A stubborn knot of fiercely resisting Menaham cavalry still clustered about the palace of King Nemo. Their zorcas were down and they fought afoot, and they fought savagely and well. With perilously few men left to me I led the final charge upon them, driving into them, with the yellow cross on scarlet biting into the ranks of diagonal blue and green.
“That flag of yours leads men on!” panted Viridia as we hacked and hewed together. The cavalry wore armor, and we were making heavy weather of it. But, as though, indeed, that flag did lure men on to victory, we poured over a shattered breach and ravened in among the Menaham. Now, we could thrust with care, aiming to drive our blades between the armor joints.
“Follow the flag!” screamed Viridia. She had flung down her rapier and now gripped the flagpole, the shaft all bloody in her fingers. The yellow and scarlet flamed above us. “It is superb! Superb! On! On!
Jikai! Jikai!”
Following that magnificent girl with her flaring dark hair and her steel-mesh clad figure waving the flag aloft the men bellowed over the last of the Menaham cavalry. Now were left only those who had run into the palace, ready, like cornered cramphs, to fight and die.
“She is superb!” grunted Inch, flicking blood drops from his ax.
“Aye!” said Valka, waving his rapier. “And so is the flag!”
We raced up the marble stairs, hurdling the dead bodies, and so came into King Nemo’s palace. As I had known I would, I found Murlock Marsilus.
Viridia, gripping the flag in her bloodied left hand, her right now wielding a fresh snatched-up rapier, used her booted foot on a double folding door, kicking it open with a crash. Spitz feathered three shafts into the room and then Inch and I leaped in. Half a dozen Menaham gathered there, three with Spitz’s blue-feathered shafts in them. The other three went down before Inch, Valka and me. Then I saw the tableau in the adjoining room, clearly visible through flung open drapes. Murlock was there, gripping a rapier, about to drive it down into Pando’s back as he clutched his mother about the waist.
Tilda faced Murlock bravely. She swung a wine bottle at his head, reeling, and with a savage laugh Murlock smashed it away. But the diversion had been enough. He heard our entrance and swung about
— and I reversed my rapier, hefted it, balanced, and hurled it as I had hurled javelins with my clansmen on the great plains of Segesthes.
The rapier flew true.
Murlock screamed, and the scream was choked off as my rapier transfixed his neck. He stood for an instant, staring, his face as horrible a mask of hatred and disbelief as any I have seen. Then he fell. Tilda and Pando, with wild and abandoned shrieks, flew across the room, through the drapes, and flung themselves into my arms, all bloody as they were.
“Dray! Dray!” they babbled, grasping me. “Dray Prescot! You have come back to us!”
Viridia, all blood-smeared, grasping that old flag of mine, stared at me. Her tanned face with the dark hair flowing contrasted with the classical ivory beauty of Tilda and her jetty mane of gorgeous hair. Pando was gripping me and sobbing convulsively.
“So,” said Viridia. “This is what you tricked me and my renders into! A woman and her brat! It was all for this that you schemed and fought!”
“Not so, Viridia the Render. This is Pando, Kov of Bormark. And this is Tilda, his mother, the Kovneva. They are my friends, and if you are my friend and comrade, then they are your friends, also. Do not forget that. As for me, my destiny lies elsewhere.”
“Do not say it, Dray!” sobbed Tilda, grasping me, as Viridia stared at me with her wide blue eyes all aglitter from the samphron oil lamps’ gleam. “Say you will not go to Vallia.”
“Vallia!” said Viridia. “What is this of Vallia, Dray Prescot, render?”
I felt the cold anger in me, the desire to turn and smash everything in sight. Not for this petty wrangling had I risked all and turned my back on Vallia and my Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains!
“Vallia is where I am going, Viridia. And neither you nor Tilda can stop me.” I lifted Pando up. He wore his old zhantil-hide tunic and belt, and I marveled. Tilda’s long blue gown was torn over one shoulder, and an ivory globe and collarbone showed, gleaming, alluring, even there, in those circumstances.
“Pando. You will stop all this nonsense of going to war, and fighting for pleasure. You are a Kov. You must rule your people wisely and well, and you must listen to your mother and to Inch. Otherwise I shall strap your backside. As for you, Tilda. You must smash the bottles of Jholaix. Pando needs guidance. You must listen to Inch. He knows my views.”
If that sounds pompous, tyrannical, banal, blame yourself, not me. I spoke truths. Truths were needed then; for I could hardly hold myself under control. Vallia! Delia! The need for her flamed in my blood, drugged me with desire. Too long had I betrayed her, and dillydallied with renders and Kovs and all the petty glory of sailing a swordship sea under my old flag.
“You — will not desert us, Dray?” Tilda tried to wipe away the tears staining her cheeks. Her eyes rested on me in a new glory, and I knew that if I stayed I would now have the same trouble with her as I had with Viridia.
As for that pirate wench, she stood with my old flag draping her shoulders, her rapier all bloody, glaring at me.
“And if you go to Vallia, Dray Prescot the Render, what is to prevent me from going, also?”
I sighed. I tried to speak calmly.
“There is nothing but heartbreak for you in Vallia, Viridia.”
“And is she so much more beautiful, more desirable than me, Dray?”
“Or me?” demanded Tilda passionately.
There was no answer that a gentleman might make, and although I am no gentleman, although a Krozair of Zy, I could make no answer, either. But my silence told them both. The moment held, awkwardly. Then Pando broke it. He struggled free, wiping blood from my armor caught tackily on his hands down that zhantil tunic.
“And would you beat me, Dray?”
Then I laughed.
“I would flog you, Pando, you imp of Sicce, if you did not behave like a true Kov and have a care for your people of Bormark! Aye, flog you until you sobbed for mercy!”
Before Pando could answer the chamber filled with the pirates who had followed me here. They crowded in, forming a great excited mass of milling men and glittering steel about me. Arkhebi, his red hair all tousled, shouted the words, words taken up by the others in a flashing of lifted rapiers.
“Hai, Jikai! Dray Prescot! Hai! Jikai! Jikai!”
Well, they were happy in the knowledge that immense plunder awaited them in Menaham. I listened to the uproar, and that slit between my lips widened a trifle, hurtfully. That glorious mingled sunshine of Antares flooded in from the tall windows to lie across the rich trappings, the colors, the steel of blade and armor, the flushed excited faces, the blood. The samphron oil lamps blinked dim. Someone had thrown back the shutters from the windows and all the opaz glory of the Suns of Scorpio poured in.
I looked through the windows into that bright dazzlement and saw a giant raptor, its scarlet and golden feathers brilliant in the streaming mingled light of the twin suns. And coldness touched my heart.
Jerkily, moving with the stiffness of rheumatic old-age, I pushed through the shouting exultant renders, entered a small side room. I was vaguely conscious of Viridia and Tilda following me, suddenly anxious, but if they spoke I did not hear what they said. Behind them, I guessed, Inch and Valka and Spitz would be treading on fast, and Pando would be working his way through to catch me. I felt dizzy.
Then — how I recall that moment of horror, of despair! — across that empty room before me I saw the scuttling running form of a scorpion.
I knew, then. .
I was to be returned to Earth, banished from Kregen beneath Antares, hurled back contemptuously to the planet of my birth.
As that cursed blue radiance limned all my vision and the sensations of falling clawed at my limbs, my body, my brain, I cried out, high, desperately, frantically.
“Remember me, remember Dray Prescot!”
