Transit to Scorpio

Chapter Eleven

How my brothers in obi would have laughed to see me now!

How those fierce fanatical clansmen would have roared their mirth to see their Zorcander, their Vovedeer, dressed like a popinjay!

Three days had passed since my futile attempt at escape. I knew I had been bought from the marble quarries. When the Princess Natema wanted anything men trembled for their lives until that thing was brought her. Now I strode the tiny wooden box in the attic of the opal palace I had been given as my room-strange, I had thought when a gray-clad slave girl had shown me in with a furtive, scared look-and stared at myself in contempt. I had refused to don the garments; but Nijni, the fat, dour, ever-cham-chewing slave-master had whistled up three immense fellows-scarcely human with their bristle bullet-heads, their massively rolling shoulders, their thick dun-colored hides mantled with muscles of near-armor thickness and toughness, their short sinewy legs and slayed feet-two to hold me and the third to strike me painfully across the back and buttocks with a thin cane. This was so remarkably like the rattans carried by our warrant officers of the King’s Ships on which I had served that I received three strokes before I had sense enough to cry out that I would don the garments, for, after all, what did foolish fancy dress signify in so much of squalor and misery?

The man who had struck me, and I must think of him as a man although from what pot of incestuous and savage genes he sprang I do not care to contemplate, leaned close as he went out.

“I am Gloag,” he said. “Do not despair. The day will come.”

He spoke in, a voice throttled in his throat, a whisper from lungs and voice box used to a stentorian bellow as a normal method of conversation.

I gave no sign I had heard.

So now I looked in dissatisfaction at myself. I wore a fancy shirt of emerald and white lozenges, with scarlet embroidery. A silk pair of breeches of yellow and white, with a great embroidered cummerbund of eye-watering colors. On my head perched a great white and golden turban, ablaze with glass stones, and gay feathers, and dangling beads. I felt not only a fool, I felt a nincompoop. If my savage brethren of the plains of Segesthes saw me now what would they not make in jest and ribald comment of their feared and respected Vovedeer?

Nijni came for me with Gloag and his men, and three lithe lissom young slave girls. The girls were clad in strings of pearls and precious little else. Gloag and his men were from Mehzta, one of the nine islands of Kregen. They wore the usual simple gray breechclout of the slave, but they each had an emerald green waistbelt, from which dangled the slim rattan cane. I went with them. In my naivete I had no idea of where I was going, or of why I was dressed as I was, or even why I had been forced, not unpleasantly, to go through the baths of the nine. This was simply a process of proceeding from lukewarm water where the grime washed off me in sooty clouds into the liquid, through nine rooms where the water grew at each step hotter and hotter until the sweat rolled from me, and then colder and colder until I shouted and shivered and bounded as though from ice floes. I did feel invigorated, though.

Nijni paused before an ornate gold and silver door set with emeralds. From a side table he took a box and from the box a paper-wrapped bundle. Carefully he pared back the tissue. Within, virginal, white, gleaming, lay a pair of incredibly thin white silk gloves.

The slave girls with exquisite delicacy helped me don the gloves. Nijni looked at me, chewing endlessly on his wad of cham, his head cocked on one side.

“For every rip or tear in the gloves,” he said, “you will receive three strokes of the rattan. “For every soil mark, one stroke. Do not forget.” Then he threw open the doors.

The room was small, sumptuous, refined past elegance, decadent. It was, I suppose, what one would expect of a princess who had been brought up from birth to have every whim instantly gratified, to have every luxury heaped on her as a right, and who had never felt the restraining touch of an older or wiser hand, or the sound common sense of a person to whom everything is not possible.

She reclined on a chaise longue beneath a golden lamp carved in the semblance of one of the graceful flightless birds of the plains of Segesthes the clansmen love to hunt and catch to give their bright feathers to the girls of the vast chunkrah herds. She wore a short gown of emerald green-that eternal hateful color-relieved by a silken vest of silver tissue. Her arms were bare, round and rosy in the light. Her ankles were neat, her calves fine, but I thought her thighs a fraction heavy, firm and round and delightful; but that infinitesimal fraction too thick for a man of my finicky tastes. Her lush yellow hair was piled atop her head and held in place by pins with emerald gems. The sweetness of her mouth shone red and warm and inviting.

Beyond her, in an alcove, I could see the lower body and feet of a gigantic man clad in mesh steel. His chest and head were hidden from view by two carved ivory swing doors. By his side, its point resting on the floor, he held a long rapier. I did not need to be told that a single command from the Princess Natema would bring him in a single bound into the room, that deadly point at my throat or buried in my heart.

“You may incline,” she said.

I did so. She had not called me a rast. A rast, I knew now, was a disgusting six-legged rodent that infested dunghills. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe, apart from my four limbs and my larger size I, in this palace, was no better than a rast in his dunghill. At least, that was his nature.

“You may crouch.”

I did so.

“Look at me.”

I did so. In all truth, that was not a hard command to obey. Slowly, languorously, she rose from the couch. Her white arms, rounded and rosy in the lamplight, reached up and, artfully, lasciviously, she pulled the emerald pins from her hair so that it fell in a glory around her. She moved about the room, lightly, gracefully, scarcely seeming to touch the scented rugs of far Pandahem with those pink feet with their emerald-lacquered toenails that shone so wantonly. The green gown drooped about her shoulders and I caught my breath as those two firm rounds appeared beneath the silk; lower down her arms dropped the gown, lower, sliding with a kind of breathless hiss, so that at last she stood before me clad only in the white tissue vest that ended in a scalloped edge across her thighs. Silver threads glittered through the tissue. Her form glowed within like some sacred flame within the holy precincts of a temple.

