Then the cold, thoughtful, measuring eyes turned upon myself.
“And you, my lad―what of you, eh? The strangest of all in this strangely mixed company of ‘harmless travelers’!” he puffed in his light, wheezing voice. “What of you, eh? A stranger from a far-off land, no doubt; for never have I laid these tired old eyes on a lad with such peculiar coloration!”
“From a far-off land, even as you surmise, Lord Shaphur,” I replied in even tones. “But, oddly mixed as we are, which is an accident of fortune and not of design, we are indeed harmless travelers as you say. And we would be on our way, if it please you ….”
“To Shondakor, I believe, if my outriders report correctly. Well, well! Yonder beautiful lady is indeed Shondakorian, if I may trust my weary old eyes to tell aright, but the rest of you … eh! What business can so many Perushtarians have in the Golden City?”
“Our business is our own, Shaphur!” a clear contralto voice slashed through the Soraban’s labored, breathy tones. I groaned inwardly. For it was Zamara!
“Lord Shaphur, dear lady,” he chuckled. “Let us observe the amenities, if you please … .”
“Lord Shaphur, I mean,” Zamara said in a throttled voice.
“That’s much better . . your gracious ladyship would be, I believe, a Tharkolian, as would also be yonder starveling, as the both of you twain boast that hirsute adornment of pate denied to we coastal dwellers of the pure blood?”
“Tharkolians, yes … lord,” Zamara said. She pronounced the word as if it strangled her to refer to another person by his title. It came to me then that perhaps Zamara possessed a modicum of good sense, after all; at least she had not yet loudly announced that she was Empress of all Callisto, and demanded that the smirking, oily fat man grovel at her feet.
“A pair of Tharkolians, a stranger from a far-off land a noble Shondakorian lady, and a Perushtarian―from?” he spoke sharply, stabbing a hard glance at sullen-faced Ergon.
“Narouk,” grumbled Ergon unwillingly.
“… Narouk … ah, yes, our sister city! Well, well. I understand you five so oddly ill-assorted traveling companions have become lost for some days past and strayed from your route … eh?”
“That is the truth, Lord Shaphur,” I said evenly. “And, with your gracious permission, we should like to be on our way.”
He flapped pudgy hands in horror at the suggestion.
“Oh, but, surely not until you have partaken of our famous Soraban hospitality!” he protested, wheezing. “Deprived of the civilized comforts during your unfortunate journey, reduced to devouring the crude and scarcely edible leafage of the elusive jinko, mounted on ill-trained and highly unsuitable steeds which bear, I perceive, tribal markings of the Yathoon barbarians … surely you must be my guests for a time, while you recover from your ordeal! Azaroosh, see that our guests are fed and made comfortable.”
The guard so instructed made his salute and turned to guide us. Zamara sharply overrode this.
“You hold us captive, then?” she demanded imperiously.
Shaphur’s fleshly face assumed a grimace of surprise.
“Ah, noble lady, you are in mistake! I, Shaphur of Soraba, your captor? Never! Say, rather … your gracious host, until such time, in the very near future, when you have recovered yourselves from the travails and discomforts of the journey … Azaroosh!”
And so we became the “guests” of Shaphur, merchant princeling of Soraba. Well, I suppose it could have been worse.
After all, Zamara had yet to tell him his guests included the regnant prince and princess of Shondakor, to say nothing of the divinely appointed Empress of the entire planet!
Chapter 16
A Little Soraban Hospitality
It could indeed have been worse. Our quarters were in a large and commodious covered wagon whose interior was thickly and comfortably carpeted and cushioned. It was not, of course, so richly decorated as that sumptuous vehicle in which Lord Shaphur traveled in state, but neither was it Spartan in its furnishings. The Sorabans are more warlike and monarchical than the rest of the Perushtarian race, but they do enjoy their creature comforts and have much the same taste for luxurious accommodations as their cousins of Farz and Narouk and Glorious Perusht itself.
Our wagon, like most of the larger wains, was drawn by a huge, lumbering, heavy-footed draft animal called the glymph, which the Thanatorians prefer as a beast of burden to the light, wiry, tempermental thaptor. The difference between the two beasts is much the same as that between the horse and the ox back on Earth. Glymphs, however, don’t look much like oxen. They are about as large and fat and heavy as rhinoceroses and look quite a bit like the extinct prehistoric triceratops, with their flaring neck shield of thick bone and several horns adorning brow and snout. They are slate gray in coloring, which hue fades to a dingy yellow in throat and chest and belly, and for some inscrutable reason of her own, Dame Nature has seen fit to ornament the imposing creatures with tiger-stripes of an amazing shade of crimson.
Our glymph lumbered along, head down, waddling with its heavy-footed stride, the reins held by our driver, a glum, unspeaking Soraban with a long nose and small, suspicious eyes called Laalmurak. He sat on a sort of buckboard in the front of the wagon and kept an eye on us, although an unobtrusive one. We were neither bound nor shackled, as befitted our ostensible position in the caravan as guests of the management.
It wasn’t bad, all things considered. We had luxurious sleeping-furs to curl up in and a plenitude of plump, soft pillows, and none of these things were exactly unwelcome to us, who had spent the past seven days sleeping on the hard ground curled up in the grass like so many rabbits. And Shaphur certainly set a fine table for his “guests”!
I had almost forgotten what real food tasted like, after a week of subsisting on broiled strips of jinko bladder. As the caravan creaked and rumbled along, we sampled a profusion of covered dishes which fitted neatly into small legged trays ideally designed for eating while in motion. These contained a delicious, piping hot meat stew in steaming gravy, spiced fish-cubes in cream sauce, hot meal-cakes sprinkled with sarowary seed, marrow of argang in jelly, fresh fruit, candied nuts, and beakers of a cool, green, mint-flavored wine that rather resembled crime de menthe.
We fell to with lusty appetites, emptying dish after dish with gusto. If this was Soraban hospitality, thought I, where had it been all my life!
The only dish unfamiliar to me was the argang marrow, a blackish, pungent paste that tasted vaguely like caviar―although it had been so many years since I had last partaken of that terrene delicacy, that I could not be certain my taste buds weren’t fooling me.
The argang was not a fish, despite its caviar-like flavor, but a kind of crustacean found in the coastal waters of the Corund Laj, and a delicacy greatly prized by the gourmets of the Perushtarian empire―which is really an oligarchy, by the way. For although the Perushtarian cities are leagued together under the rule of a sovereign, his rule is a formality, and the wealthy merchant princes are the actual monarchs.
Ergon munched the caviar-like paste with a rare good humor. It had been a long time since he had left Narouk, and in all that time he had enjoyed few of the traditional delicacies of the Perushtarian art of cooking.
“Superb!” he mumbled, licking the last morsel off his thumb. “Do you know, Jandar, that the humble argang has a larger relative called the harthak? Only a half-spoonful of marrow may be extracted from the lowly argang, but it’s larger relative, I have often thought, might yield a bushel of the stuff, were it not so damnably unfriendly!”