I can look back now at myself as I was then so long ago, and smile. But I can truly say that no thought of the actual power and might and majesty of Delia’s father the Emperor entered my mind. He was just a man. He could be made to do what I wanted him to do. It was on Delia, and on Delia’s feelings, that all my thoughts centered. This I swear.
We saw no more headless zorcamen and two days of hard pulling with many locks to bite into the actual distance traversed of our eighty-lock-miles-a-day travel, we came down into Vomansoir. I had expected just another town, perhaps a city, something like Therminsax. What I saw enchanted me. Vallia is full of strange and exotic places and out-of-the-way retreats. Vomansoir straddled the Great River and six canals joined here in a wide stretch of hectically busy waterways. We trudged in and got our berthing ticket and tied up at the hoffiburs wharf run by a Company of Friends with whom Yelker usually dealt.
Every canal ran in through a series of lock flights, for Vomansoir is situated in a great natural bowl. As we descended we could see the surrounding slopes terraced and cultivated so that not a square inch of space was wasted. Colors rioted everywhere. Trees and bushes and flowers all blended into an enormous patchwork quilt of dizzying splendor. The river, She of Fecundity, ran in and out of the bowl through colossal canyons. Along the banks were moored vessels of surprising size. Beyond them the quays hummed with throngs of people busy about the everyday tasks of living. Zorca chariots clattered and whirred here and there, quoffas dragged carts of humbler duties, men and women rode saddle zorcas, and I saw again the half-voves I had last seen in Zenicce. Vallia, however, has no voves in the natural state, although there are small herds here and there bred up by men. Everything was magnificent. The women wore flowing free gowns of myriads of colors; the men in their Vallian gear were not content thus to be left in the shade and their wide-shouldered tunics and jerkins were also brilliantly colored. I saw many of the men working on the quays and at the warehouses, as in the factories and the streets that dealt in various items of merchandise, wore the shirts with the banded sleeves, and while many of these banded colors were gray and yellow, the colors of Vomansoir, there were many also of other colors, sometimes three colors banded together. The red and black of the guards were in evidence, and I saw, with a bunching of my jaw muscles, gangs of slave haulers at work. Also, I saw men with black and white sleeves.
“Racters,” said Yelker, when I questioned him. “You are cut off in Valka, Drak, to be sure. By Vaosh, but they flaunt their superiority!”
I witnessed a clash between men of a racter employer and men wearing white and green banded arms over the priority of unloading a narrow boat. They fought with cudgels. They struck each other doughty blows. Yelker put his hand on my shoulder.
“Let them be, Drak, my friend. I am a man of peace, and you, I know, are a man of violence. But they go their ways-”
I was profoundly shocked.
“I, too, am a man of peace, Yelker! How can you call me a man of violence?” I considered. “I only tripped Kutven Ban!”
Rafee let rip with his coarse cackle at this. I could see their point. But I was annoyed. I am never violent
— at least, not stupidly so, not unthinkingly, not when it will hurt people for whom I cherish affection. At least, so I hope.
I turned to collect my gear from the cabin I had used, up in the bows. “At least,” I said over my shoulder, “I never hit an old man or an old woman for fun.”
Then I stopped. “Well, Yelker — and you, too, you grinning onker, Rafee — if I am violent it would be because I saw someone doing just that! I’d be inclined to hit him and thus attempt to show him the error of his ways.” Like, I thought with some remorse, I had shown that argenter captain in Pa Mejab the error of his ways for slapping young Pando.
I bid them all Remberee and took myself off. They were sorry to see me go. I hoped they’d get back through the Ogier Cut without bother this time, although the lissium ore did not share the same urgency as the hoffiburs.
Finding a posting station was not easy, for I had made up my mind to continue by zorca. I did not have the price of an airboat ticket, assuming I could find a Company of Friends operating an airline here. The oldster with the stubbly chin scratched that stubble, and spat in the straw, and sized me up. My beard had been trimmed neatly. But folk in Vomansoir were clean-shaven as a rule.
“You must be in a mighty hurry, dom.”
“I am. The zorca will be safe, for I am accustomed to riding them. Here.” I held out coins with the portrait of the man I wished to see. “What will it cost?”
Strange words, those, for Dray Prescot on Kregen!
In the event I hired a zorca and left a whacking deposit as a guarantee of my honesty. Vallia has a functioning banking system, as must any country which trades at such a high intensity, and I could collect the deposit when the zorca was either returned or unsaddled at the Vondium stables. I bought some food, and with a few silver coins left clanking rather dismally in the lesten-hide bag, I set off. Vallian roads are foul. They are better now, but I speak of the time when I rode south through the sun-drenched land seeking an interview with my prospective father-in-law. The zorca made good time, considering, and I wended my way south through towns and cities, crossing the canals, watching the lazy progress of the narrow boats, spurring on harshly when I saw a gang of hauler slaves dragging an Emperor’s barge, giving a quick sailor eye to the boats sailing on the Mother of Waters. I passed huge cornfields that took a day to traverse, immense dark forests, where twice I fought off footpads. This made me frown, for I had taken Vallia to be civilized. I would not allow myself to become fatigued. The zorca held up wonderfully well, and I fancy he recognized he had a zorcaman on his back. The twin Suns of Scorpio chased in jade and crimson across the sky each day, the nightly procession of moons cast down their pinkish light, and I hurried on.
I reached Vondium.
I will say nothing of that altogether marvelous place now, and, truth to tell, at the time I scarcely heeded all its marvels. It was all too easy for me to hear the news. It was the subject of conversation in all the myriads of pleasant open-air restaurants along the quays beside the canals and waterways.
“The Emperor? Oh, that naughty daughter of his! He is not in Vondium. He has gone to Delphond to teach her a lesson!”
CHAPTER TEN
Delphond is a delightful, charming, cozy land of small fields and secluded hamlets, of winding brooks and gentle undulations of ground clad in the brilliant green of Kregan grass speckled with the prodigious abundance of Kregan flowers. It is a warm land, a soft and safe country, a place for lazy retirement and idle amusements, happy and carefree and going the old ways of its people. Tucked away in a southern bend of the coastline of the main island of Vallia, it receives all the benefit of the Zim Stream, that warm current sweeping up through the Cyphren Sea from the unknown southwestern oceans. From Delphond comes the finest vintage claret in all Kregen, or so I believe. Also there are apples, pears, gregarians, and squishes, and the people there rear a kind of ponsho whose fleece, besides being as soft and silky as any in two worlds, provides chops and shoulders and legs of a succulence not to be believed until eaten, fresh, crisp, and savory, with liberal helpings of mint sauce and with the small round yellow momolams, a tuber that Zair put on Kregen in holy wedlock with roast ponsho.
Also in Delphond are fat cattle, very like our Earthly bulls and cows, and the cream they make there. . it is of a triple consistency, rich and thick and fit for Opaz himself. Such a meal I ate in a pleasant raftered alehouse, with the twin suns slanting in at the open window and the bees busy about the mauve and white loomin flowers in a pottery jar of Pandahem ware on the windowsill. The good-natured innkeeper’s wife bustled, bringing me her best, and I ate well, for the journey had been swift and eating of secondary importance. My booted feet stuck out across the polished sturm-wood floor and in other circumstances I would have been content. I munched a handful of palines after the meal was finished, considering.