The suns of Scorpio (11 page)

“He won’t go under arrest! For I shall cut him down — now!”

The long sword glimmered silver in the spray, high over my head. It slashed down.

Nath, Zolta, and I carouse in Sanurkazz

I moved sideways and I kicked that florid-faced young man where I had kicked Cydones Esztercari, neatly, making him double up and retch all over the sea-wet deck. I took the long sword away. I held it so that Rophren and his friends could see it.

“Countermand a single order I have given,” I said, “and you die.”

Their hands bunched on their sword hilts. They were proud, arrogant men, used to command. They lurched on the decks as the galley surged and bucked and fought the sea. I stood there, limber and straight, balanced, and the sword in my fist maintained a steady arc upon them. Whether they would have charged me, desperate in their ill-founded belief that I was consigning them all to a watery grave, whether they would have remained, like chained leems, snarling and impotent, I do not know. I rather suspect the latter, for I have been told that when I, Dray Prescot, challenge a man with a sword in my fist I present a most daunting and unhealthy spectacle.

As they stood there, wet, miserable, and frightened, facing the boiling sea or the bright menace of my sword, a sharp hail lifted from the bows.

Up there Nath, my Nath of the galley bench, perched. He pointed and waved a dripping arm.

“Clear, Stylor!” he screamed. “We’re clear!”

We looked, those men like chained leems, and I. The rocks were moving astern of us, their spouting white-fanged venom dropping astern as we pulled away. Slowly, struggling for every inch,
Lilac Bird
labored her way past that cruel point of rock and so weathered the cape and we could run more comfortably into the gulf beyond.

After that it was merely a matter of a routine court of inquiry when Zenkiren regained consciousness. Rophren was placed under arrest. The florid-faced young man, Hezron of High Heysh, also was placed under arrest; but in his presence I spoke for him, knowing this had been his first cruise as an officer aboard a swifter and this his first storm.

“The dangers of the sea vary in proportion as one comes to know them,” I said. “I do not hold it against Hezron that his untutored fear impelled him to seek to kill me. Perhaps he may hold it against me that I kicked him between wind and water.”

Zenkiren did not smile; but I was watching his face as he sat in the seat of judgment at his table, with the other officers present and the glowering, pasty-faced Rophren between two men-at-arms, and I thought he might have smiled at another time. Zenkiren was a jolly man who loved a good belly laugh despite his ascetic brilliance.

“What do you say to that, Hezron?”

Hezron of High Heysh lifted his head. He was a boy who was used to throwing his weight about, that was clear, a member of a rich and powerful family in Sanurkazz.

“I do not forget an injury,” he said, and his words splintered in the cabin as
Lilac Bird
pulled toward the harbor. “I shall hold it against you that you demeaned me, that you dared lay a hand on me. I, Hezron of High Heysh. You will not forget that lightly, barbarian.”

I looked at him. I had heard the opprobrious epithet barbarian applied to me, as a stranger from the outer seas, more than once, but never like this, never with so much venom. I thought of the galleys of the inner sea, I thought of their fighting qualities, and I wondered. Those ships of Zenicce, which city was not popular on the outer oceans, and the wide-ranging fleets of Vallia, were they fashioned by barbarians?

Was the gorgeous enclave city of Zenicce barbarous? If it was, it was of a form and style of barbarity these swifter-men of the Eye of the World could not understand.

“If you wish to make an issue of that,” I said, and I know I spoke in a harsh and barbaric voice, “you are welcome to meet me at any time with weapons in our hands.”

“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 sometimes 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.