Swordships of Scorpio

“You’ll have to tell him soon, Tilda,” I said as Inch and Pando went ahead. “If we are to rouse support for you, he is bound to hear-”

She nodded. “You are right, of course, Dray. We have much to thank you for-”

“You have,” I said. “But say nothing of that until the job is finished. Then-” and I chanced it, and took a breath, and said stubbornly: “And then, Tilda the Beautiful, I must be on my way to Vallia.”

She halted. “Vallia!”

“So you can see why we are like two nits in a ponsho fleece. We both have a zhantil to saddle.” Which is the Kregan way of saying we both had our own secret and dangerous purposes.

“But, Dray! Vallia! What can possess you to go to that dung-heap of a disgusting rast-nest?”

When a woman as beautiful and respectable and intelligent as Tilda of the Many Veils spoke like that about the country that was the home of my beloved — what could I say?

“I have good reasons, Tilda. I believe I can expect of you some trust, to believe you do not think me an imbecile.”

If she was about to make some unthinking remarks about me being a spy, she thought better of it. To take care, I hoped, of that eventuality, and already regretting that I had opened my big mouth, I said: “I have come to like and admire your Tomboramin, Tilda, I get along with your people. I shall be sorry, I think, to leave for Vallia, for there I shall do much mischief.”

And, by Zair! That was true!

Inch, ahead of us, took Pando’s arm, as I took Tilda’s, to thread safely through the maze of traffic thronging the street as we crossed to make our way down to the discreet tavern in which we were lodging. The Admiral Mauplius was situated in the cooler end of a square, overlooking the sea and gathering most of the sea breeze. The temperature was somewhat higher here in North Pandahem than I had found it anywhere else I had so far traveled on Kregen. I have remarked that Zenicce and the cities of the inner sea are situated close to the same parallel of latitude, and Vallia, also, lies with much of her island bulk on those parallels. It is a strange fact that the temperate zones extend over far greater an extent north-south than they do on Earth. From the most southerly tip of the most southerly promontory of South Pandahem, the equator is not so many dwaburs farther south. From South Pandahem directly southwestward lies the coast of Chem. The equator runs through the enormous, dripping rain-forests of Chem in Central Loh. While I mention North and South Pandahem, it is worth saying that they are separated by a range of mountains running generally southeast to northwest in a dogleg. The mountains extend on into the sea to form the long chain of islands that terminate off Erthyrdrin in Northern Loh. But the mountains do not stop, for there, in Seg’s homeland, they rear and convulse into that misty land of song and then, abruptly, collapse into a few islands across in the Cyphren Sea around which the Zim Stream swirls in its northward progress.

The problem we faced now was to hoist this usurper Murlock Marsilus out of his title and possessions, knowing that the king and the law would not help us until we had performed the deed, and knowing, also, that Murlock had all the aces on his side. He had the estates; ergo he had the money and the people tied up.

“We must do a little crafty detaching, Inch.”

“With Ngrangi’s help, that will be a pleasure.”

Inch, as you know, came from Ng’groga, which is right down in the southeast of Loh, well south of the equator. I wondered if he’d want to go home after this. If he did, he’d try to talk me into going with him.

“Murlock,” I said, firmly and with some bite. “We hit the top from the beginning.”

So strikingly beautiful a woman as Tilda was surely going to raise men’s eyebrows, inter alia, and she had taken to wearing a loose semitransparent blue veil, after the fashion of the women of Loh. When I asked Inch about Loh, and its mysterious walled gardens, and its veils, he chuckled and said: “I come from Ng’groga. There we are somewhat different folk.”

“The truth is, Inch, everyone all over the world is somewhat different.”

From the capital Pomdermam we took a coaster, a vile little ship smelling abominably of fish, to the westward. We touched at various charming little ports along the great incurved sweep of the north coast which forms the extensive Bay of Panderk, voyaging steadily westward. On the third day we saw a swordship foaming toward us on a parallel course, the waves breaking clean over her long low hull as she wallowed and lunged in the sea, her oars bending with the strain, white spume skyrocketing high, all her blue banners and flags taut in the wind that bore us so comfortably on. One of the crew spat overside. “A King’s swordship,” he said.

