speak.
“I know you fought for Natema,” he said. “For Delia told me of it. I do not know how to thank you for saving her life.”
I spread my hands. If this was all! But he went on.
“Delia told me, and she was angry-how superb she is when she is angry! — that you were in love with Natema.” Varden rushed on now, ignoring my sudden start and the glowering look of fury I knew had flashed into my face. “I believe that was the true reason for her leaving us. She knew you did not care for her, that you regarded her as an encumbrance, for she told me all this, Dray, and she was very near to tears. I do not know whether to believe it or not, for from all I have seen I had thought you loved Delia, not Natema.”
I managed to blurt out: “Why should my not caring for Delia make her leave, Varden?”
He looked astonished.
“Why, man, she loves you! Surely, you knew that! She showed it in so many ways-the ling furs, the scarlet breechclout, her refusal to take Natema’s gems-and the way she looked at you. By Great Zim, you don’t mean to say you didn’t know!”
How can I say how I felt, then? Everything lost, and now, when it was too late, to be told I had had everything within my grasp and thrown it away!
I rushed from that sunshine-filled bow window and found a dark corner and heard only the stamp of my heart and the crash of blood through my head. Fool! Fool!
They left me alone for three days. Then Great-Aunt Shusha wheedled me into returning to life once more.
For their sake, for pride’s sake, for the sake of my bonds of obi-brotherhood with my clansmen, who were riding over the plains toward the city, I paraded a facsimile of normal living. But I was a husk, hollow and dead, within.
Varden told me, with a smile he tried to hide in face of my agony, that Prince Pracek of Ponthieu had contracted with a most brilliant bride-to-be, a princess from the powerful island of Vallia; that the Esztercaris had, however unwillingly, agreed to this match, for it would strengthen their alignment-and this meant, as I saw at once, that Natema was freed. Varden bubbled with the hope that in some fantastic way he would claim her. I told him I was pleased for him. I even ventured out into the public places of Zenicce once more. I had to live now only for my life with the clansmen. An unpleasant scene developed one day as storm clouds rolled in the from the Sunset Sea over the city. We had gone to the Assembly Hall and, leaving, were met by a crowd of the Esztercaris entering, and with them the purple and ocher of the Ponthieu. In the animated crowds always to be found talking and lobbying in the corridors and halls surrounding the Great Hall there were the silver and black of the Reinmans and the crimson and gold of the Wickens, so we were not alone.
Among the Ponthieus walked a tall and burly man clad in a fashion strange to me. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, curled at the edges, and with two strange slots in the brim above his eyes. His clothes were of buff leather, short to his thigh, belted in at the waist so the small skirt flared, and immensely wide across the shoulders. The shoulders were padded and artificially broadened, I saw; but the effect was in no wise incongruous. He wore long black boots reaching over his knees. He wore no single item of jewelry. His face was wind-beaten, bluff, with a fair moustache that curled upward.
“The consul of Vallia,” remarked Varden. I knew that in the city there were many consular offices, their functions more mercantile than diplomatic, for the niceties of foreign protocol are not too highly developed on Kregen, and a Noble House would have no hesitation in smashing down a consul’s door should they desire for some reason to do so.
The man struck me as a seafaring man, and his manner, quiet, relaxed, reminded me of the calm that deceives before the gale.
“They’re discussing the bokkertu, I suppose,” said Varden gleefully, Vallia was unusual among the land masses of Kregen in that the whole island was under one government. It lay some hundreds of miles away between this continent of Segesthes and the next continent of Loh. Vallia, as a consequence, was extremely powerful, with an invincible fleet. Such an alliance would make the Esztercari-Ponthieu axis so formidable nothing could stand against it. We must strike first, before their plans to attack us matured. It was on that day, I remember, that for some reason I went to the chest where I had stored the gems I held in trust for Delia. They were gone. Upset, miserable with my own worries, I had not stomach for further upsets and slave beatings, so I did not mention the matter. There was my portion that Delia might have-Delia, wherever she was now!
Now we glowered on the Esztercaris and rapiers were fingered and half-drawn and someone had the sense to send for the city wardens, and no blood was spilled. But the storm clouds above Zenicce were no blacker than our faces, and portended no greater hurricanes and whirlwinds.
A day later Gloag at last reported he had found Nath, the thief, and that Nath would help, for-how I relished the irony-he regarded himself as an obi-brother of the clansmen with whom he had escaped and shared dangers.
The simplicity of the plan was its strength.
No walls girded Zenicce with a ring of granite. Each enclave was a fortress in its own right. An attacking army might swirl along the canals and open avenues; they would swirl as the French cavalry swirled about the British squares at Waterloo-a scene I witnessed for myself. Even the three hundred thousand free people without the Houses maintained their own fortress-like enclaves into which they could retire from their souks and alleys. Great-Aunt Shusha gave me a surprise. She called me into the long room of her private apartments, and smiled and cackled at me as I gaped at a dozen of her personal retainers. They were clad not in the Eward powder blue but in a glorious, flashing, brilliant scarlet. They looked pleased.
“Strombor!” she said. She spoke the name proudly. “I have made up my mind.” She motioned and a slave girl brought forward two sets of scarlet gear for Gloag and myself. “Varden will have need of your strength, Dray Prescot. Will you wear the Strombor scarlet for me, and aid him?”
“I will, Great-Aunt Shusha,” I said.
She picked me up sharply. “I am not your great-aunt, Dray Prescot. Never think it.”
The affection I believed existed between us made me smother by surprise, for, of course, she was right. I was simply a wandering warrior, a clansman, with no claims to relationship with a great noble of the House of Eward or of Strombor. I took the scarlet gear and nodded.
“I will remember, my Lady.”
“Now,” she said, her bird-like eyes bright on me. “Go, Dray Prescot. Jikai!”
That evening as the storm clouds roiled and burst above the city the final plans were made. Clad in the gray slave breechclouts and carrying our magnificent scarlet gear and our weapons rolled in bundles, Gloag and I and the men we had chosen, twenty of us, swam the canal toward the island of Esztercari that had once been the island of Strombor. We entered through that low conduit from which Gloag, Delia and I had escaped-it seemed so long ago- and secreted ourselves.
The messenger from Hap Loder had arrived; in the dawn light the clansmen would reach us. Nath would see to that.
We waited, Gloag and my men and I, in the pouring rain, waiting for the first sign of the lumbering wherries easing through the canal water, dimpled with raindrops, from the marble quarries. The waiting was fretting.
So far I have deliberately made no mention of the Kregan system of time-keeping. But that wait was kept in counting the slow passage of the leaden-footed burs. A bur is forty Earth minutes long, and there are forty-eight of them in a Kregan day and night cycle. The discrepancies in the year caused by Kregen’s orbit of a binary were smoothed out by the addition or subtraction of burs during the festive seasons, and a similar calculation with regard to days at those times. Each bur contains fifty murs, or minutes. Seconds, although known and used by astronomers and mathematicians, are generally unnecessary in the daily commerce of Kregen. The position of the two suns by day, or any of the seven moons by night, can tell a Kregan the time instantly. An uproar broke out far above our heads. It was clearly extraordinarily loud for us to hear it, with the rain splashing down into the canal by our ears. I knew what it was. Up there on the bewildering profusion of roofs the powder blue of the Ewards would be spiraling down in their fliers, the men would be leaping out with rapiers aflame. They had not waited! They had gone into the attack early-and I could half-guess that the pride of the Eward House could not stomach waiting for my tough clansmen to strike the first blow. The fliers would be swirling away to bring more fighting men. The emerald green would be surging back, now. There would be death, violent, ugly death, sprawling all over the rooftops and down
