Prince of Scorpio (12 page)

“Kutven Ban tangled himself up in the rope. Quick! We must help.”

Other voices joined in a chorus of disbelief. I was making a great play of unwrapping the rope from Ban. He tried to hit me and I put my foot on his head, purely by accident, and he gobbled into the muddy grass of the towpath.

“Help us!” I shouted.

The crone started to hit me with the frying pan.

I ducked and Ban struggled up, foaming, and I gave the end of the rope a kick and it slid into the water like an eel. A big fellow with a red jerkin and silver earrings ran up. Two or three boys joined in and a couple of girls danced about. Other people formed a ring.

Ban was purple.

“He tangled in the tow rope and fell over,” I shouted. I spread my hands. “Look at the following boats.”

The fellow in the red jerkin spun around as though I had kicked him in his breechclout.

“Oh, by the mighty Vaosh himself!” he moaned.

Men and women were tumbling out of the boats to get onto the bank, where the haulers were laying back and being dragged on squeaking heels along the path. The next boat homed in on the boat wedged diagonally across the cut and bumped in a great groaning of wood. The following boats began to pile up. I looked around. Now boats were filling the cut in a series of zigzags and presenting a scene of utter confusion.

I looked around with a certain satisfaction on my handiwork.

Then I looked the other way and saw
Dancing Talu
and
Pride of Vomansoir
gliding across the empty stretch, and the other boats on the Ogier Cut calmly receding into the distance.

Ban glared up, spitting mud, struggling to rise.

“You really should be more careful,” I said.

I could not immediately run off and jump aboard Yelker’s boat. There might be reprisals. So I started in on a fresh series of explanations for the benefit of fresh arrivals.

“Poor Kutven Ban!” and: “Ban shouldn’t do it all himself.”

I looked at Ban. He shook his broad shoulders and cocked his fists, spat mud, bristled, and started for me.

I said, “It is better that it was an accident, Ban. I do not think I wish to hurt you, but if it is necessary, I will.”

He roared, threw back his head to glare in hatred at me — he looked in my face. He stopped. He hesitated. His right foot scraped the towpath. He lowered his fists.

“Maybe, at that, ‘twas an accident.”

“By Vaosh, Ban,” I said. “You’re a man after my own heart.”

The clustered ring of people quite clearly were prepared to take their cue from the Kutven. He suddenly began roaring and raving to such effect that the ring burst asunder, and men and women, boys and girls, flew to their boats and a gang tailed onto the tow ropes of Kutven Ban’s boat and began to drag her parallel to the banks once more. I shouted in a very genial way, “Remberee!” and walked off.

Dancing Talu
pushed on southerly and I hauled with a will, but I was not so prideful or so foolish as to wish to show off and haul by myself, although capable of it, and I noticed that Zyna would very often be there with me, hauling with her slender firmly-rounded body thrusting into the rope. In the normal course of events life on the cuts is leisurely, but now, because the cargo of hoffiburs might go rotten on Yelker, he maintained a good pace and by nightfall we had left
Pride of Vomansoir
well behind. We pushed on, the leading hauler with a lantern balanced in a lantern-hat, an arrangement of cradles and slings strapped onto the head and around the chin, angled back so that the lantern swung horizontally, although the hauler’s head inclined down with the strain of pulling.

It was the next night we saw the headless zorcamen.

Yelker ran up onto the forepeak of the boat and yelled, and Zyna let out a shriek of pure fear.

“Get back on board!” roared Yelker. “Let the rope go!”

Zyna clasped my arm. Her fingers shook.

“Drak! Drak! The headless zorcamen!”

I slipped the rope off my shoulders, got a grip on Zyna, and plunged bodily into the water. A few quick overarm thrusts with my free hand and I could heft her clinging body up with my other hand to the waiting grip of Yelker and Rafee. I followed them up. I stood on the narrow catwalk around the sheeted cargo space, dripping water, and stared narrowly into the blackness.

My eyes adjusted quickly — and then I saw them.

A long line of cowled and cloaked figures they were, as I thought, dark against the sky where four moons floated. Then a closer inspection revealed that, indeed, the cowls were merely hunched shoulders, the cloaks trailing, and that the zorcamen rode headless across the moors.

“Rubbish!” I said. “By Zim-Zair, a trick, a cheap trick.”

