His haggard face looked uplifted, lightened. He squared his shoulders with a gesture at once instinctive and defiant.
“Lahal, Pur Dray,” he said. His voice sounded thick, drugged. “Give me a sword. I would be pleased to exchange hand blows with these Zair-benighted rasts of Magdag. You go on and take the women with you.”
He knew I could not do that. But he meant it. I looked at him.
“Lahal, Rophren,” I said.
“I am of the Red Brethren of Lizz,” he said proudly, with a lift of his head. “I wished to be a Krozair of Zy, but the rashoon stopped all my hopes there. Give me the sword. I will die here, and none will pass until I am dead.”
“I believe you, Rophren. I will stay with you.”
I reached for the long sword Susheeng held. She was looking at me with a wild light in her eyes and she shrank back. “What-?”
Rophren took the sword. He hefted it. The mailed overlords of Magdag were hurrying up the stairs toward us. “It is good to feel a sword in my fist again,” he said. “I have been captive too long.” He laughed then, and swung the blade. “Stay, as you will, Pur Dray, my Lord of Strombor, you who are a Krozair of Zy. It will be a great fight. Stay and you, a Krozair, may see how a Red Brother of Lizz can die!”
Susheeng was staring at me with all of horror and hell in her eyes. “A Krozair,” she whispered. “You — the Lord of Strombor!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Truth to tell, all during this imprisonment in the colossal structures of Magdag where I was a sacrificial victim in the ritual games to insure the return of Genodras, I had been half hoping against all reason that the workers and slaves of the warrens would continue our plans, would mount the attack despite the catastrophic loss of their leaders. If ever there was a need for them to put in an appearance, it was now. Even while the Princess Susheeng shrank back from me, her face a white mask of fury and despair, a seething agony of acrimony I could well understand impelling her to turn from me at last and finally, the mailed men ran up the flight of stairs.
“A Krozair!” she said. Her fists struck again and again at my chest. “A pest-ridden rast of a Sanurkazz pirate! The vilest Sanurkazzian Krozair of them all, Pur Dray Prezcot, the Lord of Strombor!” She was laughing and shrieking now, mad and wild with the frenzy that tore her. Holly came up and took her shoulders and wrenched her away. Holly’s face was as blanched and set as those of Pugnarses and Genal. To them it was inconceivable that an escaped galley slave hiding in the warrens might be a Krozair. Krozairs, they knew, fought to the death.
“They come,” grunted Rophren. He had wanted to be a Krozair of Zy, and his crisis of nerves during the rashoon had blasted his hopes. But the Red Brethren of Lizz were a renowned order. He had redeemed himself; he would die well. I do not subscribe to the view that a single act of courage can wash out all a man’s crimes, as is so often said; but Rophren, for me, had committed no crime save that of being unfit to be a sailor.
We stood, Rophren, Pugnarses, and I, with our long swords eager to smite down on the coifs of the advancing overlords. We fought. There were only ten of them and in accounting for five of them I felt I had betrayed my comrades, for Pugnarses was wrestling his sword out of the cranium of one while Genal struggled hand-to-hand with another who sought to cut down Pugnarses from the side — and Rophren was down, on his knees, bending over with his life’s blood bubbling through his fingers. But there were ten dead overlords littering the stair.
We stepped back from the carnage. Pugnarses, with a curse, kicked the bodies down the steps. I knelt by Rophren. He tried to smile. “Say Lahal and Remberee for me to Pur Zenkiren,” he whispered, and so died.
Pugnarses and Genal were collecting the swords.
“Why burden yourself with them?” I asked. Susheeng was vomiting all over those brilliant tiles. I knew it was not because she had seen men die.
“We can give them to the slaves!” snapped Pugnarses. “They will fight-”
“As you have just done, Pugnarses? With your blade wedged in your opponent’s head? The skill, Pugnarses, the skill.”
He swore vilely, bitterly, but he kept the swords.
I approached the Princess Susheeng. She looked up. Her cheeks were stained with tears, vomit slicked on her ripe lips.
“Will you stay here, Princess? You will be safe, for none know now how we escaped.”
I felt sorry for her. She had suffered exceedingly; and now she had discovered that the man for whom she conceived she bore a lifelong love had turned, at a single disastrous stroke, into a hereditary enemy. Truly, I think she had suffered enough.
“And are you truly Pur Dray, Krozair, the Lord of Strombor?”
“I am.” Did I speak boastfully? I do not think so. Did I speak pridefully? Ah, there, I think I did.
“How can I love a man of Zair?” she wailed.
“You do not love me, Susheeng-”
“Have I not proved it?” she flashed back at me.
I could not answer that. There was no answer.
Holly made a small movement, and I turned, and she stood there, clad in the gray slave breechclout, with a sword in her little fist. “We had best be going, Stylor.”
“Yes,” I said. I turned back. “Susheeng — try not to think ill of me. You do not understand the compulsions that drive me. I am not as other men. I do not love you — but I think you have touched a chord in me.”
She stood up. In that moment, with the tears and the vomit smearing her face, her hair unbound and disarrayed, she looked as close to a human being as I had ever seen her. I thought, then, that if she had the luck to fall in love with the right man she would turn out well. But that is something not of that pressing moment when we stood on the stairs with their florid tiles, in the megalith of Magdag.
“I cannot go with you into the warrens, Drak,” she said.
“No. I did not expect you to. Try to think well of me, Susheeng, for red and green will not always be in conflict.” I bent and kissed her. She did not move or respond. I suspect that she was trying to hate me, then, and failing. Her emotions had been drained from her, her will power exhausted. “Go down to your friends, Susheeng. As long as we live, we will not forget this moment.”
She started to walk down the steps. She moved like a mechanical doll of Loh struts, jerkily, almost tottering at each step. She halted. She looked up. “You will all be killed when Genodras returns to the sky.” The words seemed hardly to mean anything to her. “Remberee, Kov Drak.”
“Remberee, Princess Susheeng.”
She walked away from us, her hated red dress draggling on the flight of stairs, under torches, between those brilliant tiles of winged birds and horned beasts.
We descended the opposite flight and passed out into the brilliance of a day on Kregen when only Zim, the red sun, shone in the sky.
With our news, and with what they suspected, and the wailing over the pile of corpses of their group leaders, the warrens were in uproar.
“The overlords will ride in and destroy us all!” shouted Bolan. His bald head gleamed orange in the light. We had avoided the half-human guards on our way in. But I knew they would happily fulfill their contracts with the men of Magdag and charge into warrens to discipline us. We faced the kind of decision I think must face any man, any group of men, if he or they wish eventually to taste their rightful portion of life.
Because the orbit of Kregen is slanted steeply to the plane of the ecliptic the green sun during this eclipse appeared to descend at a sharp angle on the red; it would appear at the opposite side at the same angle. I looked about. Were there green tints returning to the orange colors of Kregen?
Soon men and women were running and screaming through the alleys and maze of courts.
“Genodras is returning! Woe! Woe!”
By reason of the place where the green sun was appearing from the red I knew what the men of Zair would
