Swordships of Scorpio

suppose these seafaring folk of Kregen clung to their own ideas with a stubbornness I could recognize. The name of this wonder craft was Strigicaw. A strigicaw is a powerful fast-running carnivore with a hide striped as to the shoulders and foreparts and double-spotted as to belly and haunches, in a variety of brown and red camouflage colors, and although looking not unlike a leem has only six legs instead of that voracious beast’s eight.

She was a hundred feet in length — any more would have been too much for her power-propulsion -

and had just the two masts, a main and a fore, both rigged with courses and topsails. At least, she did boast a rudder and whipstaff. This is a clumsy system long superseded on the ships of Earth; no doubt soon the naval architects of Kregen will develop the wheel and cylinder steering gear. I strode about her, and, despite all, despite that she would need constant pumping, I began to get the feel of her, and to know she was my command.

After the sinking of Venus Viridia’s render maidens had been shipped aboard another of her squadron, whose crew had been distributed among the remaining ships, so that we had been crowded. Now I would have to look to bargaining and cajoling and arguing in order to obtain the crew I wanted. As we so stood surveying our new swordship a booming horn note rolled weirdly over the anchorage. All the busy noise of hammering and shouting, of singing and whistling, all human sounds ceased. Again that booming note mourned across the water.

“The alarm!” shouted Spitz, a redheaded archer from Loh. I had marked him from the first, and sought to woo him for my little company, for in his quiver he carried arrows fletched with the brilliant blue of the king korf — and also arrows fletched with jetty black feathers — feathers I knew had been set by Sosie na Arkasson — and given to me, and loosed by me against Spitz, and so retrieved by him for further use.

“King’s swordships!”

We tumbled down into the boat and rowed ashore in a welter of foam. The swordship — or swordships

— prowling around the island of Careless Repose might come from any nation; but we usually dubbed any swordship attempting to police the islands the King’s swordship. Viridia met us on the beach. She looked excited, her tanned face flushed, her strong body in the mesh steel armor firm in the suns-light.

“Be ready to repel them if they venture past the concealing islet!” she rapped out to her lieutenants, captains of their own vessels, of whom I was now one. “I and my warrior maidens will seek to do their business for them.” She laughed, throwing her head back in the light so that the dark hair swirled. “As we have done before!”

“Aye, Viridia!” the man yelled. “Hai, Jikai, Viridia the Render!”

There was no malice in me, no regret, for the use of that great word here. Viridia, in that moment, was a lady pirate indeed.

She took her girls off to the other side of the island and the swordship crews repaired aboard their craft and made ready to pull around the point if Viridia’s plan did not work. As I had no crew, apart from my own small company of loyals, I took them, with weapons in our hands, across the island after Viridia. She might welcome a little help, when it came to the time.

As it happened, she needed no help, least of all from mere men.

A repetition of what had happened to the old Nemo took place. This swordship, commissioned to hunt down the renders and sailing out of the chief port of The Bloody Menaham, was taken in exactly the same way and by exactly the same means.

I daresay it was the same half-naked sprite who ran along the central gangway carrying the dripping head of the chief whip-deldar.

The King’s swordship was rowed around the point and past the concealing islet and so into the anchorage where the slaves were freed from their oars. They set up a wonderful hullabaloo. All, I knew, would take the alternative of joining the pirates.

I studied the new ship. She was a smart and efficient-looking vessel, with three sails and a spritsail on her bowsprit. Her bronze ram was fashioned into the likeness of a mythical bird of prey, something like a falcon, although, of course, the hooked beak had been smoothed into a single shaft of cutting bronze. Anything like a hook, as of an accipiter’s beak, for a ram is idiocy. One has to be able to backwater and shove off from a rammed vessel, with the aid of the proembolion, before the water rushes into the cleft in her hull and the apostis, the rowing frame, settles down over your ram and drags you under. As for her spritsail, that was a sailor-like rigged job, nicely forward and yet well clear of her beak. I watched the ex-slaves being ferried ashore. Among those on the beach I saw a group forming around some object on the sand, and I heard loud guffaws, and hearty laughter, and many merry curses. I strolled down.

A man, a very tall man, was upside down on the sand, his legs rhythmically bicycling in the air. Some of the men were attempting to push him over. He did, at that, look a sight. I heard him yelling. “Clear off, onkers! I must abjure my taboos!”

A guffawing render — a towheaded man from one of the islands past Erthyrdrin — pushed the tall upside- down man and he rolled spraying sand.

Instantly, he was upside down again, his long fair hair sand-clogged, his legs rotating. The renders and ex- slaves roared.

“Taboos!” They yodeled, getting set for their next prank.

I sighed.

I strode over and unlimbered my sword.

I stood before Inch.

“If any man wishes to push this man over while he abjures his taboos, he must pass this rapier first.”

After that, Inch could get on with it, and I could only wait until he had worked all the accumulated taboo- breaks out of his system before I could ask him all the news.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The yellow cross on the scarlet field

Strigicaw prowled the seas in search of plunder.

“I never believed, Dray Prescot, that any man could claw back from the Ice Floes of Sicce.”

“Since I don’t believe in investigating that shivery region for many years to come, Inch, your surprise is unwarranted.”

“But, man! You just disappeared!”

“Evidently, what happened to me happened to you.” I told him, briefly, how King Nemo had disposed of me and he sighed and said: “Much the same. I suppose I was getting too big for my boots. When you vanished, no man knew whither, Tilda insisted I stay on. I had to — you see that, don’t you, Dray?”

“Of course. It was the honorable thing to do.”

My swordship, making a most unpleasant business of beating into a devilish strong wind from the wrong quarter and with a sea that made the use of oars out of the question, pitched and rolled. Spray drenched us. My flags flew stiff as boards.

Being anafract, that is, without armor protection for the rowers, my artillery — for I may use that word of varters — must be concentrated forward. We were far more a galley than a galleass, like the other swordships. The others of Viridia’s squadron were sailing far more weatherly than we and were pulling away across the tumbled sea. Again I looked up at my flags. Up there the yellow cross of my clansmen had been charged on the scarlet of Strombor. A brilliant yellow upright cross on a scarlet field. Yes, those were my colors. A momentary stab of an emotion I did not want to recognizethe render flag, a shaft of conscience, almost, that the pirate flag should wave in company with my own. Inch had given me the news. He had tried to assist Tilda, and keep Pando under some sort of control; but the wild zhantil had taken his newly-won status as a Kov to heart, and had lavished money and armament on the king and, with a great levy, had gone to war. I ached that I had not been there to help him — and by helping him to draw him back from the folly of war.

“I spoke out, Dray, and the next thing I knew was chained on the rowing beaches of a swordship -

and, mark me — a swordship of The Bloody Menaham.”

“I had noticed. They sold you, it seems.”