CHAPTER EIGHT
I, Dray Prescot, of Earth and of Kregen, fell into low ways and low company. I make no excuses.
The taverns I explored, the dopa dens, the theaters, the fighting arenas (Djanduin is mightily contemptuous of the Jikhorkduns of Hamal and Hyrklana and instead flocks to see real fighting by professionals that almost invariably results in no one dying at all), the dancing girls I gawped at, the zorca races and the sleeth races, the dicing, the gambling, the drinking! Money came in, for I have skills at certain of the hairier games of Kregen, and I never went hungry or thirsty — or, at least, not often. Pallan Coper and his charming wife Sinkie had shown me tremendous hospitality and they had been horrified by my antics and pleaded with me to give up such a terrible life. But they would not hear a word spoken against me.
And the cause of all this wanton debauchery?
As I have told you, calendars and dates are highly individual idiosyncrasies on Kregen, and every people and every race and every country keep some kind of time in their own way, and to the Ice Floes of Sicce with everyone else’s.
By the expenditure of a great deal of time and effort and by constant application at the observatory of the Todalpheme of Djanduin — a small and humble group compared with other Todalpheme I have known — I calculated out dates. The Todalpheme are those austere and dedicated men whose charge it is to work out the tides of Kregen, and give timely warning. So I worked on my figures and when I had finished I stared in appalled horror at the final figure, under which I scrawled a great slashing red line. Ten years.
Ten Terrestrial years, it was going to take, for the present in which I now lived to catch up with the time I had left the Heavenly Mines.
I did not go mad; after all, this was a mere matter of waiting, and patience is a virtue, even for me, sinner that I am. And I would wait in as much comfort and pleasure as I could contrive. My only true comfort was that Delia would not know of my durance, and her sufferings could, if I ranked my Deldars correctly, be curtailed or obviated altogether.
So I plunged into the heady nightlife of Djanguraj and found most of the strong young men gone off to war, and their womenfolk moping after them, and war and talk of war filling everyone’s horizons. This suited me ill.
Chuktar N. Stolin Rumferling had gone off to war.
Seeing him briefly before he flew off I was struck by the cunning way nature can produce entirely different end products from the same original material. Imagine a meek and mild little clerk, with contact lenses and a sinus drip, hunched over a computer in a glass-walled office in a great city of Earth, weak-chested, scrawny-armed, flabby where it would do the most harm, prim and precise — there, to slander him, you have a defamatory picture of O. Fellin Coper. Imagine a fullback, bulky, powerful, superbly muscled, charging head-down into a mess of footballers in his way, chunking them aside with massive energy — there you have a not unflattering picture of Chuktar N. Stolin Rumferling. They are both men. They both come from the same stock. But what a difference between them!
“This will be a bloody business, Notor Prescot.” Rumferling spoke in a gruff way that told me he was perfectly capable of cowing the roistering, rough-and-tough barbaric Djangs he would command. “Those cramphs of Gorgrens must be taught a lesson, once and for all.”
“They will return and return, Naghan,” squeaked Coper. “We all know that, Djan rot ’em!”
There was no gentle Sinkie present to protest his language.
So the fighting-men went off to war and I frolicked about town, enjoying what I could of the fleshpots. Ten years! Ten long damned years!
I witnessed the new king’s coronation. It was a rushed affair, with a hushed and spartan wartime atmosphere. This king was a nonentity, the old king’s nephew by marriage, and he would not, I fancied, last long in some places of Kregen I had been — Sanurkazz or Magdag, for example, or Vallia herself. He did not last.
A palace revolution was the first upheaval and that placed another nephew on the throne. He was strong, but a fool. He was murdered after a season and the Chuktar of the palace crowned himself as king. He lasted until the next Chuktar of the palace bribed enough of the king’s personal bodyguard and overthrew him. His body was dragged though a pool of fighting fish, something like piranha, and the new king was crowned.
All this time I caroused and drank and sang and watched the dancing girls — for they were dancing girls, unlike those fine free girls of my clansmen who danced for us beneath the moons of Kregen — and they were very skilled in the arts of the dance. Their four arms weaved arabesques of beauty, and their oiled bodies and gleaming masses of silver bangles and golden bells, of waving fans and swirling silks, charmed me even as they bored me.
I would have none of them.
Ten godforsaken years!
My Delia — I had to get the disaster that had overtaken me in proportion. My overriding duty lay to Delia, and through her to Vallia, and to my people of Valka because I was their Strom. Also I owed a duty to Strombor and my clansmen of the Great Plains. But Gloag in Strombor and Hap Loder with the clans did everything right, as I well knew, and my duty was fully and freely carried out by them. Delia -
I had to think of other things. Like the teasing arguments we indulged in so often over the merits and demerits of the wonderful zorcas of her Blue Mountains’ blue-grass grazing estates as against the fabulous zorcas of my clansmen.
So with some of my ill-gotten winnings I went to the zorcadrome to buy myself the best zorca I could. The zorcas of Djanduin are fine animals. But then, it is difficult to find a zorca that is not a fine animal, for of all the animals of Kregen, I believe, it is the zorca who most nobly fulfills its ancestral breeding. This is not to gainsay the superb quality of the vove, that fearsome steed of the Great Plains. But voves — real voves — are found only there in the natural state, while zorcas are found in many areas of Kregen. Passing the totrixdrome — as you know I have never been fond of the sectrix, the nactrix, or the totrix, or of any other of the trix family — and hurrying on with Khobo the So chattering away in my ear as he guided me through the throngs of people who seem forever to wander and push and shout through the markets of two worlds, we came out to a wide dusty space fenced in with lenken rails. A pair of zorcas were racing up toward us, having completed a circuit of the oval, and they were neck and neck. Even at speed like that a clansman can point a zorca, and the faults of both these were at once apparent. But a fat cortilinden merchant, sweating happily as he paid out golden deldys, bought them for his son, who looked as though a quick belt on the backside would suit him better than a zorca saddle. They were Lamnias, and so the merchant should have known better.
“Rubbish!” Khobo whispered in my ear. He was a jaunty rogue, a carousing companion I had rescued from a brawl and who had stuck to me since. “I know old Planath the Zorca. He will not cheat me.”
I grimaced at the name of Planath’s, for although it is common on Kregen for the occupation to decide the label — and very colorful that is, to be sure — there were places I knew where to be called anything at all to do with zorcas meant much effort and sweat, not a little blood, and general approbation from one’s peers. As for that genial rascal Khobo, he was called the So for obvious reasons. He’d been in the army and as a young man had had his upper left arm lopped off. As so is Kregish for three, thus Khobo was the So.
As I casually inspected the zorcas on display — for some reason I have always disliked the use of the word horseflesh for horses and zorcaflesh for zorcas — I was vividly reminded of what my father used to tell me as he doctored up a lame horse, or patted a strong chestnut neck, his eyes filled with the love of horses. It was with a nostalgic thought or two that I came at last to a magnificent pair held by two Djang grooms of Planath the Zorca’s establishment.