Swordships of Scorpio

not dead, for he moaned; but he had been struck a shrewd blow.

“I am not a fat old innkeeper,” I said.

“Then I will open your tripes and find out!” said this Gorlan, flickering his blade very swiftly before me. He lunged.

My dagger seemed — of its own volition and without any conscious effort of my muscles — to do as it pleased. It sliced up, deflected the rapier blade in a screech of metal, and so drove Gorlan back, with a spring, his face abruptly blackening with thwarted anger.

“You miserable cramph!” he bellowed.

He drove in again, powerfully, overbearing me by sheer weight and ferocity. My twin blades beat him off. The metal slithered and clanged, sliding and twisting with many cunning tricks and turns. He scored a long slicing cut across my left arm and then my rapier point pressed into his throat and his dagger flew spinning across the inn. I did not hear it land.

“Oh, Gorlan,” I said, rather thickly and with the world jumping and dancing with purple spots and streaks of white fire. “Oh pitiful little Gorlan!”

His face blanched. It was a very wonderful sight to see that swarthy visage drain of blood, the eyes glare in terror upon me, the lips go suddenly dry.

“Dray!” screeched Tilda.

I swiveled to my right, taking the rapier around ninety degrees and showing its point to the man Tilda had kicked and who was now rushing upon me with drawn sword. My left hand gripping the main-gauche swung around with my movement and my fist smashed sloggingly into Gorlan’s jaw. He dropped like a sack.

The second man hauled up, his rapier engaging mine, and for a short space we circled. With an oath the man grasping Tilda flung her from him, drew his own weapons, and charged in upon me at the side of his companion. The difficulty of focusing nearly betrayed me; I did not want to kill these two, as I knew they would not wish to kill me. This was a tavern brawl over a woman — as far as they were concerned a tavern wench — and they knew the arm of the law of Pandahem stretched here to Pa Mejab. As for me, the same strictures obtained. That Tilda was in very truth a famous actress, here in this colonial port city of Pandahem only because she had married for love, and her soldier husband had been killed here, leaving her stranded with her nine-year-old son Pando, meant nothing to them, although it meant a great deal to me.

So I engaged, and parried, and feinted, and took their blades upon my dagger, and thrust in the attempt to disable them. And all the time the world pressed roaring and swirling in upon me, my sight dimmed. I felt my banana knees bucking, and their onslaughts grew stronger and stronger as I grew weaker. By a desperate piece of sheer outrageous Spanish-style two-handed fencing that would have had my old master, the cunning Spaniard, Don Hurtado de Oquendo, foaming with outraged professionalism, I managed to disarm the second man and send him reeling back with blood spurting from a pierced bicep. But the other fellow bored in and my sluggish legs wouldn’t drag me around in time to meet his attack. Then — like an avenging angel — Tilda rose up at his back and, two- handed, brought down a jug of purple wine upon his head.

He grunted and lurched forward and his rapier skewered the floorboards as he smashed on past, the blade vibrating backward and forward and the hilt seesawing like an upside down metronome. As though hypnotized by that rhythmic motion I went to my knees, toppled slowly forward, and so came to rest beside the leem-hunter — and all of Kregen fell on me in blackness.

CHAPTER FIVE

A zhantil-skin tunic for Pando

Tilda would not tell anyone — not even me — any other name by which she might be known in Pandahem. Tilda was her professional name, her stage name, and by it she had become famous. What personal tragedy lay as the cause of her moldering, as I termed it, here in a distant colonial port city she also would not reveal. I gathered this had something to do with her husband, and of him all she would say was that he had married her against the wishes of his family. As a soldier he had been posted to Pa Mejab and, leading his squadron one day, had been slain.

She was fanatically proud and possessive of Pando, who was, as you have seen, an engaging imp of a rascal. She fretted continually over his safety and welfare, constantly chiding him for not wearing enough clothes, for not eating enough, for fighting the other children thronging the busy streets. But, in all this, she never lost sight with a clearheaded practicality that Pando was the son of a soldier, that she must look to him one day, and that he must develop as a man.

I confess that I grew to a better liking for both of them with each day that passed. My room at The Red Leem had always a vase of colorful flowers, and the sheets and sleeping furs were changed with hygienic regularity. Old Nath, the landlord, recovered of the knock on the head, consented to allowing me a reduced rent when I went on the guard duties by which, perforce, I earned my daily crust. He was only too well aware of the business Tilda brought into his inn. In the evening when she sang and danced, when she gave recitals of the great parts in Kregen drama, tragediennes and comediennes, performances so moving in both cases that they brought tears to the eyes of her audiences, rapt in silent admiration, Pando and I would sit companionably together and listen.

Pando, at nine years old, had the most fanatical admiration for his beautiful mother. For, as I have said, Tilda was a beauty with her ivory skin and ebony hair, all swirling and glowing, with her firm figure that had no need of the theater’s contrivances to drive men’s blood singing through their veins. Her violet eyes and her voluptuous mouth could melt with passion, could become stern and regal, could blast all a man’s hopes, could urge him to fire and ardor and unthinking gallantry — and all this on the tiny scrap of stage mounted at the far end of the main room of The Red Leem!

Pando is a familiar name for children of Pandahem, the great rival trading island to Vallia. It was only on the second day of my stint as a caravan guard that he was discovered hiding among the calsany drovers. The overseer, a tough and chunky man with a cummerbund swathing the results of many a night at The Red Leem, and, probably, all the other inns and taverns of Pa Mejab, hauled Pando out by an ear and ran him up to me where I strode along on the left flank of the leading flight of calsanys.

“Dray!” roared the overseer, one Naghan the Paunch. “Dray Prescot! Look what has dropped with the nits from the hides of the calsanys!”

I sighed and stared at Pando with a greatly feigned air of complete despair.

“We have no room for passengers, Naghan. Therefore he must either be slain at once, or sent back alone — or-?” I cocked an eye at Naghan the Paunch.

He pondered deeply. “To slay him now would probably be best, for he would never reach Pa Mejab against the leems and the wlachoffs who would rend the flesh from his bones and devour him until not a morsel was left.”

Pando, squirming against the brown hand that held his ear in so tight a grip, looked up, and the whites of his eyes showed.

“You wouldn’t do that to me, Dray! What would Mother say?”

“Ah!” said Naghan the Paunch, enjoying himself. “Poor dear Tilda the Beautiful! Tilda of the Many Veils! How she will grieve for this limb of Sicce himself!”

“Dray!” yelped Pando.

I rubbed my beard. “On the other hand, Naghan, Pando did run with his dagger to protect Tilda the Beautiful when she was attacked by leem-hunters. If he could do that, might he not thus also attack the leems themselves?”

Naghan twisted the trapped ear. “Have you a dagger, boy?”

Pando was thoroughly aroused now. He tried to kick Naghan. “Had I a dagger, oh man of the Paunch, I would have stuck you with it long before this!”

“Oho!” quoth Naghan the Paunch, and laughed.

And I laughed, and so — I, Dray Prescot, laughing! — because we could not send Pando back across that