The suns of Scorpio

If all the nobles of Vallia were like him I was in for a boring or headily exciting time, depending on how much I was prepared to put up with them. “I am a Kov of Vallia — as are you, for my sins — and we demand style in our living. Anything less than this would be unthinkable; in itself it is barely good enough, as I have told Glycas in no uncertain terms.”

“Glycas?”

We slaves of Magdag knew little of the upper crust “A most powerful force, a man who has the king’s ear. We are renting this palace from him-” If he was about to say words to the effect that I should be careful how I comported myself in case I damaged the furnishings, he thought better of it. Vomanus had taken off his buff coat with a sigh of relief and now wore only a white silk shirt with his breeches and black boots, a shirt, however, whose overlong sleeves were wristed by a mass of ruffles which he liked to flourish up and down his brown and muscular arms as he gesticulated in his talk.

“The place is well enough, Tharu,” he said. Tharu glared at him, but let the matter drop. We were all anxious to leave and return to Vallia, and soon news came that a Vallian ship had been signaled. I guessed the Todalpheme of Akhram would have a hand in that business. We passed the days in walking about the city, patronizing wineshops and taverns in the evening, watching the dancing girls and the various varieties of sports available. The girls were slaves, dancing girls clad in bangles, beads, and precious little else. They were totally unlike the girls who danced so gaily for us among the wagon circles of my Clansmen.

I was back in the snuffle of slavery, with beasts half-human, half-animal for guards, and I didn’t like any of it.

I scarcely used the suite of rooms assigned to me in the palace rented from Glycas. When I had been taken unconscious aboard My Lady of Garles with a glib explanation, Tharu, with his accustomed harsh authority, had quickly persuaded the Magdag captain to take aboard our baggage also. Tharu’s own iron-bound chests stood in his rooms. So it was that, with the exception of deviced clothing, I had all that I had brought from Sanurkazz — silks and furs, jewels, coins, weapons, my own long sword, and the coat of mail Mayfwy had had made for me. I could clearly see the danger these represented. They were soaked with the traditions of Zair. They would make me a marked man if discovered. So I had them hidden away beneath my bed, the three bronze-bound chests of lenken planks a nail in thickness. Then I took pains to explain to my Magdaggian hosts how I had picked up a long sword and a coat of mail as mementoes of a pleasant visit to their city, and when comments were made that the hauberk was unmistakably of Sanurkazzian cut I forced myself to laugh and said that no doubt this was the booty of a prize made to the greater glory of Grodno. That pleased those men of the green sun. Mind you, it was refreshing once more to stroll about with a long rapier at my side. Glycas was a dark-visaged man on the threshold of middle age, which on Kregen meant he must be turning a hundred or so, and his black hair was still crisp and fashionably cut, his hands and arms white, his fingers loaded with rings. But he was not a fop. His long sword was hilted plainly, with a bone grip that I, personally, would not have tolerated but which I knew was much favored on the inner sea. He was short and squarely built and he possessed a temper that had made him notorious. He was, truly, a dangerous man.

His sister, the princess Susheeng — plus a score of other pretentious names denoting her exalted rank and the broad acres of her estates, the thousands of slaves she owned — was lithe, lovely, and dark-haired, with eyes that tried to devour me with amorous glances from the moment we met. I was forced to contrast her with the gay reckless simplicity of Mayfwy, and had to acknowledge the animal vitality of this woman, her burning gaze, the intensity of the passion with which she took anything she wanted. All her noble honorifics amused me, through their pomposity. I realized afresh how lightly my Delia carried all the ringing brave titles to which she was heir, how subtly and how surely, with what courtesy and quiet gravity — shot through with her own elfin irony at life — she fitted the role of Princess Majestrix of Vallia.

The Princess Susheeng made a dead set at me. I was aware of this, and it annoyed me, through the complications that inevitably must ensue. Vomanus openly envied what he called my good fortune. Tharu, with a darker vision, contained his own resentment and annoyance.

