Prince of Scorpio (11 page)

The weather grew warmer as we progressed south, although with the much greater band-spread of temperate climate on Kregen the differences between Vondium, in the south, and Evir, in the north, are nothing like what one would expect on Earth. The Mountains of the North are cruelly cold, as I had discovered.

Winding lazily southward through the center of Vallia flows the Great River, the Mother of Waters, She of Fecundity, which empties into the Sunset Sea where Vondium is situated. Because of the lazy windings of the river, which bears many names along its length, canals sometimes use it when convenient; most often they have been cut by men with a disregard of the river’s course. Once we crossed the Great River on a long-striding aqueduct, like twenty Pontcysylltes rolled into one.

Through the low-rolling hills to the south we traveled past tree-hung banks where the mirrored reflections gave a strange duplicating effect of aerial navigation, as though we floated in air. The water changed color occasionally as minerals washed down from the hills; generally it reflected the sky and the clouds, the overhang of trees, the grasses, wild flowers, and rushes of the banks. In a glass it sparkled silvery pure, clean, sweet, refreshing, and — if you were not of canalfolk — deadly.

Between towns the thread of water ran through open country, vast sweeps of moorland, or massy forests, through tangled byways and past the outskirts of magnificent lordly holdings. Sometimes there were no traffic arrangements at crossings, where cut met cut.

Yelker roused himself on an afternoon of lazy sunshine and drifting cloud, and consulting with Rafee, the bulky-shouldered man who acted as his second-in-command, shouted an order to ’vast heaving. He jumped lithely to the bank and with Rafee strode ahead to where the canal curved beyond a clump of missals, leaning over the placid water. Only one other boat was in sight, a red and green craft that had been gently following us for the last day or so.

“What is it?” I said to Zyna.

She tossed her brown hair back and said: “The Ogier Cut. It crosses here.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking of Borg.

The deep, quietly green-breathing heart of the country surrounded us. The green of the banks reflected in a double bar along the edges of the canal, the placid water pent between, dimpled occasionally by the plop of a fish, the high arch of the sky, the faint refreshing breeze, all added up to create images of perfect peace and quietude. I jumped to the bank.

“I will come with you, Drak.”

“With pleasure, Zyna.”

We walked up the bank together, the towpath, as is usual, wide enough for three people abreast. Just past the clump of missals there was a winding-hole where boats might turn. A little beyond that the canal widened again and I saw the Ogier Cut coming in from the east and west. At this watery crossroads stood Yelker and Rafee, and they were frowning at the long procession of boats on the Ogier, streaming past at right angles to the Vomansoir.

“This will take time, Yelker,” Rafee was saying.

I had picked a spike of grass and I was chewing this as I walked up. Yelker turned at sound of our footsteps.

‘Time, Drak,” he said. “And time is money. They will never pause to let us through.”

“I don’t see why not.” I walked up to the ridge of the bank and looked east. The boats continued pulling steadily toward us for as far as I could see until the canal curved, a distance I estimated as three-fifths of a dwabur. “There are a lot of them. This, as Rafee says, will take time.”

“We must then go back to the boat and brew up and wait.”

“Why? Surely they can hold up just long enough for us to slip through?”

“There are no canal wardens out here. It is every man for himself.”

About to ask him — almost tauntingly — what of the vaunted comradeship of the canalfolk, I stopped. They had accepted me as a canalman who had, sorrowfully enough, become mixed up with ordinary Vallians. I must be of the canals, for I could drink the water. But I must not show too much ignorance.

“I will take a little stroll,” I said. And then as Zyna perked up, smiling, I added swiftly: “Alone.”

Dancing Talu
carried hoffiburs from Therminsax and if they did not reach Vomansoir in good time they would go rotten. Any delay was to be avoided. We could be stuck here for the rest of the day. From Vomansoir the boat would take lissium ore back to Therminsax, a busy and lucrative trade.

As I walked slowly along I could just see a shining sheet of water dim and vast along the eastern horizon, and knew this to be one of the many great lakes that make the interior of Vallia so pleasant a place. The procession of boats on the Ogier Cut passed endlessly. The haulers walked carelessly enough across the wooden bridges built over the Vomansoir Cut. Other bridges, of a distinctively different pattern, crossed the Ogier north-south. I walked along the western bridge and stood leaning on the parapet, chewing my grass stem.

