Nath drank and wiped his mouth and declared roundly: "The Lady Delia is a princess! By Buzro’s Magic Staff! She is a princess from the top of her head to the tips of her feet, and she says you are a prince — the Prince Majister of Vallia, no less."
"For my sins, Nath, old comrade."
"Aye," said Zolta, putting a finger to his beak of a nose. "And she says you are a king of some place called Djanduin. If that is to be believed."
"What, you great onker!" roared Nath. "Do you doubt the word of Lady Delia?"
"No, no, you great oaf of a chunkrah! I doubt that this poor fellow here, this Stylor, could ever be a king!"
Nath subsided, rumbling. By Vox! How I needed their fierce heartwarming clowning, but how hollow it all struck me as I insisted on contemplating the future I beheld.
"Yes. Yes, I am a prince and a king. They mean nothing."
I did not go on. They stared at me keenly, and then Nath slowly said: "Lady Delia told us to tell you." He stopped and glared at Zolta. "Well, you nit that crawls on a calsany’s back! You are the lady-killer, you tell Dray what’s what!"
Zolta put his jug of wine on the dirt floor. His fierce bold eyes sized me up. We did not know the history of Zolta, yet he carried the proud Z not only just in his name, but as the initial letter of his name. Much was to be known of Zolta. As for Nath, as the son of an illiterate ponsho-farmer from Zullia, which is a village to the south of Sanurkazz, his whole history was writ in his large and powerful frame, his weather-beaten face, his addiction to drink, his jovial rough-necking and his loyalty. Now both of them stared at me as though they pondered the wisdom of their deeds.
"Tell me, by Vox!"
"Vox?" said Zolta. "You have been away a long time." I said nothing, only waited.
Zolta heaved up a sigh and fixed me with an eye like that of a fish on a slab. "Very well, then, but how you come to be married to so divine a creature. ." Here Nath nudged him and he went on. Despite his inclinations the seriousness crept in to shadow his words. "Lady Delia has said that, in view of certain impending developments, she feels it her duty to return to — where was it? — Ester Rarok?"
"Esser Rarioch. It is my home in Valka."
"Valka. Oh, aye."
"Return home? Impending developments? Tell me, in the sweet name of Zair!" Nath shuffled his feet. Zolta picked up his wine jug and put it down. "You saw her in some stinking fish cell in Zy?"
"Yes — yes!"
"So that’s why she is going home."
I felt stunned.
Then Zolta said, "She is so well aware of you, Dray, knows you so well. You told her you wished to reinstate yourself as a Krozair of Zy."
"Did I? I scarcely remember. And I find I do not overmuch care now-"
"That’s a lie!"
"Aye."
"So she wants you to do what you can. She believes in you. By Zair, you great fambly! If I had a wife like that. ." And here Nath swelled his massive chest. "I’d be pretty damn careful about how I upset her, I can tell you, Makki-Grodno take me else!"
"Did I upset her?"
"It would take a very great deal," said Zolta, at last, picking up his jug, "to upset Lady Delia. She wants you to regain your rightful place as a Krozair of Zy."
"Yes, she was very particular about that. Tell him,’ she said, ’tell him I wear the Krozair badge still, and will not unpin it until he returns home to Valka and tells me to take it off with his own lips.’ That’s what she said, aye, and she meant it too!"
They both nodded like those balancing birds dipping their beaks in liquid.
"Fight back! Fight for what you believe is the right of it!" How well I could picture my Delia saying those words, proud, chin lifted, her eyes sparkling with a dangerous light that the uncouth might construe as unshed tears. How my Delia knew me! And yet was it so strange? I had made no secret to her of my attachment to the Krozairs of Zy, and she had sent her two sons there, without question, joying in seeing them go through the same stringent disciplines as their father had endured. She must see the good in the Krozairs. She must regard my Apushniad as a mere interruption, to be cleared up, a passing shadow.
My Delia is seldom wrong in matters of this kind.
I felt that no dramatic gesture was necessary. So I simply said, "It will not be easy. There are things I cannot explain. Things that no sane man would believe. But I will try! I will fight back." They both beamed at me.
Nath slapped his knee and Zolta twirled his arrogant mustaches.
"Lady Delia said — well, no matter. She knew. She told us what you would say, almost word for word. You see, Dray Prescot, Lady Delia loves you as you love her."
Chapter fourteen
The fight in the clearing
Soon the Zairian swifter Zulfirian Avenger would weigh and make for the sea in company with three others of her kind, long, low sea-leems of the Eye of the World, ready to fall on a Grodnim convoy and joy in battle and slaughter and destruction. As responsible Zimen, men devoted as lay brothers to the care and comfort of the Krozairs of Zy, my two oar comrades Nath and Zolta should sail in her. They had aided me to escape from the rowing benches. So far they were above suspicion, or so they claimed.
One of the courses that had been open to me before they told me of Delia’s words had been to take them back with me to the outer oceans, back to Valka, where I would heap honors on them and shower them with chunkrah herds and mineral wealth and broad kools of land and drown them in gold. As Zair is my witness I did not then really know if that kind of life would suit them well or ill. They were rough, tough sailors, accustomed to the hardships of life afloat in swifters in the inner sea. How would they take to the ways of life of Vallia and Valka, of Djanduin and Strombor?
Then I reassured myself. They were adaptable. They would do more than survive. And with some of the pretty girls out there Zolta could be very happy, and Nath, I felt sure, would pronounce a good Jholaix as fine as his best Zond.
Well?
The truth was I did not intend to leave the Eye of the World until I was once more dubbed a Krozair of Zy.
The issue was perfectly plain.
I could not ask them to come with me on a mission of so much peril and of importance only to me. They would throw everything for which they had worked away, abandon their careers, which I now knew had brought them to the ranks of zan-Deldars, ready to make the all-important leap across to ob-Hikdars. One was a chief varterist, the other a Palinter, a purser of the lower rank. No. No, it would be foully cruel of me to snatch them away from their own lives into lives filled with cruelty and danger and death, merely to serve my own selfish ends.
I valued them far too much to do that to them.
So I thought then, as I sat in the miserable hut and planned what I would do. They had told me that Pur Zenkiren, who had known them too well for their own comfort, had been passed over when old Pur Zazz had at last died and gone to sit in glory on the right hand of Zair in the paradise of Zim. The battles he had fought up along the eastern shores had slid and slipped away so that gradually Proconia had been lost to the allies of Magdag. Nath had said, with a round Makki-Grodno oath, that the Grodnims he called Yoggur-cramphs had rolled down from the north with huge armies of diffs. Chuliks, Rapas, Katakis — at which my eyebrows had lifted — Ochs and Naor’vils like clouds driven before the winds of heaven, rampaging down with their mercenary ibs uplifted by the gold promised by the Overlords of Yoggur, following the green banners.
"We stopped ’em, in the end. The place was a defile, a good defensive position." Zolta licked his lips. "I was told by a Deldar who lost an eye. The place was called Appar, from which the battle takes its name. This Deldar did not relish the telling. But Pur Zenkiren marshaled his forces and we fought and we stopped them, the rasts of Grodno and their Zair-forsaken beast-men allies." This was a thing I had long noted, how the men of the red southern shore seldom employed diffs, and how very few of the myriads of marvelous halfling races of Kregen made their homes along the southern shore of the inner sea of Turismond. How important a factor in my life — aye! and the destiny of Kregen