He advanced toward Tilda, his arms open to her.
“My dear! I never thought to see you again! You do not know the pleasure these old eyes of mine gain by once more gazing upon your beauty!”
They kissed and I thought this Pallan, this councillor or minister of state, showed some true feeling for Tilda.
“And is this-” He turned to Pando.
“This is my son, Pando.”
“So,” said Nicomeyn. “You are the young Kov-”
I said, loudly, so that they all jumped: “Pando is a fine boy. He doesn’t know much, though.”
“Dray!” said Pando, and he tried to kick me. I moved my foot and he kicked the chair, and I smiled.
“Sit quietly, you young imp, and listen while your elders talk.”
He used the Kregish expression for grups, which I ignored.
“So he does not know, eh?” said Nicomeyn. He nodded. He wasn’t too slow to catch on. “Perhaps that is wise.”
Pando, defying me, said: “Will I see the king?”
“All in good time, dear, all in good time,” said Tilda. She faced Nicomeyn. “You know the truth. Will you help us?”
He pursed his lips so that the lines indented deeply around his mouth. He put a long white finger to those lips, and shut his eyes, and thought. Just as I was about to become angry, annoyed that he should thus insult Tilda the Beautiful, he spoke his own salvation.
“There is no need to ask if I will help, Tilda. The question is — what to do best?”
“Oh, Nicomeyn!” said Tilda. “Dear Nicomeyn.”
“Old Marsilus was a drinking comrade of my youth. It is dangerous to compare a king to his brother. I will not say more.”
I stood up. “Well, that’s settled, then, and pleased I am, too. Now Inch and I can get on. Kregen is a large place.” I began to make a polite farewell to Tilda, with Pando staring at me as though I had grown another head, when Nicomeyn cut in.
“Please do not prattle, young man. I do not know who you are, but I assume the Kovneva Tilda employs you as a bodyguard. Your brute strength and your sword will be needed now, as it has never been needed before. So sit down and listen.”
Then — with a great swoosh of air, I laughed. The situation tickled me. Inch looked most offended and Pando glowered at me, pursing his lips and fidgeting up and down on the seat; but I had my laugh out. Tilda stared at me and her plucked dark eyebrows rose.
Most men, speaking like that to me, would have woken up in the far corner minus a few teeth. But the Pallan Nicomeyn was deep in conversation with Tilda, and patently anxious to help, so that I was completely disarmed. He did not know me, that is true, and so he escaped the deserts of his rash talk; besides, he was old and he wanted to help Tilda and Pando.
A plan was concocted but of it all the most important lay in the few words Nicomeyn spoke to me. “I have labored long for this realm of Tomboram, and I know the family of Marsilus can play a great part in our future. My loyalties go a long way into the past. I would wish to see Pando where he belongs.” I made no comment, frivolous or otherwise, on that pious hope. “If the usurper Murlock Marsilus can be deposed, and a fait accompli is presented to the king, then the law is clear. The rightful title lies-” He glanced at Pando, and finished: “The title lies where the law obliges it to lie, and cannot be challenged. But, the usurper must be deposed first. While he holds — possession counts for a great deal.”
“And he’s a bad lot?”
Nicomeyn made a face.
“I see. So we must first get rid of him and then it is plain sailing?”
“Yes.” Nicomeyn looked at me. I was dressed in a sober blue tunic with leather shoulder straps rather like winged epaulettes, and my weaponry was belted about me as was my custom. Under the tunic I wore my scarlet breechclout, but that was invisible. I held the broad-brimmed gray hat with its curled blue feather on my knee. As though sizing me up in a different light from that with which he had first conned me, Nicomeyn said: “He is cunning, like a rast. He is strong, like a leem. He is stubborn, like a calsany. He will not be an easy person to dislodge.”
Pando perked up, speaking his clear childish treble. “I don’t know what it is you say, Uncle Nicomeyn. But if anyone can do anything, that one is Dray Prescot. I know.”
I clumped my ex-assassin’s boots on the floor and stood up. The part that Murlock would play was already clear; for he had sent the assassins after Tilda and Pando to make absolutely sure of his inheritance, that was patent. “We had better be about our work, then.”
All the way out from the palace and into the suns-shine of Kregen I was hating myself. For I had once more engaged to do something that prevented me from rushing to my Delia, and claiming her before the world.
On the street with the busy pedestrians, and the zorca riders, and the calsany carts, and all the hurry and bustle of a great port that was also a capital city, Pando piped up, “Why did Uncle Nicomeyn call you a Kovneva, mother?”
Immediately I took his arm and bent and whispered: “Did I not tell you, oh boy of little faith?”
He looked up at me and giggled and then tried to kick me whereat I spun him around and Inch yanked him back onto the pavement and a passing zorca bucked and its rider cursed. I looked up at him, and his curses stopped in midstream, and he swallowed and smiled — rather a sickly smile — and dug in his spurs and cantered off.
“You’ll have to tell him soon, Tilda,” I said as Inch and Pando went ahead. “If we are to rouse support for you, he is bound to hear-”
She nodded. “You are right, of course, Dray. We have much to thank you for-”
“You have,” I said. “But say nothing of that until the job is finished. Then-” and I chanced it, and took a breath, and said stubbornly: “And then, Tilda the Beautiful, I must be on my way to Vallia.”
She halted. “Vallia!”
“So you can see why we are like two nits in a ponsho fleece. We both have a zhantil to saddle.” Which is the Kregan way of saying we both had our own secret and dangerous purposes.
“But, Dray! Vallia! What can possess you to go to that dung-heap of a disgusting rast-nest?”
When a woman as beautiful and respectable and intelligent as Tilda of the Many Veils spoke like that about the country that was the home of my beloved — what could I say?
“I have good reasons, Tilda. I believe I can expect of you some trust, to believe you do not think me an imbecile.”
If she was about to make some unthinking remarks about me being a spy, she thought better of it. To take care, I hoped, of that eventuality, and already regretting that I had opened my big mouth, I said: “I have come to like and admire your Tomboramin, Tilda, I get along with your people. I shall be sorry, I think, to leave for Vallia, for there I shall do much mischief.”
And, by Zair! That was true!
Inch, ahead of us, took Pando’s arm, as I took Tilda’s, to thread safely through the maze of traffic thronging the street as we crossed to make our way down to the discreet tavern in which we were lodging. The Admiral Mauplius was situated in the cooler end of a square, overlooking the sea and gathering most of the sea breeze. The temperature was somewhat higher here in North Pandahem than I had found it anywhere else I had so far traveled on Kregen. I have remarked that Zenicce and the cities of the inner sea are situated close to the same parallel of latitude, and Vallia, also, lies with much of her island bulk on those parallels. It is a strange fact that the temperate zones extend over far greater an extent north-south than they do on Earth. From the most southerly tip of the most southerly promontory of South Pandahem, the equator is not so many dwaburs farther south. From South Pandahem directly southwestward lies the coast of Chem. The equator runs through the enormous, dripping rain-forests of Chem in Central Loh. While I mention North and South Pandahem, it is worth saying that they are separated by a range of mountains running generally southeast to northwest in a dogleg. The mountains extend on into the sea to form the long chain of islands that terminate off Erthyrdrin in Northern Loh. But the mountains do not stop, for there, in Seg’s homeland, they rear and convulse into that misty land of song and then, abruptly, collapse into a few islands across in the Cyphren Sea around which the Zim Stream swirls in its northward progress.