One young lad there was, tall, strong, upright, with the glowing features of hero-worship about him I found most distasteful, whose name was Vangar ti Valkanium, told me he was a Deldar in the Vallian Air Service. He had come in mufti, the buff tunic and the wide-brimmed hat with the red and white colors in feathers and in a great cockade over his left shoulder. I told Vangar ti Valkanium something of my admiration for the Air Service people, and we talked very pleasantly. When he left I knew that I would feel a pang at abandoning my island of Valka.
But I would abandon any and everything in two worlds for the sake of my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains.
Sitting at the black-wood table in the window I felt a softly caressing touch stroke feather-light across the nape of my neck. It was there and gone in an instant. I took no notice. In the window on its own special pedestal stood a flick-flick. The plant has many names on Kregen, and as an example of the closeness of the Vallish to the Kregish, the fly-catcher is fleck-fleck in the Vallish and flick-flick in the Kregish. Its six-foot-long tendrils uncoil like steel springs, their honey-dew stickiness certain death for flies. The flowers are cone-shaped trumpets of a pale and subtle peach color, and they gobble flies like a starving elephant stuffing down buns. Most homes like to have a flick-flick, usually near the kitchen. Flies, as I have said, get everywhere.
The break made me stand up and stretch and look out of the window. Across the patio, with its tables and chairs and Young Bargom’s clientele drinking happily, the canal ran along between meticulously upkept banks. And a great straggly gang of haulers passed, their gray slave breech-clouts filthy, the whip marks jikaidering their backs, bloody and filthy, hauling a huge gray barge with a cargo that brought the gunwales down to within a knuckle of the water.
I frowned.
Delia detested slavery as much as I did.
I had thought I had been brought to Kregen to help stamp out slavery. My own plans called for the fulfillment of my own selfish ends. To hell with the Star Lords and the Savanti! Delia was all I cared about.
Many times, as you have heard, I had been deflected from my intentions. Now, again, I was prevented from putting our plans into operation that day, as I had wished, by the distraught arrival of Kta. Angia.[2]
A plump, homey, beeswax kind of woman, she sobbed out her story. Her son was a proud and headstrong youth, but they were in debt, for he was a cabinet-maker and had had words with his employer and could not find fresh work. He would not ask friends of the Valkans here in Vondium for help. And now he had been dragged off to the bagnios. She was desperate. Could I help?
The story is quickly told. Quickly — in that I went with her to the bagnios and found her son, Anko the Chisel, and paid off his debt, and in the process being arrogant and insulting to the guards with their red and black sleeves. But not so quickly — in my discovery of the bagnios themselves. I have seen many slave barracks, and barracoons and bagnios, and those of Vallia were no worse than many. Here criminals, debtors, hostages, prisoners, those who had forfeited their liberty in any way, were kept for dispersal among the slave farms, or the haulers, or the mines, or in any of the many places that slaves were employed. We took Anko the Chisel out of that place and his mother, Kta. Angia, fell on her knees before me, whereat I felt all the nausea of myself rising, and I bid her get up and take her son home, and start again in the search for work.
The point I had had thrust upon me I did not want to face, would not face, refused even to countenance. Delia. That thought alone was all that mattered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
That evening everyone crowded in and The Rose of Valka rocked with the roistering songs of Kregen. And, chief among these, sung for all its seven hundred and seventy-eight stanzas, was The Fetching of Drak na Valka.
Among the Valkan revelers, dressed like them in the flaunting red and white, sat Seg Segutorio. I had told him, swiftly, not to start singing The Bowmen of Loh.
“I’ll fight any man who denies me!” he had started to roar out and I had hustled him away up the black-wood stair to my upper chamber.
“By Zim-Zair, you onker-headed bowman!” I exclaimed. He calmed down and then, with that strong streak of practicality that runs intertwined with the feyness of the men of the mountains and valleys of Erthyrdrin, he nodded, understanding. “Although, Dray, you know that there is no better bow than the longbow. All these made-up sinew and bone and horn bows, curved like a pregnant duck; they are as toys beside the longbow.”
“True, true. But — watch it!”
“All is ready. By the Veiled Froyvil, but Delia is a true princess! She has made the arrangements for the airboat. Thelda and I and little Dray are ready. We can-”
I felt shock.
“You — you wish to come, too, Seg?”
He looked at me as though I had slapped him around the face.
“Of course.” His bright blue eyes glittered on me in the soft radiance of the samphron oil lamp. “You want me to, don’t you, my old dom?”
I managed to say, “I couldn’t get along without you,” and turned away so that he should not see my face.
The noise from below was reaching fantastic proportions and we went down and took up the wine — it was the best of Jholaix, precious and rare and saved for super-special occasions — and joined in the singing. Vangar ti Valkanium sang. Anko the Chisel sang. Everyone sang. We sang of Valka. A lithe and lissome girl, very beautiful, with a heart-shaped face and a figure to stir men to immediate action, recited some of the more sublime passages from The Fatal Love of Vela na Valka and we all joined in the choruses. Then, for the third time, we roared out all the seven hundred and seventy-eight stanzas of the song commemorating my fetching of Valka out of the shadows and of the Valkans fetching me to be their Strom.
It takes a long time to sing seven hundred or so stanzas and when, at last, we threw the shutters back it was high noon outside in Vondium. Deldar Vangar had a mad scramble to get back to report for duty. He spoke of a visit the Emperor was paying to Vindelka, northwest of the city. No one took much notice, the fumes of wine coiling in our brains. Seg had left early, saying that as a private Koter he had duties to perform he dare not let lapse now, so close to the time for our departure. He had mentioned Vindelka, too.
We had, in the Kregan idiom, a zhantil to saddle, and we all had our secret parts to perform. To clear my head, after I had shaved that harsh chin of mine, I took a stroll along the quays and watched all the busy loading and unloading of the great galleons of Vallia. Produce from all over the known world flowed into Vondium, and the products of Vallia flowed out. Gulls wheeled overhead, shrieking. The twin suns shone gloriously. The air held that bracing tang of the sea. But — the Star Lords had expressly forbidden me to sail the seas of Kregen for a space. How I longed, then, to take my Delia up onto the deck of a great galleon and sail with her over the rim of the world!