I told her, one day as we stood on the third-level ramparts overlooking one of the harbors that opened out below the palace in which we were lodging, that I was looking forward earnestly to returning home.

“But, my Kov of Delphond, what has your vaulted Vallia to offer you that you cannot find in far greater quantity and quality here in Sacred Magdag?”

I winced, covered that lapse, and said: “I am homesick, Susheeng. Surely you understand that?”

With incongruous pride, she said: “I have traveled not for one single mur outside the lands of Magdag!”

I made some empty reply. That a person would boast of that kind of chauvinism appalled me.

“Well, Princess,” I said, and saying it realized how incautious I was, “I intend to return home as soon as possible.”

The woman nauseated me.

I had my mind on other women. Put this Princess Susheeng in the starkness of the gray slave breechclout, teach her the humility that is the only sure path to serenity, and she would turn out well. Slaves had no chance to reach to anything beyond their slavery, except those who escaped physically, by running or by death, and the humility a slave learns is corrosive and corrupting; but this girl might profit from it, if she knew she was to learn by her experience.

I wanted to travel to Vallia — and at once.

She saw all that in me; she saw my utter rejection of her.

The next day Vomanus and I were wandering through one of the high-class jewelry streets, a kind of open-air market, when we bumped into the Princess Susheeng with her body of retainers, blank-faced Chulik guards and a group of swaggering popinjay show-off Magdag nobility all fawning on her. She treated them all like dirt, of course.

“And what is that trinket you are buying, Kov Drak?”

She used the familiar tone of address to infuriate her attendants, of course. I held up the jewelry. It was a beautiful piece of cut chemzite, blazing in the suns’ light. It was work of Sanurkazz style and skill.

“I think it a pleasant piece,” I said.

“It is of Zair,” she said, her mouth drawn down. “It and all like it should be broken up and refashioned into more seemly work of Grodno.”

“Maybe. But it is here.” I forced myself to go on. “No doubt it is the booty of some successful swifter captain.”

She smiled at me. Her mouth was ripely red, a trifle too large, soft, and rapacious with overfed passion.

“And is it for me, a parting gift, Kov Drak?”

“No,” I said. I spoke too sharply. “I intend to take it to Vallia as a keepsake of the Eye of the World.”

That was half of the truth, as you will readily perceive.

She pouted, and laughed gaily, as at a joke, and made some flighty and, in truth, slighting, remark, so as to retain her composure before her toadies. Then she walked swiftly from the market to her sectrix, which she rode well enough, I grant you.

I know, now, that that scene saved my life.

That evening the Vallian ship was sighted rounding the point. She would tie up in Magdag this night. So far I had not set eyes on a ship of Vallia, for they were rare enough in the inner sea, tending to make armadas of their voyages to take advantage of the prevailing seasonal winds, and I had always been raiding when they had called at Sanurkazz. I had once tried to set course to intercept a Vallian I knew to be due off Isteria; however, for a reason that I did not then comprehend, I missed her. I looked forward to the encounter.

Vomanus took himself off to the harbor to greet the Vallian captain, and then he was back cursing and swearing, to saddle up a sectrix and ride off to a more distant anchorage to which the Vallian vessel had unaccountably been assigned by the port captain. I shouted some jovial remark after him. I had wanted to ride myself, but Tharu had sternly vetoed that.

“A Kov does not ride down to the jetty to greet the mere captain of a ship,” he said, and that was that. I had gathered that a Kov was what we on this Earth would call a duke; the information depressed me. I had often found that empty titles mean nothing, and that intermediary ranks are stifling and frustrating. There is a board game played a great deal on Kregen called Jikaida. As the name implies it has to do with combat. The squared board is, in shape, like an elongated chessboard, and with a touch of Halma about the moves, as one army of Jikaida men clash with the others. If you expect the colors of the men to be red and green, you are wrong. They are blue and yellow,