I heard the women screaming.
Blood made the floor slippery. I hurled the broken hilt at a Chulik, who dodged nimbly. His yellow face slicked under the lamplight. The fray was close and deadly for a moment as my dagger held them at bay, and then I had drawn the rapier I had taken from the mailed warrior-he who had fought so nobly and died so well.
Indeed, and his blade was a marvel! The balance, the deftness of it, the suppleness as the gleaming steel whickered between the ribs of the penultimate antagonist!
The last one stared in appalled horror on the four dead bodies of his carousing-companions. He tried to escape. I would have let him go. I stepped aside for him in the corridor and raised my blood-stained blade in ironic salute. My eye caught a movement to the side and I glanced quickly to see the three slave girls rising. Two were still partly draped in strings of pearls. Trust these mercenary ruffians to select the prettiest and most pleasure-skilled of slave girls. Then I saw the third-naked, trembling, but with eyes filled with a fire I knew and remembered and loved-Delia, my Delia…
Natema shouted, shrilly, her voice filled with terror. I flicked my glance back. The Chulik whom I had been about to let go, with the honors of battle, had seen my involuntary look toward the girls, and he had stepped in and was in the act of thrusting his rapier between my ribs. My opinion of him as a fighting man went down. He should, in those close quarters, have used his dagger. Had he done so I would not now be telling you this. I flicked the long blade away with my own dagger and sank my rapier into his belly. He writhed for a moment on the brand; then I withdrew it and he slumped, vomiting, to the floor. Natema rushed to me and clasped me, shaking and sobbing.
“Oh, Dray! Dray! A true fighting man of Zenicce, worthy of the Noble House of Esztercari!”
I tried to shake her off.
I stared at Delia of the Blue Mountains, who drew herself up, naked and grimed, her hair dusty and bedraggled, her body taut and firm in the lamplight. She looked at me with those limpid brown eyes and-was it anguish, I saw? Or was it contempt, and anger, and a sudden cold indifference?
I was standing by that great jar of Pandahem porcelain. We were abruptly surrounded by green clad nobles who surged into the corridor, chief among them Galna, whose hard white face ridged and planed as he saw Natema. He cried out in horror and whisked a fellow-noble’s gaudy cape about her glowing nakedness. The slave girls were hustled back with the rest of us as the princess was placed within a solid palisade of noble living flesh. There was some confusion.
Galna saw me.
His eyes were always mean; but now they narrowed and the hardness and meanness drilled me. He lifted his rapier.
“Galna! Dray Prescot is-” Natema stopped. Her voice lifted again, once more arrogant, once more assured, the mistress of the utmost marvels of Kregen. “He is to be treated well, Galna. See to it.”
“Yes, my Princess.” Galna swung back to me. “Give me your sword.”
Obediently I handed across the nearest Chulik sword I had already picked up against this moment. I also handed across the Chulik dagger that had not, like its Jiktar, failed me. Now my breechclout concealed the broad belt, and the scabbard flapped against my legs, empty, Galna let me keep those, as he supposed, tawdry souvenirs of my struggle.
I tried to hurry after Delia; but there was much coming and going in the barricaded nobles’ quarters as arrogant young men, gentlemen, officers, bravos, from Esztercari and from Ponthieu and many of the Houses who were aligned with those two Houses’
axis, congregated for the great hunt and slaying of slaves that was to ensue. I lost Delia. I was ordered by Natema to take the baths of nine and then to go to my room. As though I were some infant midshipman caught in a childish prank, banished to the masthead!
“I will send for you, slave,” were her farewell words to me. I didn’t give a tinker’s cuss for her. Delia… Delia!
Natema for the sake of her dignity and position must display her pride and arrogance before all men. She could not own to anyone the love for a slave she had only recently been so ardently displaying to me, naked and begging on her knees. But when she would send for me-what could I do, say?
A knock sounded on my door, rather, a furtive scratching that lacked the courage to knock loudly. When I opened it Gloag stumbled in, his body blood-stained, his face ghastly, his fist still gripping the stump of a spear. He looked at me.
“Was this the day, Gloag?”
He shook his head. “They brought their airboats, flying to the roof, they brought men onto our rear, men and beasts and mercenaries-swords and spears and bows-we did not have a chance.” He sagged, exhausted.
“Let me bathe your wounds.”
He wrenched his lips back. “This is mostly accursed guards’
blood.”
“I am pleased to hear it.”
He did not say what had brought him here. He did not need to. This man had struck me with the rattan. I fetched water in a bowl, and salves left by the old crone for his wounds and bruises, and fresh towels, and I cleaned him up. Then I pulled my trundle bed away from the wall and pointed to the space beneath it, between wall and floor.
He grasped my hand. His great booming voice husked.
“Mehzta-Makku, Father of all, shine down in mercy upon you!”
I said nothing but pushed the bed back, concealing him. The killing of slaves went on for three days in the opal palace of the Princess Natema Cydones of the Noble House of Esztercari. Many were the brilliantly-colored liveries of the different Houses in alignment with Esztercari as they came hurrying to suppress this slave revolt. The city wardens in their crimson and emerald also acted with vigor; for this was a matter that touched the security of the whole city of Zenicce.
During this period I brought food and wine for Gloag, hidden beneath my bed, and saw to his toilet needs, and talked to him, so that we came to understand each other better.
“I hear you are a great swordsman with rapier and dagger,” he said, licking his bowl with a crust.
“I could show you a style of fence with a smaller sword than a rapier, without a dagger, that would astonish these rufflers.”
“You would teach me swordplay?”
“Do you know the layout of the palace?”
Gloag did; he might know little of the city, but he could find his way about the opal palace readily enough by its secret warrens and runnels. He had not escaped before because his duty lay with the slaves; now he was trapped in my room. I promised him. I believe that only Delia and the two slave girls in their strings of pearls, Gloag and myself, and one other, escaped the dreadful retribution wrought upon the slaves. When all had been killed the Noble House spent of their fortune to buy more slaves. That hurt them-the sheer financial loss on the slave revolt.
Natema sent for me and, once more dressed in my offensive clothes, a new set even more luxurious than the last with a great deal of brilliant scarlet, I went with guards and Nijni-who as slave-master held a post of some authority and had hidden during the revolt-up to a high roof overlooking the broad arm of the delta on its seaward side. Wide-winged gulls circled overhead. The suns sparkled off the water, and the air smelled fresh and sharp with sea-tang after the close sickly confinement of the palace. I opened my lungs and drew in that old familiar odor.
Landward of us lay the city, a blaze of color and light, with tall spires, domes, towers, battlements, creating a haphazard jumble of perspectives. Across the canal the purple and ocher trappings of the House of Ponthieu flamed from a hundred flagstaffs. Beyond their walls there were other enclaves built upon the islands of the delta. Seaward I could see-and how my heart leaped-the masts of ships moored to jetties hidden by the walls and the intervening roofs.