“We are neutral.” Tharu spoke impatiently, abruptly. “The barbarians from Magdag would not dare to harm us. They may kill all their enemies from Sanurkazz, but they will not touch me, nor Vomanus here
— nor you, Dray Prescot.”
“Why?”
The galley’s long bronze ram curled the seas away in a long creaming bow wave that roiled down her sides where her oars flashed down and up, down and up, like the white wings of a gull. She was a hundred-and-twentyswifter, double-banked, fast. I could see the men on her beak ready to board us and others at her bow varters. Her sails had been furled, but her single mast had not been struck. Tharu of Vindelka moved to the rail so that I turned to face him. Nath and Zolta below were frantic in their despairing efforts to rouse the crew. Vomanus walked quietly aft. The longboat was in the water and an oar splintered against the broad ship’s side in the panicky haste.
“They will not take you, Dray Prescot.”
“Why? What will it matter to them that I know the Princess Delia of Delphond? That my every thought is of her? I have never seen Delphond, Tharu, nor the Blue Mountains. But I regard them as my home.”
He let that square, hard face of his relax. I did not think he was smiling.
“My duty is clear, Dray Prescot, who is intended to be Prince of Delphond.” A grimace clouded his face with his inner resentments. “Rather, I think you had best be a Chuktar — no, on reflection, the dignity of a Kov is better suited. It will impress the Magdaggians more. I am, you should know, a Kov myself, although of a somewhat more ancient lineage.”
I stared at him. I as yet did not know quite what he was talking about or where he was driving. Then I heard a light scrape of foot on the deck to my rear. I am quick. The blow almost missed. But it sledged down on the back of my head and dazed me and drove me down, and the second blow put out the lights.
When I regained consciousness I was aboard a Magdag swifter and I was dressed in the buff coat and black boots of a Vallian, a rapier swinging at my side was complemented by a dagger, and I was, so I gathered, an honored guest of Magdag. My name, I was told by Tharu, was Drak, the Kov of Delphond.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Because the vessels of the inner sea almost invariably put either into port or were dragged up onto a convenient beach at night they were seldom provided with bunks or hammocks. I was lying on a kind of hard wooden settle covered with a ponsho fleece dyed green.
Green.
It is difficult for me, even now, to recollect anything coherent out of my thoughts then. Suffice it to say that I simply lay there for a space while the whirling thoughts crowded, mocking and vicious, through my still-dazed head. My skull rang with the blow.
Tharu, Kov of Vindelka, leaned over me so that his stiff beard bristled against my cheek.
“Remember who you are, Drak, Kov of Delphond! It is our heads as well as yours that depend on your memory.”
“I have a good memory,” I said. I spoke dryly. I was thinking of Nath and Zolta. “I remember faces and names and what people say.”
“Good.”
He straightened up and I could see a little of the cabin, that of the first lieutenant as I judged, having some skill in reading the infinitesimal touches that mark rank from rank upon the sea — any sea — and despising the lot of them.
“Wait.” I caught his sleeve. He thought I wanted assistance to rise and began to draw haughtily away, but I looked him in the eye. Vomanus came into view, his lively face now sadly apprehensive. “Tharu -
Delphond I understand, and Kov, because you told me. But Drak? Where did that come from?”
Tharu’s square face darkened and he cast a malevolent glance up toward Vomanus. Vomanus said: “I called you that, Dray — ah, Drak — as the first name that popped into my head.”
“Once this young fool had named you, I could do nothing less than accept it. The Magdaggians are not fools.”
It seemed that Vomanus was lying, judging by his face.
Tharu went on speaking as I let him go and levered myself up. My head rang like those bells of Beng-Kishi.
“Drak was the name of the emperor’s father when he ascended the throne. Also it is the name of a being half-legendary, half-historical, part human, part god, that we may read of in the old myths, those from the Canticles of the Rose City, at least three thousand years old.” He spoke impatiently, a cultured man telling a peasant.
Well, and wasn’t he right?
I stood up.
Beng-Kishi clanged a trifle less discordantly.
“You’ve done it now,” I told them. “If these devils from Magdag find out who I am, they’ll fry you over a fire, chip you into kindling, and feed you to the chanks.” Vomanus looked a trifle sick. Mention of the chanks, the sharks of the seas of Kregen, made me think of Nath and Zolta again.
“We saw them pulling for the shore in the longboat,” said Vomanus, swallowing.
“They either drowned or were saved,” said Tharu. “It is no matter. They were unimportant.”
He made a mistake, saying that to me, their oar comrade.
I brushed past him and, ducking my head, went out onto the deck. We were drawn up in the lee of the island; fires blazed as the watches kept a vigilant lookout. The stars of the Kregan night sky blazed down, forming those convoluted patterns the wizards of Loh can read and understand, or so they say. A cooling breeze blew and stirred the leaves ashore. Sentries stood on the quarterdeck and I caught the flash of gold as an officer moved. Only two of the lesser moons were up, and they would soon be gone in their helter-skelter hurtling around the planet.
The thought of conversation with a man of Magdag was nauseating to me. I looked hungrily out to the shore. Perhaps Nath and Zolta were out there, waiting to pounce. But what chance would we stand, three against a swifter crew? I knew an arrow would feather into me if I dived overboard; I decided that I would chance that. I would dive and swim to the island, and the devil take the chanks. If I was to walk the length of the central gangway and try to jump down to the beach I would be stopped. I knew the habits of Magdag captains, as I knew those of Sanurkazz. I knew what I would do were I the swifter captain.
Vomanus joined me, and then a Magdaggian Hikdar, who turned out to be the man whose cabin we had taken. He didn’t seem to show his annoyance. I made an excuse, and went below again. The stink of the slaves and their eternal and infernal moaning and clanking of shackles and fetters made me irritable. I believe, now, looking back, that I had not lost my nerve. There have been times in my life when I have followed a course of action that the casual onlooker would feel smacks of cowardice. I answer to no one, of course, for my actions — except to Delia. If I got myself killed, Delia would be alone, and more and more I was coming to the conclusion that she would need me by her side in the days to come. There were great forces moving implacably and with incredible cunning, somewhere. . We sailed with the rising sun and headed west.
The news was bad. Pattelonia, the city of the Proconia where the flier had been left, had been raided and left in flames. The men of Sanurkazz had suffered a defeat. This swifter, My Lady of Garles, a five-five-hundred-and-twentyswifter, had sustained some damage and lost some oarsmen. She had been entrusted with dispatches for the admiralty in Magdag and her smart capture of the old broad ship on which we had been traveling had come as a pleasant diversionary tidbit. Tharu, bowing to the inevitable, had consented to be taken back to Magdag. Without a flier, travel across The Stratemsk and over the hostile lands beyond to the place where we could pick up a ship for Vallia, Port Tavetus, was impossible. Ergo, we must go to Magdag and wait for a ship from Vallia, which was due, so Tharu told me, sometime soon.