She stared down on me, insolently, taunting me, knowing full well the power and the drug of her body. Her red lips pouted at me, and the lamplight caught on them and shot a dazzling star of lust into my eyes.

“Am I not a woman, Dray Prescot?”

“Aye,” I said. “You are a woman.”

“Am I of all women not the most fair?”

She had not touched me-yet.

I considered.

Her face tightened on me. Her breathing came, sharper, with a gasp. She stood before me, head thrown back, hair a shining curtain about her, her whole body instinct with all the weapons of a woman.

“Dray Prescot! I said-am I of all women not the most fair?”

“You are fair,” I said.

She drew in her breath. Her small white hands clenched. She stared down on me and I became closely aware of that grim mailed swordsman half-hidden in the alcove.

Now her contempt flowed over me like sweetened honey.

“You, perhaps, know one who is fairer than I?”

I stared up at her, levelly, eye to eye. “Aye. I did, once. But she, I think, is dead.”

She laughed, cruelly, mockingly, hatefully. “Of what use a dead woman to a live man, Dray Prescot! I pardon your offense-”

She halted herself, and put one hand to her heart, pressing. “I pardon you,” she said, again, wonderingly. Then: “Of all women living, am I not the most fair?”

I acknowledged that. I saw no reason to get myself killed for the sake of a spoiled brat’s pride. My Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains-I thought of her then and a pang of agony touched me so that I nearly forgot where I was and groaned aloud. Could Delia be dead? Or could she have been taken by the Savanti back to Aphrasoe? There was no way I could find that out except by finding the City of the Savanti-and that seemed impossible even if I were free.

As though suddenly wearying of this petty taunting, although, heaven knew, she was prideful enough of her beauty, she flung herself wantonly on the chaise longue, her head back, her arms flung casually out, her golden hair cascading down to the rugs from far Pandahem. “Bring me wine,” she said, indolently, pointing with her jeweled foot.

Obediently I arose and filled the crystal goblet with a golden, light wine I did not recognize, from the great amber flask. It did not smell particularly good to me. She did not offer me any to drink; I did not care.

“My father,” she said, as though her mind had turned ninety degrees into the wind, “has a mind I should marry the Prince Pracek, of the House of Ponthieu.” I did not answer. “The Houses of Esztercari and of Ponthieu are at the moment aligned and in control of the Great Assembly. I speak of these matters to you, dolt, so that you may realize I am not just a beautiful woman.” Still I did not reply. She went on, dreamily: “Between us we have fifty seats. With the other Houses, both Noble and Lay, who are aligned with us, we form a powerful enough party to control all that matters. I shall be the most powerful woman in all Zenicce.”

If she expected a reply she received none.

“My father,” she said, sitting up and propping her rounded chin on her fist and regarding me with those luminous cornflower blue eyes. “My father, because he holds the power of the alignment, is the city’s Kodifex, its emperor. You should feel extremely fortunate, Dray Prescot, to be slave in the Noble House of Esztercari.”

I lowered my head.

“I think,” she said, in that dreamy voice, “I will have you hung from a beam and whipped. Discipline is a good item in the agenda for you to learn.”

I said: “May I speak, Princess?”

She lifted her breast in a sudden deep intake of breath. Her eyes glowed molten on me. Then: “Speak, slave!”

“I have not been a slave long. I am growing uncomfortable in this ridiculous position. If you do not allow me to stand up I shall probably fall over.”

She flinched back, her brows drawing down, her lips trembling. I am not sure, even now, even after all these long years, if she truly realized she was being made fun of. Such a thing had never happened to her before-so how could she know? But she knew I had not responded as a slave should. In that disastrous moment for her she lost the semblance of a haughty princess beneath whose jeweled feet all men were a rasts. Her silver vest crinkled with the violence of her breathing. Then she snatched up her green gown and swathed it carelessly about her body and struck with her polished fingernails upon a golden gong hung on cords within arm’s reach of the chaise longue.

At once Nijni and the slave girls and Gloag and his men entered.

“Take the slave back to his room.”

Nijni cringed, making the half-incline.

“Is he to be punished, oh Princess?”

I waited.

“No, no-take him back. I will call for him again.”

Gloag, as it seemed to me, very roughly bundled me out. The three slave girls in their scanty strings of pearls were laughing and giggling and looking at me slyly from the corners of their slanting blue eyes. I wondered what the devil they were finding to chatter about; and then bethought me of my ludicrous clothing. I thought what Rov Kovno, or Loku, or Hap Loder, would make of them, on the backs of voves riding into the red sunset of Antares on the great plains of Segesthes.

Gloag clapped me on the back.

“At least, you still live, Dray Prescot.”

We left that scented powdered corridor where Nijni removed the silken gloves from my hands. The wine had stained my right thumb. He looked up, crowing, chewing his cham-cud.

“One stroke of the rattan!” he said, annoyed it was not more. A slave girl in the drab gray breechclout of all slave menials walked around the corner before us carrying a huge earthenware jar of water. A lamp swung from golden chains beyond her head suddenly aureoled her hair and shone into my eyes. I turned my face away, glowering at Nijni.

I heard a desperate gasp. I heard the jar of water smash into a thousand pieces and the water splash and leap in that hidden corridor of a decadent palace. I looked up, moving my eyes away from the light so I could see.

Clad in the gray breechclout, her head high and face frozen, her eyes filled with tears, Delia of the Blue Mountains looked hard and long at me, Dray Prescot, clad in those foolish and betraying clothes.

Then, with a sob of anger and despair, she rushed from my sight.