The problem we faced now was to hoist this usurper Murlock Marsilus out of his title and possessions, knowing that the king and the law would not help us until we had performed the deed, and knowing, also, that Murlock had all the aces on his side. He had the estates; ergo he had the money and the people tied up.
“We must do a little crafty detaching, Inch.”
“With Ngrangi’s help, that will be a pleasure.”
Inch, as you know, came from Ng’groga, which is right down in the southeast of Loh, well south of the equator. I wondered if he’d want to go home after this. If he did, he’d try to talk me into going with him.
“Murlock,” I said, firmly and with some bite. “We hit the top from the beginning.”
So strikingly beautiful a woman as Tilda was surely going to raise men’s eyebrows, inter alia, and she had taken to wearing a loose semitransparent blue veil, after the fashion of the women of Loh. When I asked Inch about Loh, and its mysterious walled gardens, and its veils, he chuckled and said: “I come from Ng’groga. There we are somewhat different folk.”
“The truth is, Inch, everyone all over the world is somewhat different.”
From the capital Pomdermam we took a coaster, a vile little ship smelling abominably of fish, to the westward. We touched at various charming little ports along the great incurved sweep of the north coast which forms the extensive Bay of Panderk, voyaging steadily westward. On the third day we saw a swordship foaming toward us on a parallel course, the waves breaking clean over her long low hull as she wallowed and lunged in the sea, her oars bending with the strain, white spume skyrocketing high, all her blue banners and flags taut in the wind that bore us so comfortably on. One of the crew spat overside. “A King’s swordship,” he said.
“The good Pandrite rot him,” said another crewman, looking up from where he slapped dough to make the long Kregan loaves he would bake on the hot stove later during the morning. “My brother was sent to the swordships — for nothing. I’d like to-”
“Aye, Lart!” interrupted the first, scowling. “And your mouth is like to get you sent to join your brother in the galleys!”
I took note of this little interchange. Evidently, this King Nemo was not loved by all his subjects. With the bread we ate cold vosk and taylyne soup. In the warmer weather here the cold soup was delicious, a thing I would normally never credit. Taylynes are pea-sized, scarlet and orange in their redness, and in conjunction with succulent vosk, superb.
“In Vallia,” Tilda told me when we chanced on that awkward subject, “they drink their vosk and taylyne soup so hot it scalds their lips and mouths. Barbarous, they are, in Vallia.”
She sighed. “Poor Meldi loved vosk and taylyne soup.” Meldi was the bodyguard with whom she had fled from Tomboram, and from what I heard of him he had been a gentle giant, caring for Tilda and Pando, until sickness had carried him off just before my arrival in Pa Mejab. On the fifth day we saw what at first I took to be a school of fish with tall almost-transparent dorsal fins. A cry went up and the crew rushed to the rail. Then, between the foam and the splashing I made out that this was all one huge and serpentine monster of the deep, with an oval body along the top of which grew that long fence-like fin. His head was impossibly out of proportion to his body, being immense, and equipped with a dredger of a fang-filled mouth.
“A sea-barynth,” said Lart, whose brother rowed in a King’s swordship. “Now if we could catch it we’d feast right royally this night.”
However, the coaster’s skipper was no intrepid huntsman, and we left the sea-barynth far astern wriggling and curving in the water. It had two large paddle fins beneath its head. I was told that the barynth, of a similar size and ugly ferocity, one was likely to meet in the swamps of Pandahem as elsewhere, was equipped with four clasping claw-armed legs beneath its head. I do not believe I have mentioned that the general word in use in Kregish for sea is “splash.” The oddity of this perfectly sound onomatopoeic word in English ears, I think, is sufficient justification for the hint of a smile I summoned when I heard it, and why I use the word sea in its stead. There is another aspect of translation worth mention here. The word in Kregish for “water” in the sense of a drink of water is one that could never be uttered in any respectable company where English is spoken. To hear a wounded man calling for water, on Kregen, is to experience heights of the surreal. In the shambles of the gun deck of a seventy-four which has just received a broadside from enemy thirty-twos, of course, one would hear through the smoke and confusion both words in just about equal proportion.
On the day before we picked up the pharos for what would be our penultimate port of call Tilda discovered nits in Pando’s hair and nearly went mad, ordering up huge copper kettles of boiling water, and formidable bars of Kregen soap which is designed to scour little boys’ eyes and the backs of their ears and necks. When Pando had been nearly scalped, she pronounced him fit to enter decent company once again. I thought of those running-alive ponsho skins of the Magdag swifters. Conditions of life are all relative.
From this last port of call before we reached Port Marsilus, the entrepot for Bormark, we sailed in a little convoy of eight ships, accompanied by a vessel paid for and maintained by Bormark and her neighboring dukedom to the east for just this purpose of escort against raiders from The Bloody Menaham which lay far too close for comfort to the west beyond the promontory and islands that terminated the Bay of Panderk. The vessel was an argenter, if of a slightly leaner build than those that plowed the outer oceans, equipped with varters and catapults and with a sizable crew. I studied her, and felt something could be made of her and her like.
From Port Marsilus, with Tilda still heavily veiled and under our assumed names, we hired two onkers for Tilda and Pando and two zorcas for Inch and myself. We rode to Tilda’s home, a farm nestled among groves of samphron and muschafs, where her parents, having overcome their surprise, made us welcome. With a strict injunction to them to remain fast and not to stir abroad, and so be caught, Inch and I rode for the palace of Murlock Marsilus, the usurping Kov of Bormark.
CHAPTER TWELVE
This Murlock seemed to me to be no atavistic sport of the family of Marsilus — despite all I had heard of Marker Murlock, and all I had observed of his son Pando — for the old Kov had been relentless in his rage and malignance against not only Tilda, the girl his son had married in defiance of his wishes, but against her family also so that they had given up the stage and gone farming with distant relatives in that pleasant valley. Now, we left the valley and our zorcas’ hooves rat-tatted with a more purposeful sound on the paved road.
“Pando will turn out all right, Dray,” said Inch. He reflected, and added, “If he lives.”
“The story of the old Kov’s recantation on his deathbed and the known desire of his to have Pando recognized as his heir,” I said. “They are slender weapons, it seems to me; but they are all we have.”
“If what the Pallan Nicomeyn says is true — I expect it is — those weapons will be enough.”
“Once we have Murlock.”
“Ah!”
The palace of the Marsilus family stood on the highest eminence of a block of red cliffs that fell into the sea with a stark sheer of cliff reminiscent of those cliffs of the Eye of the World where I had dived in order to go to the assistance of Seg and the others in our flight from the sorzarts. Verdant glowing vegetation clothed the heights. The castle and palace, as richly red as the cliffs, reared above. Many flags floated there, and armed guards strode everywhere. We heard, in the inn where we stayed for a dram of Tomboram wine, that the news was that the king was visiting Tomboram and was even now on his way, traveling with a great company, coming on the pleasant coast-road, journeying in state and great comfort, surveying the domains.