His sister, the princess Susheeng — plus a score of other pretentious names denoting her exalted rank and the broad acres of her estates, the thousands of slaves she owned — was lithe, lovely, and dark-haired, with eyes that tried to devour me with amorous glances from the moment we met. I was forced to contrast her with the gay reckless simplicity of Mayfwy, and had to acknowledge the animal vitality of this woman, her burning gaze, the intensity of the passion with which she took anything she wanted. All her noble honorifics amused me, through their pomposity. I realized afresh how lightly my Delia carried all the ringing brave titles to which she was heir, how subtly and how surely, with what courtesy and quiet gravity — shot through with her own elfin irony at life — she fitted the role of Princess Majestrix of Vallia.
The Princess Susheeng made a dead set at me. I was aware of this, and it annoyed me, through the complications that inevitably must ensue. Vomanus openly envied what he called my good fortune. Tharu, with a darker vision, contained his own resentment and annoyance.
I told her, one day as we stood on the third-level ramparts overlooking one of the harbors that opened out below the palace in which we were lodging, that I was looking forward earnestly to returning home.
“But, my Kov of Delphond, what has your vaulted Vallia to offer you that you cannot find in far greater quantity and quality here in Sacred Magdag?”
I winced, covered that lapse, and said: “I am homesick, Susheeng. Surely you understand that?”
With incongruous pride, she said: “I have traveled not for one single mur outside the lands of Magdag!”
I made some empty reply. That a person would boast of that kind of chauvinism appalled me.
“Well, Princess,” I said, and saying it realized how incautious I was, “I intend to return home as soon as possible.”
The woman nauseated me.
I had my mind on other women. Put this Princess Susheeng in the starkness of the gray slave breechclout, teach her the humility that is the only sure path to serenity, and she would turn out well. Slaves had no chance to reach to anything beyond their slavery, except those who escaped physically, by running or by death, and the humility a slave learns is corrosive and corrupting; but this girl might profit from it, if she knew she was to learn by her experience.
I wanted to travel to Vallia — and at once.
She saw all that in me; she saw my utter rejection of her.
The next day Vomanus and I were wandering through one of the high-class jewelry streets, a kind of open-air market, when we bumped into the Princess Susheeng with her body of retainers, blank-faced Chulik guards and a group of swaggering popinjay show-off Magdag nobility all fawning on her. She treated them all like dirt, of course.
“And what is that trinket you are buying, Kov Drak?”
She used the familiar tone of address to infuriate her attendants, of course. I held up the jewelry. It was a beautiful piece of cut chemzite, blazing in the suns’ light. It was work of Sanurkazz style and skill.
“I think it a pleasant piece,” I said.
“It is of Zair,” she said, her mouth drawn down. “It and all like it should be broken up and refashioned into more seemly work of Grodno.”
“Maybe. But it is here.” I forced myself to go on. “No doubt it is the booty of some successful swifter captain.”
She smiled at me. Her mouth was ripely red, a trifle too large, soft, and rapacious with overfed passion.
“And is it for me, a parting gift, Kov Drak?”
“No,” I said. I spoke too sharply. “I intend to take it to Vallia as a keepsake of the Eye of the World.”
That was half of the truth, as you will readily perceive.
She pouted, and laughed gaily, as at a joke, and made some flighty and, in truth, slighting, remark, so as to retain her composure before her toadies. Then she walked swiftly from the market to her sectrix, which she rode well enough, I grant you.
I know, now, that that scene saved my life.
That evening the Vallian ship was sighted rounding the point. She would tie up in Magdag this night. So far I had not set eyes on a ship of Vallia, for they were rare enough in the inner sea, tending to make armadas of their voyages to take advantage of the prevailing seasonal winds, and I had always been raiding when they had called at Sanurkazz. I had once tried to set course to intercept a Vallian I knew to be due off Isteria; however, for a reason that I did not then comprehend, I missed her. I looked forward to the encounter.
Vomanus took himself off to the harbor to greet the Vallian captain, and then he was back cursing and swearing, to saddle up a sectrix and ride off to a more distant anchorage to which the Vallian vessel had unaccountably been assigned by the port captain. I shouted some jovial remark after him. I had wanted to ride myself, but Tharu had sternly vetoed that.
“A Kov does not ride down to the jetty to greet the mere captain of a ship,” he said, and that was that. I had gathered that a Kov was what we on this Earth would call a duke; the information depressed me. I had often found that empty titles mean nothing, and that intermediary ranks are stifling and frustrating. There is a board game played a great deal on Kregen called Jikaida. As the name implies it has to do with combat. The squared board is, in shape, like an elongated chessboard, and with a touch of Halma about the moves, as one army of Jikaida men clash with the others. If you expect the colors of the men to be red and green, you are wrong. They are blue and yellow, or white and black. The red and the green, it seems, are reserved for real battle. So to take my mind off waiting, Tharu and I settled to a game of Jikaida.
I make it a practice whenever it is practicable never to sit with my back to a door. When the door to our room smashed open and the mailed men burst in, their faces covered with red scarves, I jumped up. Tharu, whose back was to the door, was knocked flying across the table. Jikaida men went flying in a shower of blue and yellow. The table tangled my legs. My rapier was lying on the floor at my side, casually in reach but scabbarded — for this was a great city and who would expect attack within a palace? — and by the time I had the blade free a poniard stuck its tip into my throat and a single move would mean my instant death.
At that moment I felt that I was growing old — I, Dray Prescot, who had bathed in the sacred pool of Aphrasoe and would live a thousand years!
I was trussed up like a vosk and between two of the burly thugs was carried like a roll of carpet out and through a secret passage behind a full-length portrait of some arrogant Magdag swifter captain in the midst of a hypothetical destruction of a Sanurkazz fleet. Naturally, I had had no idea of the passage’s existence. Far below I was carried out and flung into a dung cart which reminded me of the galley slaves’
benches. We bumped along cobbles. I had had no sight of my attackers. I could hear no sound from them. I was gagged, and so I did not expect to hear from Tharu.
They threw me down in a stone cellar where green slime ran on the walls. I looked at their red scarves concealing their faces. Only their eyes, bright and quick, like rasts’, shining at me over the red cloths, were visible.
Afterward I learned I spent five days in that cellar, bound loosely but sufficiently to prevent escape, fed on slops, without exercise and with a bucket for toilet purposes, and with two men on guard at all times. Tharu was not with me.