable to he who pulls nearest the parados — yes?”

  He yelped as Zolta’s toe caught him, and then they were both roaring and yelling and running up the alley, the bottle brandished in Nath’s hand, and the great contagious roaring laughter welling up from Zolta to inflame the fire. I sighed. They were ruffians, true, but they were oar comrades.

  From the direction of The Fleeced Ponsho came the measured tread of booted feet. There was a ring about those footsteps, four men at least, and clad in mail. Men in Sanurkazz did not wear mail with the same habitual ferocity as the men of Magdag. The mobiles only wore half-mail. Mind you, they were so fat and indolent a lot, preferring a bottle of wine to a fracas any time, that I was surprised they’d even arrived when they did.

  The footsteps approached and I stepped back into the shadows of a balcony from which great blossoms glowed, their inner petals shut, their outer petals open to the moonlight.

  “The rast went this way,” a grating voice said. I remained very still. I did not even make an attempt to free the long sword at my side. The time would come for that.

  “Hark at those two cramphs—” Nath and Zolta were certainly making a hullabaloo enough to awaken the whole district. “We had best hurry.”

  Four men in mail pressed on along the alleyway. They entered a patch of the pink moonlight that moved only slowly with the gentle orbital movement of the two second moons. Their faces showed pink blobs, barred by ferocious upthrust moustaches. The mail glittered where it was not fully covered by the loose-fitting white surcoats. Those surcoats looked odd, and then I saw that they were bereft of the usual sizable badge, worn breast and back, that marked a man for his allegiances.

  I think I knew then what all this was about. But I wanted to know for sure. After all, I, Dray Prescot, had more important things to do on Kregen than to engage in a petty feud with a spoiled boy, no matter that he might be the scion of a wealthy and noble family.

  The men’s swords glittered in the moonlight.

  They would have passed me by, hidden in the shadows beneath the balcony. I remember there was a sweet scented odor on the air from the great moon-drinking blooms.

  I stepped out into the alleyway.

  The long sword lay still in the scabbard.

  “You wanted to speak with me?”

  It was a challenge.

  “You are he whom men call the Lord of Strombor?”

  “I am.”

  “Then you are a dead man.”

  The fight did not last long. They were fair swordsmen, nothing of note, nothing that my wild Clansmen could not have dealt with. Hap Loder, for example, would have been yelling for a drink as he finished them off, with all his panache.

  When I returned to Lilac Bird I said to Zenkiren: “I wish to see the father of Hezron.”

  “Oh?”

  We understood each other a little better now, Zenkiren and I. I had asked Zolta what Krozair might mean, and he had shuffled and hedged and then said to ask Zenkiren. His reply had been, simply: “Wait.”

  When I had pressed him, he said: “It is an Order. It is not something discussed lightly in taprooms.” He gestured around his cabin, so plain, so severe, and I had not understood.

  Now he looked at me and put a finger to his lips as I told him what had occurred in the alley outside The Fleeced Ponsho.

  “This might be serious, my Lord of Strombor. Harknel of High Heysh, Hezron’s father, is a powerful man, wealthy and influential. There are intrigues in Sanurkazz, as you may well believe.”

  I made an impatient movement. Zenkiren spoke more forcefully.

  “The boy hired killers and they bungled the job. If you tell the father he will have to deny all knowledge of it, and then discipline his son — for failing, mind, for failing! After that, you will have not that young puppy Hezron out for your blood, but old Harknel himself. Think on, Strombor — and, there is something else.”

  “I have thought,” I said instantly. I couldn’t have assassination threats hanging over me if I had work to do for the Star Lords — or the Savanti — or, and more especially, if I was to find my way out of the Eye of the World back to Vallia or Strombor and to my Delia of Delphond. “I will see whoever it takes to have this puppy restrained. That is all.”

  He pursed his lips. He tried to be fair, did Pur Zenkiren, captain of Lilac Bird. He held up a piece of paper — paper of a kind I did not recognize, and my instant alertness relaxed.

  “I have had a letter, Strombor. I would like you to go on a little journey — to Felteraz.”

  “Felteraz!”

  “Yes, my Lord of Strombor. You are to see my Lady Mayfwy. The Lady Mayfwy — wife of Zorg
of Felteraz.”

  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!”