The scrape of a bare foot on the bridge made me turn.

Zyna walked up, boldly enough, although there was a little diffidence she hid admirably. She smiled at me. Over her shoulder I could see the red and green boat had pulled in astern of
Dancing Talu,
and her people and ours were clumped on the bank, talking and gesticulating.

“You should not send me away, Drak.” She pouted at me, and the glance from her man-killing eyes would have done the business for any young buck of the canals.

“Nevertheless, Zyna, go back to your father and tell him to unmoor and begin hauling. The other boat also. They must be ready to shoot through the Ogier the moment a gap appears.”

“But—?”

“Do as I say, young Zyna, or by Vaosh, I’ll tan your bottom!”

“You wouldn’t dare!” she flashed back. And then — she giggled. I thought of Viridia the Render, and I sighed, and surmised that my handling of girls is calculated to make them exceedingly wroth with me.

“I guarantee, young woman, that if you believe you would enjoy that, you are wrong. I have a hard and horrifically horny hand.”

Whereat she giggled again. I pushed up from the bridge parapet and took out my grass stem and threw it on the gray barges of the Emperor with their arrogant right-of-planks and advanced toward her — and she ran off, shrieking with merriment.

It was precisely at crossing places like this that the gray barges of the Emperor with their arrogant right-of-way held an advantage. They would simply haul straight on. The stentor braced in the bows would lift his triply-spiraled brass trumpet, maneuvering it up and around, with his arm thrust through the spiral, the blaring trumpet mouth high and blasting forward, and peal the shrill commanding notes that would make all canalfolk hauling give way before the Emperor’s barge.

Those long low gray barges flew the flag of Vallia, the vivid yellow saltire on the red ground.

As I stared back down the towpath I saw Zyna reach the knot of folk clustered where the stem and the stern of the two narrow boats nuzzled. Faces turned to look up at me and I waved. It had not occurred to me to consider that Yelker would not instantly do as I had said, and I felt a twinge of astonishment as he and Rafee and a few others together with men and women of the red and green boat started off along the towpath toward me. Truly, the habits of a Strom, a Zorcander, a lord, do not wash with canalfolk!

“What is all this about, Ven Drak? By Vaosh, if we move into the Ogier our tows will be cut swifter than the throats of a litter of leems!”

“Maybe not so, Yelker, maybe not.”

“You have a plan?”

I hadn’t thought of any plan. “No. No, I’m just going down there and ask the first haulers I come to, to hold up for us.”

They gaped at me.

A man with a black spade beard, the skipper of
Pride of Vomansoir,
guffawed. “Ho! You’ll find yourself in Gurush’s Bottomless Marshes if you try that, Ven Drak!”

“Why?”

But, of course, the reason was obvious. No hauler is going to ease his boat back to a stop if he can avoid it; the effort of overcoming inertia to begin movement again is the toughest chore of the canalfolk, in and out of locks.

I said, “They will do as I request.”

Yelker said, “I am a man of peace, Drak. You possess a rapier, and we do not see many of those on the cuts. But your rapier is aboard, and I will not let you get it.”

He didn’t know the risks he ran by telling me I could not do something, but I had no desire to use an edged and pointed weapon in this fracas. All I knew was that time was running out and I must press on to Vondium and Delia, and a line of narrow boats prevented me.

“Then, so am I. But, nevertheless, Yelker, get ready.”

And I turned away from him and walked down the bridge and so on the Ogier Cut.

The headless zorcamen

Narrow boats keep to the left riding the Vallian cuts and so by walking down from the western bridge I could walk back eastward along the southern bank of the Ogier Cut. Past me went the stream of boats. Their haulers looked up and some smiled, others nodded, one or two called out a casual “Llahal, Ven,” to which I replied in as casual a fashion.

Six young folk on a rope passed, four jolly laughing girls and two young lads who seemed mightily bashful as they saw me watching them. I let them go. All along the placid deep-green water approaching me the boats swam smoothly on. They differed in a subtle fashion from those riding the Vomansoir Cut, but they were narrow boats, gaily decorated, brilliantly painted, their high central ridgepoles draped with multicolored canvas concealing the loads beneath. Now walked steadily a man and wife, robust, fresh-faced, firmly-muscled. I nodded to them as I climbed up the wooden bridge, giving them all the room they needed as they dragged the tow rope across the bridge railing. The wood was smooth and so highly polished by the passage of countless ropes that it shone blindingly in the light from Zim and Genodras. It took, on busy bridges, a surprisingly short time for the wood to wear away and become unsafe and so have to be replaced by the wardens.

