The suns of Scorpio

Bird, it would be essential. The ancients of Earth without knowledge of steam bending were forced to use green wood with the sap in so that they could bend the timbers to shape. The wood warped and very soon the ships leaked and became useless. The galleys of the Greeks were essentially light craft, with one man to an oar, designed to ram. The Romans with the corvus, the studded gangplank for boarding, attempted to bring land-fighting techniques to the sea, but their ships were still slightly built. With Earth’s Renaissance and the galleys of the Catholic powers against those of the Muslims, the galley reached a new development. It is hardly correct to say, as so many do, that these last galleys were the direct descendants of those of ancient Greece and Rome.

With one man to one oar, as was universal among the ancients, with the trireme’s sets of seats in threes, slanting back toward the stern, with oars of from about fifteen feet in length to about eight feet, with the thranites, the zygites, and the thalamites pulling those oars, with their everlasting baling caused through warping timbers consequent on the use of green wood, and with all their early effort concentrated on quick ramming, rolling the sinking galley off the ram and a smart backwater, the ancient Greek triremes must have been finely tuned instruments. The confusion attendant upon a single oarsman losing his stroke must have worried the trierarch as much as anything else. One man to one oar set a very definite upper limit to the power it was possible to transmit. These sailors of the Eye of the World had gone for the later system, the arrangement alla scaloccio; but, with a daring I found admirable, had concentrated their propulsive power into two or three banks. While technically correct to call Lilac Bird a bireme, and the other large galleys of the inner sea triremes, I shall stick to what the Kregans themselves called them -

swifters.

Wind scoops of a pattern I was familiar with directed fresh air below decks, and many gratings and openings gave free ingress for ventilation. Despite that, the lower rowing deck, where the thalamites sat and sweated, presented a spectacle of hell on Kregen I had no wish to suffer again. If I have not made it clear that for Zorg, Nath, Zolta, and I, fresh out of the thalamite deck of a Magdag swifter, the open pulling benches of Grace of Grodno came as a taste of reprieve, I can assure you this was so. At that time and for some time to come, I was still unsatisfied that the best arrangements for oarsmen had been found.

With my head full of galleys and swifters and triremes I accompanied Nath and Zolta to their favorite drinking haunt, The Fleeced Ponsho — Kregans sometimes have a warped sense of humor — where buxom Sisi apparently was prepared to favor these two unlikely cutthroats without overpayment merely because they happened to have escaped from the Magdag galleys.

“With one man one oar,” Zolta was saying, rubbing his chin where his black beard was growing enough to itch, “even with the apostis — for which we must give credit to the Archbolds of Zair-”

“Huh!” interrupted Nath, as we swung into the low doorway of the tavern, out of the pink moonlight from the two second moons of Kregen. “Those rasts of Grodno-gasta claim the credit for inventing the apostis!”

“May Zair rot them!” rumbled Zolta. He pitched his body onto a bench and yelled for Sisi. “Anyway, friend Strombor” — they had taken to calling me that, now, and both could not really stomach the “lord”

bit — “as I was saying before Nath opened his black-fanged wine-spout — Sisi! Hurry up, you lecher’s delight! I’m as dry as the Southern Desert! As I was saying, one man one oar, even with the apostis, is fine for small handy craft. I’d not care to be aboard when a hundred-and-eighty swifter got on her tail!

Ho! She’d be hoicked clear out of the water!”

They still had to convince me.

Sisi’s arrival with three leather tankards brimming with wine from Zond, rich and dark and potent, silenced our argument as we quaffed. Then Nath belched and leaned back, brushing the back of his hand across his lips.

“Mother Zinzu the Blessed! I needed that!”

