go on! Know, Dray Prescot, that the Prince Pracek is marrying the Princess Delia of Vallia.”
Chapter Twenty
There is little more to tell.
There is little left to say about that time, my second sojourn on the planet Kregen beneath Antares.
I cared nothing for honor, for glory, for the colors of pride, I cared nothing for the bokkertu, for what might have been written down and signed and sealed. My wild clansmen would follow me across the Plains of Mist if needs be. With that marvelous rapier gripped in my fist, with my battle-stained scarlet gear flaming beneath the twin suns, and with my clansmen at my back, I paid a call on the wedding of Prince Pracek and his exotic foreign bride. The Ponthieu enclave lay just across the canal. There would be trouble there in the future. I might have to raze or capture the whole complex. On that day, so long ago, I and my men roared across in fliers, in skiffs, in the wherries that had ghosted up from the marble quarries with my men packed within. We smashed in with unceremonious power when the place was decked in purple and ocher, and wreaths of flowers hung everywhere and the scents of costly perfumes wafted in the corridors and halls, where slave girls danced in their silks and bangles, where music sounded on every hand. At the head of my men I burst into the Ponthieu Great Hall and a guard of Ochs and Rapas and Chuliks fell away before the ranked menace of our clan bows. Grim and terrible to see, as I know I must have looked by the way the women shrank away from me and the men in their purple and ocher fingered their rapier hilts and would not look at me, I strode down the central aisle. Gloag, Hap Loder, Rov Kovno, Ark Atvar, Loku-and Prince Varden-were with me, but they kept at a distance, silent and watchful.
So sudden, so violent, so vicious had been our descent that nothing could stop us. The first Ponthieu to reach for crossbow or rapier would have died with a dozen arrows feathered in his purple and ocher trappings. I halted before the great dais as the music faltered and died away.
Absolute silence hung in that Great Hall as it had hung in the Great Hall of Strombor-my Great Hall! — only, it seemed, moments ago when Shusha proclaimed my inheritance.
Prince Pracek, with his lopsided face and sallow visage, stood there, his hand gripping his rapier hilt, gorgeously clad in his wedding trappings. Priest were there, shaven-headed, long-bearded, sandaled. Incense smoke coiled, stinking. A crimson and green carpet led to the altar.
And there, standing with lowered head, stood the bride-to-be. Clad all in white, with a white veil concealing her face, she waited quietly and patiently to be united to this twisted man at her side. Bride-to-be! Could I be too late! Then-then I promised, she would be a widow within the second.
Pracek tried to bluster the thing out.
“What is the meaning of this outrage! We have no fight with you-clansmen, a scarlet trapped foe! I know you not!”
“Know, Prince Pracek, that I am the Lord of Strombor!”
“Strombor?” I heard the name taken up and repeated in a buzz of speculation about the great chamber.
But my voice had betrayed me.
The white-crowned head lifted; the veil was torn away.
“Dray Prescot!” cried my Delia of the Blue Mountains.
“Delia!” I shouted, high, in answer.
And then, before them all, I took her in my arms and kissed her as I had kissed her once before in the pool of baptism in far Aphrasoe.
When I released her and she released me she still clung to me and her eyes were shining wonders. She trembled and held onto me and would not let go-and I would not have let her go for all the two worlds of Earth or Kregen.
There was nothing Pracek could do. The papers relating to the bokkertu were brought and ceremoniously burned. I took Delia of the Blue Mountains-this strange new Delia of Vallia-away with me back to my enclave, to my House of Strombor. Any man who had tried to lift a finger to stop us would have been cut down in an instant.
Laughing, sighing, kissing, we went back to the Great Hall where I showed Delia of Delphond to everyone and announced she was the Queen of Strombor.
There is little left to tell.
How brave she had been! How foolhardy, how noble, how self-sacrificing! Believing I regarded her as an encumbrance, as a hindrance, that I was doing what I was doing out of love for Princess Natema, she vowed to aid me in every way she could. If she could not have me, then she would help me to obtain the woman she thought I wanted, if that would make me happy. I chided her, then, accusing her of weakness and of giving in; but she only said: “Oh, Dray, my dearest! If only you could see your own face at times!”
She had taken Natema’s gems, glad now to use them to aid me, and slipped away in the airboat so that I might think she had returned home. Of course, she had known where Vallia was all along. At first she had been reluctant to tell me she was the daughter of the Emperor of Vallia for fear I would demand an immense ransom- which would have been paid, I knew. Then, when she had known she could not live without me-I believe she might have done something brave and foolish immediately after the wedding ceremony with Pracek-she did not tell me because then she thought I would simply see her home and leave, or just send her home, away from me. And she could not bear that. But when her poor confused thoughts had tangled Natema with me she had gone to her father’s consul in Zenicce, that bluff, robust, booted man with the buff gear, using the gems to ease her way in the city and setting the airboat to drift far out over the sea, and told him she wished to be betrothed to Pracek. He had tried to dissuade her, for the match was too far beneath her; but with her own imperious will so different from that of Natema, she had insisted.
I hugged her to me. “Poor foolish Delia of the Blue Mountains! But-I must call you Delia of Vallia now.”
She laughed up at me, holding me close.
“No, dearest Dray. I do not think Delia of Vallia an euphonious name and never use it. Delphond is a tiny estate my grandmother willed me. And the Blue Mountains of Vallia are magnificent! You will see them, Dray-we will see them together.”
“Yes, my Delia of the brown eyes, we will!”
“But I wish to be called Delia of Strombor-for are you not Lord of Strombor?”
“Aye-and you will be Queen of Felschraung and Longeulm, Zorcandera and Vovedeera!”
“Oh, Dray!”
There is not much more to tell.
We were sitting in a room with the sunshine from Zim flooding crimson all about us waiting for Genodras to pour its topaz fires into the room. At the far end were all my friends, laughing and talking and already the bokkertu for our betrothal was taking place. Life had come to be suddenly a precious and golden wonder to me.
As the green sunshine slanted in through the window and mingled with the crimson I saw a scorpion scuttle out from under the table. I had never before seen one on Kregen.
I jumped up, filled with a frenzied, sick loathing, a foreboding, even a knowledge. I remembered my father lying white and helpless as the scorpion scuttled so loathsomely away. I leaped forward and lifted my foot to bring it down squashing on the ugly creature-and I felt a blue tingling of fire limning my eyes and penetrating into my inmost being-I was falling-and Delia was no longer a warm and wonderful presence. I opened my eyes to a harsh and yellow sunshine and I knew I had lost everything. I was on the coast of Portugal, and Lisbon was not far off and there was some trouble before I, naked and with no explanation of my appearance, could break free and try to make some kind of a life at the beginning of the nineteenth century on Earth. The scorpion had stung once more.
For hours I would stand, gazing up at the stars, picking out Scorpio. There, four hundred light-years away, on the wild and beautiful and savage planet of Kregen, beneath the crimson and emerald suns of Antares, was all I wanted on any world, denied, it seemed to me, forever.
“I will return!” I shouted, over and over, as I had shouted once before. Would the Savanti hear and take pity on me, return me to Paradise? Would the Star Lords once again pluck me across the interstellar gulf to be used
