I looked at her. This was a test for her. I knew that. I wondered if she had realized that yet.
“For the sake of the cursed Armipand, Chekumte! Leave him alone!”
“Not until he grovels on his knees and begs my pardon.”
So far I had not moved. Still I looked beneath lowering brows at Viridia. Her bosom beneath that armor heaved. She was clearly in distress — and I marveled.
“Leave it, Chekumte! I will buy the swordship. There! Will you shake hands on it?”
But the Chulik kept his rapier point pressed against my breast.
“Not until this cramph apologizes!”
I said, “This island is called the island of Careless Repose. I did not expect to find a quarrel here.”
“There is not a quarrel, cramph! You, Prescot! Down on your knees! Lick my boots! Beg my pardon else I run you through.”
“Now, Chekumte!” protested Viridia. She began to lose her temper and a spark of that wildness flared.
“I have men here! Would you drench our safe haven in blood?”
“This is a point of honor, Chulik honor! By Likshu the Treacherous! I’ll have his tripes!”
Still I glowered down on Viridia the Render — and still she would not meet my gaze. A ruffianly towheaded pirate down the board laughed and yelled. He was of The Bloody Menaham or Menahem — either spelling conveys the meaning — and he had no love for anyone of Tomboram, from which country he believed me to originate. “Stick him now, Chekumte! What are you waiting for?” He waved his goblet and spilled wine over the brilliant blue and green cummerbund he wore, the blue and green of his national colors.
“Hold!” shouted Viridia. Her blue eyes blazed on me now with a violence of passion I knew would break out any moment and that would be followed by a battle royal and bloody corpses strewing the pleasant island of Careless Repose.
“There seems no holding the Chulik, Viridia,” I said. With a quick and startlingly sudden movement I stepped back so that Chekumte was left with his rapier pressed against thin air. I lifted my voice and shouted. “Listen, renders of the islands! I will fight this rast of a Chulik in fair fight! It lies between him and me! In all honor is this not so?”
After a great deal of yelling and cursing and argument, the general opinion was that, indeed, the quarrel lay between Chekumte and myself. He leaped the table and advanced on me.
“You have held me up to ridicule, human! Now you will die!”
I drew and faced him.
As Strom Erclan had been, as long-dead Galna had been, he was a master swordsman. The moment our blades crossed I felt the power in his thick wrists, and knew that I must put out every ounce of effort. And yet — and yet I sometimes wonder if I exaggerate the qualities of swordsman opponents in order to aggrandize my own prowess. I do not know. I know that I have faced many master swordsmen and fencers of high renown, famous in their own lands, and have bested them, every one. Is this the beginning of paranoia? Yet each time I cross blades with an opponent I know that this time, at last, I may have met my match. I think it is this tingling zest of the unknown, this awareness that every combat may be my last, that gives me the nervous energy to go on. I have met swordsmen who through years of absolute victory have thought themselves invincible and so they fought in order to kill and gloat in their killing. This, to me, is the mark of the beast. I detest killing, as I have said many times. If I thought that I could never lose a fight — where would be the fun of fighting? If, Zair forgive me, fighting is ever fun. Chekumte the Chulik was extraordinarily good, as I remember, as I believe. He would have disposed of Strom Erclan in a mere passage or two. Chekumte came from one of the many Chulik islands that stretch northeastward up the coast of southeastern Segesthes, with the island of Xuntal in the south of the chain. There they train their children in all the varied weapons they are likely to encounter when they reach adulthood and sally forth as mercenaries, for this is the chief occupation of Chuliks. Chekumte had been well-trained, and by a master I would like to meet. In addition, he had turned pirate, which was unusual for a Chulik, and had fought his way up to the captaincy of his own band of renders. We fought in a great glittering of blades, thrusting and parrying, rapier against main-gauche, whirling about and sliding and slipping on the discarded bones and meats of the floor. But, in the end, I had with as pretty a passage as I recall forced him against a table so that he bent backward to escape being transfixed. He catapulted out, his dagger low, his rapier high. He feinted a thrust with the dagger and then, as swiftly as a striking leem, slashed diagonally down with his rapier. Here was the Jiktar and the Hikdar working in sweet unison. I heard a shrill chopped-off scream. Then I had taken that swooping lethal blade on my main-gauche and in a screech of steel deflected it and the next instant my own rapier stood out a foot past Chekumte’s backbone. In almost the same motion I withdrew and Chekumte dropped his weapons. He looked down in wonderment and then placed both his hands over the blood-seeping hole in his chest. My blade had gone through cleanly, without fouling bone; but he was done for.
“You fight well,” he said, before the bright blood frothed from his lungs and out of his mouth in a gory stream. “For a human.”
Then he fell.
Without a pause I strode across the floor and stood before the towheaded man of The Bloody Menaham. I showed him the stained blade of my rapier.
“You were saying?”
He eyed me. His face was corpse-white. “I said nothing, Dray Prescot.”
“That is good. Make it so.”
Chekumte’s render band would choose their own new captain and I wanted none of that. They were an unsavory bunch. After the room had been tidied up the carousing began again. Some had not stopped drinking throughout the whole argument and fight. Later on Viridia sent for me, one of her Womoxes padding gigantic in the misty pink moonlight from She of the Veils. I went and I went alertly, for presumably Chekumte had friends. Had he comrades willing to fight for him, I did not meet a single one. Her room in the pirate village was furnished in much the same barbaric splendor, the same untidy womanly bric-a-brac as her cabin aboard her flagship. She looked different as the Womox ushered me in and then retired. Then I saw she had taken off that armor — and it was as I had suspected. She did indeed wear armor, a pliant mesh-steel shirt that came, I guessed, not from an armory of the inner sea but from the mysterious and progressive land of Havilfar.
Now she stood by the samphron oil lamp, her tanned face highlighted and wearing makeup that suited oddly. She wore a long white shift that reached her feet. Her dark hair had been combed — and that was a job for Kyr Nath, the Kregan Hercules, if ever there was one — and her blue eyes looked on me with a melting expression that at once alerted and alarmed me. I had seen that look in the eyes of women before, and I knew the trouble it brought. I braced myself.
She advanced and held out her hands.
“You fought right well, Dray. Chekumte was feared throughout the islands as a swordsman.” Her voice was not steady.
“You might have told me, Viridia, before,” I said. I spoke lightly. I tried to be casual; but Viridia the Render had her own dark and secret purposes which were transparent and unwelcome to me.
“Do you then so much dislike me, Dray?”
“Of course not! You are what you are-”
She bit her lip. Her mouth was very generous, soft and sensuous in a way quite different from the voluptuous mouth of Tilda. Now, with Tilda, I had had no trouble at all. .
“That is not — gallant.”
“Why not? You choose to walk around as a render, a pirate captain, and you dress for the part. I understand you must be tougher and stronger and more violent than your men. So-”
“So now I am changed, Dray!” Her blue eyes caught the mellow gleam from the samphron oil lamp. She was trembling. “I have combed my hair, and I have taken the baths of nine, and I am clean and fragrant
— and-”
“You are very beautiful, Viridia,” I said, for this was true, as incongruous as it sounds. Her body thrust with firm bold curves against the sheer white robe. The material of the shift, some fabricated silk from Pandahem, was very sheer, very smooth, almost transparent. Her bosom rose and fell and the silk ruffled with her movements.
“Then why do you scorn me? You must have seen with what favor I have treated you-”
I did not laugh, but I felt my harsh lips curving into a gruesome smile. “Training a bunch of calsanys with heads of lenk! Fighting the most noted swordsman of the islands! Oh, yes, Viridia the Render, you have treated me