We talked and drank and argued, and got into a gambling game with some ponsho farmers up from the country, and with Nath’s uncanny ability to manipulate the dice we were doing very well indeed, when a fight broke out — there always seemed to be fights following Nath’s dice manipulation. Laughing and roaring and throwing tousle-headed ponsho farmers from us, left and right, we roistered from the tavern. When I say that Zolta being the smallest of those four of us who had labored on the oar took the outboard, do not infer he was a small man. He could pick up his groundling and hurl him into the bar display with the best.

Sisi came yelling and running, the bodice above her red gown billowing with her outraged anger, but Zolta swept her up in his arms and bestowed on her a wet and bristly kiss and then we went whooping out of The Fleeced Ponsho. The mobiles, the Sanurkazz equivalent to a police force, fat and jolly men with swords at their sides rusted into their sheathes, hallooed into the flower-draped little square before the tavern as we went dancing out at the other side. Nath had a bottle of wine in his hand and he was laughing and dancing, and Zolta was grinning a great big foolish grin and obviously thinking of Sisi. I had to laugh at my two ruffian companions. But we had pulled an oar together in the galleys. That made us comrades with inseparable bonds. We had been four. Now we were three. I believe my laugh was no laugh a civilized man would recognize.

We scampered up the moon-drenched alley.

“We must find another tavern, and that right soon,” declared Zolta. “I am primed.”

“And what of Sisi, oh man of little faith?” demanded Nath. He pulled the cork out of the bottle with a single jerk.

“She will keep, fat and juicy. I am primed, I tell you, Nath, you nit that crawls upon a calsany.”

“As to that-” said Nath, and then paused to upend the bottle and down four hefty slugs: glug, glug, glug

— and glug. “Nits are of a size more suitable to he who pulls nearest the parados — yes?”

He yelped as Zolta’s toe caught him, and then they were both roaring and yelling and running up the alley, the bottle brandished in Nath’s hand, and the great contagious roaring laughter welling up from Zolta to inflame the fire. I sighed. They were ruffians, true, but they were oar comrades. From the direction of The Fleeced Ponsho came the measured tread of booted feet. There was a ring about those footsteps, four men at least, and clad in mail. Men in Sanurkazz did not wear mail with the same habitual ferocity as the men of Magdag. The mobiles only wore half-mail. Mind you, they were so fat and indolent a lot, preferring a bottle of wine to a fracas any time, that I was surprised they’d even arrived when they did.

The footsteps approached and I stepped back into the shadows of a balcony from which great blossoms glowed, their inner petals shut, their outer petals open to the moonlight.

“The rast went this way,” a grating voice said. I remained very still. I did not even make an attempt to free the long sword at my side. The time would come for that.

“Hark at those two cramphs-” Nath and Zolta were certainly making a hullabaloo enough to awaken the whole district. “We had best hurry.”

Four men in mail pressed on along the alleyway. They entered a patch of the pink moonlight that moved only slowly with the gentle orbital movement of the two second moons. Their faces showed pink blobs, barred by ferocious upthrust moustaches. The mail glittered where it was not fully covered by the loose-fitting white surcoats. Those surcoats looked odd, and then I saw that they were bereft of the usual sizable badge, worn breast and back, that marked a man for his allegiances. I think I knew then what all this was about. But I wanted to know for sure. After all, I, Dray Prescot, had more important things to do on Kregen than to engage in a petty feud with a spoiled boy, no matter that he might be the scion of a wealthy and noble family.

The men’s swords glittered in the moonlight.

They would have passed me by, hidden in the shadows beneath the balcony. I remember there was a sweet scented odor on the air from the great moon-drinking blooms.

I stepped out into the alleyway.

The long sword lay still in the scabbard.

“You wanted to speak with me?”

It was a challenge.

“You are he whom men call the Lord of Strombor?”

“I am.”

“Then you are a dead man.”

The fight did not last long. They were fair swordsmen, nothing of note, nothing that my wild Clansmen could not have dealt with. Hap Loder, for example, would have been yelling for a drink as he finished them off, with all his panache.

When I returned to Lilac Bird I said to Zenkiren: “I wish to see the father of