Swordships of Scorpio

“The war was not going well when I — ah — left.”

“If that idiot Pando gets himself killed — although,” I spoke hopefully- “I expect he would be held for ransom.”

“We didn’t handle him the best way. The Kovnate went to his head a little.”

“Agreed. And, Inch, that was my fault. I was a fool.”

Inch had not broken any taboos as yet since boarding Strigicaw, and I had swiftly adjusted to remembering. Now he shook his head. “Not so, Dray. You could always control him, and in the best way, without a strap. I tried. But after you went he turned wild. There was no holding him.”

“Tilda?”

He smiled. “She is a good mother, and a wonderful woman and a superb actress. But I think being a Kovneva was a trifle out of her experience. She tries to cope, but she has been drinking-”

“No!”

“I am afraid so.”

“We’ll have to go back, Inch, and sort them out.”

“Yes. It seems to me that is a task laid on us, for our sins.”

“For our sins, Zair be thanked.”

And so — what of Vallia? What of Delia of Delphond?

The strongest doubts existed that this wallowing swordship Strigicaw would ever live through a passage across the open sea. She was a swift galley built for coastal waters, up among the islands. Now, through the sheets of spray, our consorts were a full dwabur upwind of us, and going hull down. Vallia would have to wait. Delia — I know I prayed she would understand and forgive me. But I was tortured by the thought that her resistance had been broken down, and she had given into that imperial majesty, her father, and married the oaf of his choice.

“By Ngrangi!” exclaimed Inch as the ship rolled and the wind tore at our canvas and water slopped green. “This tub will founder beneath us!”

“Spitz!” I yelled to the archer from Loh. “Before the flagship disappears! Hoist the white flag from the main yard!”

With a yell Spitz ran to obey.

That white flag from our yardarm, plus the simultaneous hauling down of the pirate flag from the main truck, would indicate to Viridia, if her officers could pick the signal out, that we had been forced to return to Careful Repose.

In the midst of giving the orders that would turn our head toward the easiest point of the compass for the ship, Valka sprang up through the canvas coverings we had spread over the rowing benches to keep the sea out and raced along the central gangway toward me. He glared up to the quarterdeck.

“Only just about in time, Captain, if you ask me! The seams are working something horrible. We’re shipping water faster than the pumps can clear.”

“Muster a baling party,” I told Valka. “See they jump to it. I’m taking this ship home — never fear -

unless something better comes along.”

They all laughed at that, as though it were a jest.

The new course, off the wind and sea, eased the ship and I made a tour of inspection in the wildly leaping vessel, feeling her working in the sea, and realized just how close we had been. The inspection I had given her before we sailed had not been as thorough as I would have liked, and now I could see that Viridia had been cheated — although, no doubt, that troubled her not a whit. The new swordship she had just taken would be fitted and ready by the time she returned from this cruise. Much of the underwater planking was rotten, and I could push the point of my dagger into the wood with ease. I began to entertain a conviction that the bottom would drop out before we made port. And all through the rush of departure!

Thinking baleful thoughts I climbed up on deck again and ordered a tot of good red wine for every man. When Spitz, having hauled down the white flag, began to rehoist the pirate flag I growled at him. “Belay that!”

Certain ideas were meeting and melding in my head. I knew I was sick of the pirate trade — and yet, its fascination and its rewards, given that we would plunder only enemies, could not be denied.

“Sail ho!”

I stood on my ridiculous quarterdeck as we pitched and rolled and struggled in that sea, with a scrap of canvas showing to keep us from being merely a waterlogged lump of drifting wreckage, and watched as, on almost a reciprocal bearing, so close to the wind was she, a magnificent ship foamed toward us. She passed like a queen of the seas. She took absolutely no notice of us at all. In reality, working as we were, boarding would have been an operation too costly, as I judged. As it was that beautiful ship beat past us, leaning over, all her canvas as taut and trim as a guardsman’s tunic, her colors snapping out insolently. I gazed on that ship and on those colors.

A galleon, jutting of beak, sheer of line and curve, bold in the sea, built low with forecastle and quarterdeck and a small poop, four-masted, raked, aglitter with bright gilding and flamboyant colors. She moved surely against that sea in which we floundered. A galleon. A race-built galleon. And the flags! A yellow cross, a saltire, on a red field.

I glanced up at my own flag.

That yellow Saint Andrew’s cross on a red ground — I knew it. I knew from whence that proud ship hailed. From Vallia!

The galleon from Vallia roared past and was gone and was soon hull down and then the last scrap of her canvas winked over the sea horizon to the east.

“Damn the Vallians!” said Spitz. He held his Lohvian longbow in his hand, a kind of nervous reflex.

“They think they own the sea and all who sail on it! By Hlo-Hli! They think they’ve been anointed and given the scepter of all Kregen!”

We struggled on and, to our vast relief, the sea went down, the wind backed, and we were able to make better weather of it. The twin suns of Kregen were slipping down toward the western horizon, first Genodras and then Zim, and soon the nightly procession of moons would arch through the swarming stars.

Again came the hail that warms a render’s heart.

“Sail ho!”

She was a swordship from Yumapan, the country south of Lome, on the other side of the massive mountains that divide the island into North and South Pandahem, Her colors of vertical bars of green and blue in keeping with Pandahemic tradition fluttered in the dying breeze. She had seen us and was closing fast, and even as I watched she sprouted her oars and the long looms held, as though ruled parallel, like wings on either beam, before the drum-deldar gave his first stroke and the oars dipped as one. Valka yelled at me, pointing.

“No oars!” I shouted back.

Now Spitz and others of my officers were shouting. I leaped into the main shrouds and roared them to silence.

“They are big and powerful and can take us — and who among you wants to row for the Yumapanim?

Eh? Any volunteers?”

There rose a few scattered, uncertain laughs.

Yumapan, being situated across the sea to the east from Walfarg, had been one of that robust nation’s first conquests on her road to empire in the long ago. Now that Walfarg’s empire had crumbled, the Yumapan remembered, and aped those old ways; and they had long memories. Men even said they preferred a queen on the throne in Yumapan, in remembrance of the old Queens of Pain of Loh.

“But, Dray!” shouted Valka. “No oars! How can we fight?”

“We let her ram us, of course, you hairy calsany! Let her stick her rostrum up our guts — poor old Strigicaw is done for, anyway! Then, my sea-leem — then!”

“Aye!” they roared it back at me. “Then, Dray Prescot — then!”

And so, rolling like a washtub in the sea, we awaited the bronze-rammed shock from the Yumapan swordship.

When it came, with a roaring rending of wood and the screeching of bronze against iron nails, the smash of white water and the solid reeling shock as we nearly overset, my men knew what was required of them and knew the plan. Before the swordship captain could back his oars and draw free we were up over our side. Grapnels flew.