The suns of Scorpio

allowing me a reasonable turnover in use and rest periods.

“I thank you, Light of Zim,” I said formally. “Rest assured. I shall bring you in a tail of accursed Magdag broad ships and swifters.” It was a rote speech, but I meant it with all my heart. I went raiding on the Eye of the World.

The seasons slipped by; Felteraz remained as beautiful as ever. Nath grew ever more corpulent. Zolta had a number of narrow escapes from the form of marriage that would have clipped his wings. We sailed and we pulled and we crisscrossed the inner sea with burning wrecks and floating corpses; the totals of our prizes steadily mounted as we pulled in past the pharos of Sanurkazz. Clever distribution of the weights was always the problem in trimming a swifter. A galley that depends on oar propulsion must possess a shallow draft, yet we were packing as many as a thousand or twelve hundred oarsmen in, besides the crew, soldiers, and varters. Sometimes shipwrights went to dangerous lengths to conserve weight. Although all the enormous deadweight of the guns aboard a ship of the line did not have to be carried, the weights were still considerable. Victory ’s longest deck measures a hundred and eighty-six feet in length, and the width is fifty-two feet. She is built of wood. A swifter of that length would measure something like twenty feet beam. The differences make for cranky, unwieldy, and extremely unseaworthy craft. But then, no galley could live in a sea that Victory, or her sisters of my old Navy, could sail with ease.

Galleys are useless on the open ocean. I know.

I had seen the Spaniards out of Cartagena wallowing as we flashed past with our royals set. I could never sail back home to Strombor in Zenicce, or to Vallia, that island hub of an ocean empire, aboard a galley.

Equally, I would not relish the journey aboard a broad ship, what the ancients also called a round ship, of the inner sea.

All my growing fortune, my success, the luxury with which I might surround myself if I so wished, the good friends I was making — to my continual surprise, for I think I have indicated sufficiently that I am a loner in life — meant little. I felt more and more restless as the long days of raiding, cruising, and carousing passed. I hungered for something I was not clearly conscious of desiring. That cunning and politely vicious man, the noble Harknel of High Heysh, continued his attempts at persecution, but I held him off, contemptuously, almost with boredom. He did not pose the kind of problem I was in the mood to deal with. Because he had not been born with the all-important Z either in his name or his place of abode, by which he was known, his resentment of that further embittered him. He had seen that his son possessed the Z in his name. I had found, not without amusement, that my name was taken as Prezcot. It had helped. A man had to have the antecedents or the newly-won right to name either himself or his son with the Z. I often wondered what Zolta’s history was, but he would never tell me. Nath, now, was the son of an illiterate ponsho farmer, who had taken to the sea in revolt against fleeces, dips, and eternal flock-tending.

At the beginning of a new raiding season, when the twin suns of Scorpio were so close they appeared almost to touch as they rose in the sky, we had returned from our first cruise, happy and successful. Isteria had witnessed some carousing the night before and we had left a trail of mayhem at our many ports of call. I had taken my last cruise aboard this swifter, and was due to shift to a new six-six-hundred-and-twentyswifter, one built on long keel lines, as an experiment. She would be Zorg, of course.

Nath wore a bandage around his head.

A Magdag oar blade had welted him nastily during our last fight and he could still hear the bells of Beng-Kishi ringing in his head.

“He’s all right,” scoffed Zolta. “He wouldn’t know it if the tower of Zim-Zair fell on him. He has the skull of a vosk.”

Vosks notoriously had exceptionally thick skull bones, so I laughed, and said: “Maybe, Zolta. He should be thankful. He kept the varters going all through-”

“Vosk skull!” said Zolta, and then Nath threw a wet mop at him and I took myself off to my aft state room. It is not seemly for the captain of a king’s swifter to be seen romping with the crew. But again that nag of dissatisfaction came to me.