“Of course, Drak. They are men like you or me, dressed up to look horrific. But many men still believe them to be supernatural apparitions.”

I had had experience of headless horsemen, and the headless coachman, for in the land of my youth smuggling was a fine art.

“What purpose do they serve, then, Yelker? And why do we stop?”

“They are dangerous men. Those they do not frighten off, they kill.”

“Are we to stop, then, because of buffoons like that?”

“It is wise. So long as they believe they terrorize the district, we are safe. If they detected resistance, disbelief carried to action, they would strike us mercilessly.” He coughed, and added: “And there are Mother and Zyna, Sisi, and the girls to consider.”

“Yes,” I said. After a pause, when I had sufficiently controlled myself, I said: “Who are these kleeshes?”

“They ride the moors. Hereabouts is all the domain of Faygar, the Strom of Vorgan. He is a known racter. But he owns allegiance to the Kov of Vomansoir.”

“So?”

“So the racters must show their strength in some way when all the usual ways are denied them.”

There were twenty of them, riding head to tail, a long serpentine line of hunched shapes against the moons. They looked eerie and menacing, completely horrifying to an untutored mind.

“By Zair!” I said. “I have a mind to take my sword and teach them a lesson. And, come to that, I could use a zorca.”

Yelker passed no comment on my vainglorious boasting. He said: “You would leave us, Drak?”

My thoughts were turned to Vondium and Delia of the Blue Mountains. I had no wish to appear ungrateful to Yelker or his family aboard
Dancing Talu.
But I could not but speak the truth.

“I would be in Vondium as fast as the fleetest airboat could take me, Yelker!”

He sighed. “We shall lose you at Vomansoir, then. I value your presence aboard mightily. We would have lost much time crossing the Ogier Cut. By Vaosh, I would not have believed it!”

Rafee let out a cackle.

The zorcamen rode on, and their leader trended over the dark horizon, and so they vanished, one by one. Racters they were, out to terrorize the people of the district, to extort, to maim, and to kill. Well, they meant nothing to me. I had let my chance go. To the Ice Floes of Sicce with them all!

After a space we resumed our hauling, but Zyna remained aboard the boat.

I had detected in my actions since this arrival on Kregen a change of attitude, a laxness, a half-heartedness, a kind of softness most displeasing to me. I could guess why this was. You who have listened to my story will know that I tend to think like a civilized man, and to consider all the angles of a problem, and then to act like a savage barbarian, and jump in with my sword in my fist. Much of that must come from my Earthly ancestry mingled with the years I spent among my clansmen, fighting my way up to be Zorcander and Vovedeer. And, too, I am not a twentieth-century man, despite my veneer of the ways of speech and the automated culture of these times. I come from a lusty, brawling, robust age, when a belaying pin or a sailor’s knife settled an argument. I am not your ordinary hero of polite fictions, such as are still to be found in the scented courtly poems of Loh or of Vallia itself.

But, equally, I am not your simpleminded if quick-witted barbarian, like my good friend Wulk of the northern hills.

I had become soft and vacillating and slow. And I knew why this was. Despite all my protestations that I would go to Vallia and there confront Delia’s father, this dread Emperor, I had quailed from the task. I thought Delia understood my reasons, I fancied she saw that I had no wish to tear down the image she held of her father, all the love and affection built up through childhood and girlhood, all that warm close family kinship to be torn asunder, broken, destroyed, by a rough uncouth clansman not even from her own world!

As the twins circled through the night sky of Kregen, forever orbiting each other, I hauled the tow rope and I faced my problem. I had to go on. My feet had been set on this path by the Star Lords themselves. I must go to Vondium and stalk into the Emperor’s palace and there, before the world, claim my Delia.

I must!

There must be no more shilly-shallying. I made up my mind, then, in the puny pride of my heart, vaingloriously boasting to myself and to the moons and the stars, that I would fulfill whatever of destiny had called me to this strange and terrifying planet.

I can look back now at myself as I was then so long ago, and smile. But I can truly say that no thought of the actual power and might and majesty of Delia’s father the Emperor entered my mind. He was just a man. He could be made to do what I wanted him to do. It was on Delia, and on Delia’s feelings, that all my thoughts centered. This I swear.

