Marko found that the Prem had produced a medal from his trousers pocket. Mirabo pinned this medal to Marko’s chest. “You have merited well of me, Marko. Let this be a small token.”
“I earnestly thank Your Serenity,” said Marko. “Now just a minute …”
His heart pounding with excitement, he stopped, grasped the ankle of the bodyguard, and straightened up, hurling the guard over the edge of the basket
“Hey!” shouted the Prem, reaching for his sword.
The guard’s shriek came up with diminishing amplitude as the man fell. There was a loud slam as the armored body struck the cobblestones two hundred feet below.
Marko snatched up his ax from the floor just as the Prem whipped out his sword and thrust. Marko struck the darting blade aside with the head of his ax and, before Mirabo could execute a remise, whacked him over the helmet with the fiat of the ax.
The Prem slumped down hi the basket. Marko snatched the sword out of his limp hand, leaned over the side, and threw the weapon away.
The bodyguard lay in a widening pool of blood. The rest of the Prem’s entourage were closing in on the philosophers with bared weapons, but Toskano shouted:
“If you kill us, the balloon will fly away!”
The guards hesitated. Marko called down at the faces that looked up at him like a swarm of pink dots:
“Do as I say or I’ll throw the Prem over too!”
“What?” shouted an officer.
Marko repeated in full bellow.
“Do what?” said the officer.
“Just a minute,” roared Marko. He turned and examined the Prem. The man was still alive, for which Marko was thankful. He had feared that, not knowing his own strength, he might have slain him.
Marko unbuckled the cuirass and the helmet, baring the Prem’s nude scalp, and dropped them over, too, tossing them so that they landed on bare cobbles. With a length of rope, he bound the Prem’s wrists and ankles. Alzander Mirabo began to come to during this process and had to be quieted by a punch in the jaw.
Marko leaned over again and shouted: “Your Prem is safe while you obey our orders. Dr. Toskano will tell you what to do.”
After that, Marko had only to sit in the basket and smoke his pipe while he watched the proceedings. Sometimes he climbed up to stuff a briquette of peat into the auxiliary stove.
Under Toskano’s directions, the balloon was towed outside the gate and the drag rope was belayed to the harness of the Prem’s paxor. This process caused the paxor to fidget and bellow. Once the rope was fastened, however, the beast, no longer able to see the balloon, forgot about it.
Officers were sent out to round up other vehicles. Those philosophers who lived in Vien scurried away to gather up their families and possessions.
Marko heard the Prem move and looked around to see him sitting on the floor of the basket, glaring up at Marko with bared teeth. His face held all the concentrated malevolence that one human face can. The instant his eye caught Marko’s, the scowl was wiped away by a cheerful smile.
“Well, my good man,” said Alzander Mirabo, “perhaps you can tell me what this is all about?”
“We philosophers, Your Serenity, were forced by your threat to take this drastic method of getting out of Eropia.”
“Oh, you mean that silly debate? You took it seriously?” The Prem gave a little laugh. “My dear fellow, I was only fooling. I should not have cut off anybody’s head, no matter who lost. That was just my little joke, to make sure that both sides extended themselves,”
Marko rubbed a hand against his bull neck. “Maybe so, sir, but such a joke somehow doesn’t seem funny to the owner of the head.”
“Now that you mention it, I see your viewpoint. Where is my guard?”
Marko pointed downward.
“I remember now. Dead, I suppose?”
“He looks it.”
“Poor Sezar! A brave, faithful, and honest fellow. Aren’t you sorry you murdered him?”
Marko had not thought about the guard as a human being, but he said: “I suppose I am, but that’s war.”
“Well, let’s call off this whole fantastic escapade, what do you say? Lower me, and as soon as I’m safely on the ground I will order that all the philosophers be allowed to go free.”
Marko looked stonily at his captive.
“There shall be no reprisals, either.”
Marko kept silence.
“You don’t believe me? Well, I probably shouldn’t in your shoes. But see here, this can’t go on. You cannot possibly get away with it. You can’t seize the person of the head of the world’s greatest-nation, the commander of the strongest army, like an Arabi kidnaping a caravaner. Put me down! I, the leader of the masses of Eropia, command you! You cannot resist!”
Marko said nothing. Mirabo tried another tack: “Well, while I cannot say I am pleased by this treatment, I can’t help admiring the audacity and adroitness with which you carried it out. You ought to have gone to work for me. I still might have a place for you. Why join these mumbling, peering old pedants? Anyone can see you are more the physical type. Why not throw in with me? I can always use a man with your strength and dash.”
Marko scowled. The Prem could not know that Marko perversely took no pride in his bulging muscles but was, instead, consumed by the ambition to become a respected scholar. He replied only a curt “No.”
For an hour the Prem kept on trying to persuade Marko to let him down. He tried every approach. He threatened, blustered, bribed, wheedled, and appealed to Marko’s better nature. He even tried to put Marko to sleep by hypnotism. Nothing worked.
Then the bizarre procession got under way, heading for the south gate. First came the Prem’s state coach, an ornate vehicle of glass and gilt as big as a six-horse tally-ho. To the back of the Prem’s draft paxor was attached the drag rope that held Halran’s balloon, swaying and rotating, while the huge coach rumbled behind. Then came a long line of carriages and wagons crowded with philosophers and their gear and dependents.
“You Vizantian savages are a stubborn lot,” said Mirabo with a sigh, after his victim had shrugged off the tenth effort to get the better of him. “Where are we going?”
“To Massey, sir.”
“And then whither?”
“Oh, we thought we might borrow one of your ships.”
“I must say, I never thought philosophers could be men of action as well.. I’ll be more careful whom I play jokes on in the future.”
“Oh, I’m nobody at all, sir,” said Marko. “I’ve merely been lucky.”
They passed out through the south gate. This took a lot of arranging, because the city wall was continuous above the gate. The drag rope therefore had to be untied, carried over the gate, and reattached on the far side. The circuslike procession rumbled over the bridge across the Dunau and plodded out along the road for Massey, the main seaport of Eropia.
When Marko’s supply of peat got low, he replenished it by lowering a small basket by a light rope from the balloon to the ground. When he and his captive got hungry, he hoisted up a meal by the same means.
“You fellows seem to have thought of everything,” said the Prem.
“That, sir, is what brains are for.”
“Don’t I get any coffee?”
“I’m sorry, but I need it all. It won’t hurt you to go to sleep, but if I do I might wake up on my way to the ground.”
Alzander Mirabo laughed. “You are twice my size! I couldn’t toss you around that way without awakening you.”
“You might stab me or something.”
“Not if I’m trussed up like this.”