Swordships of Scorpio

“Surely,” he said, patting his paunch. “Naghan is the most generous of men.”

“Ayee!” said Pando, most impudently.

We walked from the caravansary through the crowded streets to The Red Leem. If we walked with a trifle of a swagger — well, had we not crossed dangerous lands and fought wild beasts and wilder bandits, and brought the caravan safely home?

A shriek as of a Corybant broke upon our ears as we walked up to the tavern. Tilda, trailing a green gown, her glorious black hair swirling about her like impiter’s wings, flew down upon Pando. She caught him up, kicking and squirming, against her breast, and smothered him with kisses.

“Pando! My son, Pando!”

Then-

“Pando! You limb of Sicce! Where have you been?”

And with that, Tilda the Beautiful started laying into him with the flat of her hand, applied to the bottom of that brave new zhantil tunic, until Inch and I winced.

“He’s been all right, Tilda,” I said — like a fool. “He’s been out with the caravan, with me-”

“With you! Dray Prescot! Out there — out there, wild beasts, bandits, drought, hunger, disease — out there — Dray Prescot, I’ll — I’ll-” She left off beating Pando long enough to scream: “Get out! Get out of The Red Leem! If you show your face in here again, you vile abductor, I’ll scratch your eyes out!” She spared a hand to rip off a slipper and hurl it at me.

“Out! Out!”

Inch and I walked off, hurriedly and without dignity.

“Nice class of friend you have, Dray,” was all Inch said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

How Tilda the Beautiful fared at The Red Leem

Tilda’s anger against me did not last long when Pando managed to tell her what had happened. For his pains he was sent supperless to bed that night, as Inch and I quaffed best Jholaix in company with Naghan the Paunch and Obolya. Inch disappeared for a time and when he came back he winked at me and leaned over, whispering.

“Climbing the back wall was easy, Dray. That young devil is munching a vosk-pie now, and probably getting disgustingly drunk on a thimbleful of Jholaix.”

“If Tilda catches him and he tells on you, Inch-”

Inch looked pleased with himself. “Sending boys to bed supperless is against my taboos,” he said, and winked.

I perked up. Inch was turning into a comrade, rather than a companion. Now, if Seg were here — or Nath, or Zolta. Or, Gloag, or Varden, or Hap Loder. .

I must not think of Seg, I thought then.

Inch was laughing and telling how a friend’s taboos had given him a pair of horns, and Naghan and Obolya were laughing, too, and I could understand Naghan the Paunch, not Obolya. If I was asked to describe the Pandaheem succinctly, I would show my interlocutor Naghan the Paunch. He was Pandaheem to the very last nail of him. Built for comfort, the Pandaheem, as were their ships. Obolya, now, while he had changed since I had knocked that Rapa off him, was still as surly and vicious as ever to everyone. To me, he maintained a watchful respect, the result, I imagined, of our fight. He did not, to me, fit in with the men of Pandahem at all. I had discovered that the island of Pandahem, which lies to the east off the coast of Loh, due south of Vallia, was divided up into a number of separate nations, most of them governed by kings jealous of their own power and prestige, continually at loggerheads with their neighbors. They seldom united even against Vallia, whose single mighty empire operated from the secure base of an island under one government. This division weakened Pandahem. Pa Mejab, which lay well to the north of Ventrusa Thole and just tucked into the bay south of the great promontory projecting from Turismond into the Sunset Sea, was a colony city of the human nation of Pandahem called Tomboram.

Tomboram, as I learned, is a pleasant place in almost every respect, situated in the northern and eastern part of Pandahem, with Jholaix as a smaller country to the northeast. The Tomboramin are a happy folk, they had made me welcome, and although they would fight their neighbors, and Vallia, and the mysterious pirate ships that sailed up out of the southern oceans, they much preferred to sit in a tavern and drink, or watch and applaud a great dramatic performance. Industrious when working and idle when playing, the Tomboramin were people with whom I got on well.

And yet — I could not forget the bitterness with which Thelda, of Vallia, had spoken of the Pandaheem, of how she had sworn by Vox that they must all be destroyed one day. My Delia was a Vallian — she was the Princess Delia, Princess Majestrix. These people among whom I sat and drank and sang were her bitter commercial rivals, and deadly foes upon the seas. Even now a great deal of talk was in the air of the next expedition to probe southward to attack the Vallian colonial port city of Ventrusa Thole.

My distress you may imagine; my determination to reach Vallia, I assure you, was in no way impaired by all this newly-found good fellowship as we drank and roistered in The Red Leem and watched the incomparable actress, Tilda the Beautiful, perform so gracefully and movingly for us. When Vallia was mentioned by the Tomboramin, it was with a curse and a bitter feeling of betrayal, a sense of dejection and doom. No, these good people of Pa Mejab did not care for Vallians. Listening to them, hearing tales of treachery and deceit, I absorbed some of that feeling. Vallia was overbearingly powerful, omnipotent, almost. Vallia scorned all other nations. Vallia made treaties and broke them, contemptuously, careless of good faith. Vallia was as perfidious as, I suppose, the England of my day was considered by France.

Albion Perfide was now Vallia Perfide — indeed!

These days I habitually left my long sword in my room and in deference to local custom wore only the rapier and dagger about the town.

Tilda, in conversation one day, mentioned that political difficulties were growing worse every day with the Pandahemic nation immediately to the west of Tomboram, a nation she called The Bloody Menaham. I took little notice, although I knew that Menaham had sited a colonial port at what appeared to be perilously few dwaburs to the north, being more concerned over my own problems and being a trifle irritated that the wrangles on one island of Kregen were preventing me from reaching another. In this I should have been more careful; for The Bloody Menaham, no less than Tomboram, was to play a large part in my life before I found Delia again.

We discovered that it was taboo for Inch to eat the tiny and delicious fruit called squishes and Pando took a fiendish delight in bringing in great baskets of them from the orchards, for they were in season, and leaving heaping bowls of them everywhere in The Red Leem. Inch doted on squishes. This convinced me that his taboos differed radically from what is considered a taboo on Earth; there, had the squishes been taboo, he would never have eaten one in the first place. As it was, whenever we came upon Inch standing on his head, his face expressing the greatest anguish, we knew he had broken his taboo and gone munching squishes.

And Pando, the imp of Sicce, would laugh.

“I wonder, Dray,” he said to me, very solemnly, with Inch on his head in a corner close by. “If I had to stand on my head every time I ate vosk-pie, would I go off vosk-pie?”

“Such gratitude!” said Inch, and succulent squish juice dribbled down into his eye.

“Stick to palines, Inch,” I said. “There is nothing more sovereign.”

He groaned, and shut his eye, thus winking at us when he had nothing in his head to warrant a merry wink — at all.

The time was fast approaching when the armada might be expected in from Pandahem and the caravans would be loading again and Naghan the Paunch would be hiring guards. Due to the depredations of pirates — call them corsairs, rovers, buccaneers, privateers, as you will, to honest sailor-men of Kregen they were renders all — abroad on the outer oceans ships tended to sail whenever they could in great convoys called armadas. I heard Naghan shaking his chins and his paunch and saying, “The swordships make life hard for a merchant, may Armipand drag ’em down by the short and curlies. I sometimes make myself remember, when my caravan is attacked, that I