I have mentioned the single occasion on which I attempted to alleviate the lot of the slaves aboard my galley, and of how they rose as one man and attempted to cut the throats of all my crew.[5]Both red and green kept slaves: the red only for gallery work and a few personal body servants, the green for every aspect of menial labor they required. I had conceived it that my duty lay with the men of Zair — and I heartily loathed and hated the men of Magdag — but also I tried to remember that perhaps the Savanti had sent me here to the Eye of the World to do something positive about this abhorrent slavery. If they had, if the Star Lords also had their own requirements, I must obey, but I would do so with the clear understanding that I would make for Vallia or Zenicce just as soon as I could. The Proconia, those fair-haired people who dominated all the eastern shoreline of the inner sea, were involved in another of their internecine wars. As I have said, we always kept out of it, for we had enough to do with Magdag. This time Magdag herself had taken a hand in an attempt to dominate the only area of the Eye of the World where neither Grodno nor Zair were worshipped.[6]My new Zorg was directed to join a squadron outfitted for an expedition toward the east. This would be entirely new sea for me. I found a fresh interest in life again and Mayfwy had had made for me a new coat of mail of a fineness almost as supple as the mail worn by that mailed man in the Princess Natema’s alcove. That mesh steel had come from Havilfar, I had learned. The mesh of the inner sea was practical, lumpy, and unsophisticated by contrast.

The Victorian antiquaries who, to do them justice, revived an interest in Medieval artifacts, persisted in their odd usage, a quite erroneous nomenclature, of “chain” mail for the mesh iron coat, or hauberk, for far too long. One even still sees this silly word used of a coat of mail. I sat, I remember, in the stern sheets of my barge, feeling the iron links between my fingers, and thinking deep and powerful thoughts of nothing at all as we rowed back from Felteraz to Sanurkazz. The suns, very close together, were sinking into the sea ahead of us. The water shimmered and sparkled with the most wonderful colors. We drowned in sparkling light. The lighthouse men were climbing up the winding stairs to the pharos. A few fishing craft were sailing out. Some birds flitted against the cliffs. The glow of lamps and torches were lighting all over the city.

Perhaps I was dull, tired, maybe stale. Whatever the cause I was scarcely aware of the abrupt rush of men with dark cloaks swathed over their mail. We had just touched and bow oar had hauled us in with his boat hook and I, as was proper, was first out of the boat onto the steps. The men smashed into us in a fierce and silent onslaught. At once Nath’s long sword cleared his sheath and he was fighting for his life. Zolta, cursing, hurled himself into the fray. My men tumbled up from the barge. We would have had a hard time of it; maybe I would not have survived, had it not been for two men who appeared unexpectedly at the side of the jetty. I heard two whirring thuds, and as two men pitched screaming to the stones of the jetty I knew I was again seeing and hearing the terchick, the balanced throwing knife of Segesthes, in action.

Both victims had been struck in the face where their mail did not protect them. Zolta was yelling like a crazy man. My long sword cleared its scabbard in time to cut down the attacker who pounced on me like a mad graint. I could see the two newcomers and they were going to their work with a will. Swords flashed in the dying light. Men yelled and bodies made heavy splashes as they toppled from the stones. The attackers had been caught flat-footed by that unexpected flank onslaught; and as more of my men came racing up the stairs, green and slippery with weed, Zolta, Nath, and I with reinforcements drove them off. We had been lucky; without those two on the flank, they might have overwhelmed us by sheer numbers. Nath was puffing with his mouth open, his bulk heaving. Zolta, to my surprise, was not making rude comments. He was looking at the newcomers.

“By Zim-Zair!” he said, in wonder. “Is that a sword? Or is it a toothpick?” I knew, then. A light, arrogant, and yet pleasant voice answered. “They don’t like it through their eyes, friend. They don’t like it.”

The man who bent to retrieve his terchick from the bloodied face of a dead man wore buff clothes, short to the thigh and belted in; his legs were encased in long black boots. However, the item that truly identified him for me was the jaunty broad-brimmed hat, with the gay feather, and with those two strange slots cut in the brim above his forehead.

He straightened, the cleaned terchick in his hand. In a single rapid motion it vanished into the sheath behind his neck.

“The little Deldar,” he said, “has his uses, like the Hikdar,” and he slapped the long left-handed dagger at his right side. “And the Jiktar, my toothpick, as you so disrespectfully called the queen of weapons.”

His rapier was long, thin, and elegant, rather too ornate about the hilt, and there were spots of blood about the hilt he had not cleaned off.