I descended the other side of the southern bridge over the Vomansoir Cut. I let two barges go past, hauled by four men apiece, agile as they flexed out the tow ropes as they ascended the bridge. I walked on. Now I had to believe that Yelker would do as I had said. His argument had been surprising; I had to remind myself I was simply an ordinary mortal here, no longer a Strom. Ahead of me the narrow boats stretched out of sight, a moving, gliding patchwork of color along the glinting waters of the canal.

There are in any society men who for whatever obscure reasons of psychology desire to shine, to be noticed, to do things with an air that will draw the attention of everyone exclusively to them. We all know people like that. I had never been like that, but had found that simply by doing what I felt I had been impelled to do I had gained many of the results of a greater striving. Sometimes a man, to show his strength and prowess, would haul a narrow boat alone. The average rate was around a third of a dwabur a bur and by traveling at night the boats could cover sixteen dwaburs in a day. I was looking at this one man who wished to show off.

He came striding on, head down, muscles bared to the air with his jerkin unlaced and open over his chest. He was a fine-looking man, with plenty of manly hair on that chest, and a well-proportioned head with fiercely jutting beard and arrogant moustaches. He carried the tow rope over his left shoulder so that he could lay his weight against it to control his boat. I judged that, indeed, she was his, for after the fashion of many of the canalfolk he wore adornments of gold and silver about him, golden earrings and golden bands around his arms, and these were of a fine quality.

The sound of the boat’s passage in that rhythmical series of gurglings and plashings swelled as he drew nearer. I could see no one on the deck of his boat, which was a large specimen of canal craft, a good hundred and fifty feet long in Terrestrial measurements. A brute to handle in a congested way, as I well knew.

I approached.

“You look as though you could do with some help over the bridge, Ven.”

He looked up, not having heard my approach.

“I do not think so, Ven.”

“Oh, I am sure you do.”

I fell in at his side and walked pace for pace. Ahead of us the bridges grew nearer, and the Vomansoir Cut.

“I am Kutven Ban nal Ogier, and by your clothes you are not a canalman, by Vaosh! I need no help. Or do you wish to drink canalwater?”

A Kutven was a high-ranking man among the Vens. The canalfolk had many degrees, of course, and among them there was the Lord High Kov, and the Lord High Strom, and so on down to the ordinary Kutvens and Vens. I made myself laugh.

“Oh, come now, Kutven Ban! Of course you need help to climb that bridge.” I put a hand on the rope.

I was keenly aware of the ludicrous situation. Here was I ready to brawl with a fellow canalman over rights of way, and yet all my thoughts were centered on the Princess Majestrix of this land. Truly, I relished the irony. “Take your hand off that rope. By Gurush of the Bottomless Marsh! Do you hear me, leepitix?”

“I hear, Ven, and I am not amused. I do not like being called a leepitix.” A leepitix is a twelve-legged reptilian wriggler about a foot long who infests the canals and has a nasty bite. They can be frightened off by splashing. “Clear off!”

He let go the rope with his left hand and struck out. I ducked, tripped him up, yanked the rope in hard. It came with the peculiar soggy resistance and welling movement typical of a boat in narrow waters.

“I’m only trying to help you, Ven!”

He yelled and tried to stand up, whereat I cast a bight of the rope about his ankles and so pitched him over again.

“Look out!” I yelled. I jumped up and down and waved my arms at the boat which now headed majestically into the bank. “Look out, Ven! You’ll have her aground!”

He was shrieking and raving by this time. A head popped up over the hatchway coaming of his boat. Yells floated up. The stem grounded about a yard out, and the stern began to swing. The cut, here, just after the winding-hole farther back, narrowed so as to present the shortest distance for the canal architects to bridge. The boat’s stern drifted across and grounded on the far bank. Now people were yelling and running from all directions, it seemed, and I heard a series of splashes as people dived in to swim to the bank as the quickest way ashore. I yelled at a crone with gray hair who ran shrieking with her frying pan held aloft.