The suns of Scorpio (18 page)

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!”

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.