“The good Pandrite rot him,” said another crewman, looking up from where he slapped dough to make the long Kregan loaves he would bake on the hot stove later during the morning. “My brother was sent to the swordships — for nothing. I’d like to-”

“Aye, Lart!” interrupted the first, scowling. “And your mouth is like to get you sent to join your brother in the galleys!”

I took note of this little interchange. Evidently, this King Nemo was not loved by all his subjects. With the bread we ate cold vosk and taylyne soup. In the warmer weather here the cold soup was delicious, a thing I would normally never credit. Taylynes are pea-sized, scarlet and orange in their redness, and in conjunction with succulent vosk, superb.

“In Vallia,” Tilda told me when we chanced on that awkward subject, “they drink their vosk and taylyne soup so hot it scalds their lips and mouths. Barbarous, they are, in Vallia.”

She sighed. “Poor Meldi loved vosk and taylyne soup.” Meldi was the bodyguard with whom she had fled from Tomboram, and from what I heard of him he had been a gentle giant, caring for Tilda and Pando, until sickness had carried him off just before my arrival in Pa Mejab. On the fifth day we saw what at first I took to be a school of fish with tall almost-transparent dorsal fins. A cry went up and the crew rushed to the rail. Then, between the foam and the splashing I made out that this was all one huge and serpentine monster of the deep, with an oval body along the top of which grew that long fence-like fin. His head was impossibly out of proportion to his body, being immense, and equipped with a dredger of a fang-filled mouth.

“A sea-barynth,” said Lart, whose brother rowed in a King’s swordship. “Now if we could catch it we’d feast right royally this night.”

However, the coaster’s skipper was no intrepid huntsman, and we left the sea-barynth far astern wriggling and curving in the water. It had two large paddle fins beneath its head. I was told that the barynth, of a similar size and ugly ferocity, one was likely to meet in the swamps of Pandahem as elsewhere, was equipped with four clasping claw-armed legs beneath its head. I do not believe I have mentioned that the general word in use in Kregish for sea is “splash.” The oddity of this perfectly sound onomatopoeic word in English ears, I think, is sufficient justification for the hint of a smile I summoned when I heard it, and why I use the word sea in its stead. There is another aspect of translation worth mention here. The word in Kregish for “water” in the sense of a drink of water is one that could never be uttered in any respectable company where English is spoken. To hear a wounded man calling for water, on Kregen, is to experience heights of the surreal. In the shambles of the gun deck of a seventy-four which has just received a broadside from enemy thirty-twos, of course, one would hear through the smoke and confusion both words in just about equal proportion.

On the day before we picked up the pharos for what would be our penultimate port of call Tilda discovered nits in Pando’s hair and nearly went mad, ordering up huge copper kettles of boiling water, and formidable bars of Kregen soap which is designed to scour little boys’ eyes and the backs of their ears and necks. When Pando had been nearly scalped, she pronounced him fit to enter decent company once again. I thought of those running-alive ponsho skins of the Magdag swifters. Conditions of life are all relative.

From this last port of call before we reached Port Marsilus, the entrepot for Bormark, we sailed in a little convoy of eight ships, accompanied by a vessel paid for and maintained by Bormark and her neighboring dukedom to the east for just this purpose of escort against raiders from The Bloody Menaham which lay far too close for comfort to the west beyond the promontory and islands that terminated the Bay of Panderk. The vessel was an argenter, if of a slightly leaner build than those that plowed the outer oceans, equipped with varters and catapults and with a sizable crew. I studied her, and felt something could be made of her and her like.

From Port Marsilus, with Tilda still heavily veiled and under our assumed names, we hired two onkers for Tilda and Pando and two zorcas for Inch and myself. We rode to Tilda’s home, a farm nestled among groves of samphron and muschafs, where her parents, having overcome their surprise, made us welcome. With a strict injunction to them to remain fast and not to stir abroad, and so be caught, Inch and I rode for the palace of Murlock Marsilus, the usurping Kov of Bormark.