We saw no more headless zorcamen and two days of hard pulling with many locks to bite into the actual distance traversed of our eighty-lock-miles-a-day travel, we came down into Vomansoir.

I had expected just another town, perhaps a city, something like Therminsax. What I saw enchanted me. Vallia is full of strange and exotic places and out-of-the-way retreats. Vomansoir straddled the Great River and six canals joined here in a wide stretch of hectically busy waterways. We trudged in and got our berthing ticket and tied up at the hoffiburs wharf run by a Company of Friends with whom Yelker usually dealt.

Every canal ran in through a series of lock flights, for Vomansoir is situated in a great natural bowl. As we descended we could see the surrounding slopes terraced and cultivated so that not a square inch of space was wasted. Colors rioted everywhere. Trees and bushes and flowers all blended into an enormous patchwork quilt of dizzying splendor. The river, She of Fecundity, ran in and out of the bowl through colossal canyons. Along the banks were moored vessels of surprising size. Beyond them the quays hummed with throngs of people busy about the everyday tasks of living. Zorca chariots clattered and whirred here and there, quoffas dragged carts of humbler duties, men and women rode saddle zorcas, and I saw again the half-voves I had last seen in Zenicce. Vallia, however, has no voves in the natural state, although there are small herds here and there bred up by men.

Everything was magnificent. The women wore flowing free gowns of myriads of colors; the men in their Vallian gear were not content thus to be left in the shade and their wide-shouldered tunics and jerkins were also brilliantly colored. I saw many of the men working on the quays and at the warehouses, as in the factories and the streets that dealt in various items of merchandise, wore the shirts with the banded sleeves, and while many of these banded colors were gray and yellow, the colors of Vomansoir, there were many also of other colors, sometimes three colors banded together. The red and black of the guards were in evidence, and I saw, with a bunching of my jaw muscles, gangs of slave haulers at work. Also, I saw men with black and white sleeves.

“Racters,” said Yelker, when I questioned him. “You are cut off in Valka, Drak, to be sure. By Vaosh, but they flaunt their superiority!”

I witnessed a clash between men of a racter employer and men wearing white and green banded arms over the priority of unloading a narrow boat. They fought with cudgels. They struck each other doughty blows. Yelker put his hand on my shoulder.

“Let them be, Drak, my friend. I am a man of peace, and you, I know, are a man of violence. But they go their ways—”

I was profoundly shocked.

“I, too, am a man of peace, Yelker! How can you call me a man of violence?” I considered. “I only tripped Kutven Ban!”

Rafee let rip with his coarse cackle at this. I could see their point. But I was annoyed. I am never violent — at least, not stupidly so, not unthinkingly, not when it will hurt people for whom I cherish affection. At least, so I hope.

I turned to collect my gear from the cabin I had used, up in the bows. “At least,” I said over my shoulder, “I never hit an old man or an old woman for fun.”

Then I stopped. “Well, Yelker — and you, too, you grinning onker, Rafee — if I am violent it would be because I saw someone doing just that! I’d be inclined to hit him and thus attempt to show him the error of his ways.” Like, I thought with some remorse, I had shown that argenter captain in Pa Mejab the error of his ways for slapping young Pando.

I bid them all Remberee and took myself off. They were sorry to see me go. I hoped they’d get back through the Ogier Cut without bother this time, although the lissium ore did not share the same urgency as the hoffiburs.

Finding a posting station was not easy, for I had made up my mind to continue by zorca. I did not have the price of an airboat ticket, assuming I could find a Company of Friends operating an airline here. The oldster with the stubbly chin scratched that stubble, and spat in the straw, and sized me up. My beard had been trimmed neatly. But folk in Vomansoir were clean-shaven as a rule.

“You must be in a mighty hurry, dom.”

“I am. The zorca will be safe, for I am accustomed to riding them. Here.” I held out coins with the portrait of the man I wished to see. “What will it cost?”

Strange words, those, for Dray Prescot on Kregen!

In the event I hired a zorca and left a whacking deposit as a guarantee of my honesty. Vallia has a functioning banking system, as must any country which trades at such a high intensity, and I could collect the deposit when the zorca was either returned or unsaddled at the Vondium stables. I bought some food, and with a few silver coins left clanking rather dismally in the lesten-hide bag, I set off.