Prince of Scorpio

CHAPTER EIGHT

On my back I floated with the mild drift of the current, for here near the inflow of river water, controlled and sluiced, the canal waters possessed a definite movement of their own. The sky above me towered enormously high, palely blue, with the intolerable glare of Antares blinding down and streaming variegated highlights from the tiny waves I made as I floated. I knew what I was doing there. I had been stupid, as usual, and slow, which for a man in my trade is unforgivable. I knew, however, why I had been slow. My aims had been confused; a desire to do what naturally occurred to me to do and my so-clever newfound rationality had played me false. I would far better have simply rushed in swinging as in the old days. Then, instead of me floating in the canal with a muzzy head there would be six bully-boy guards floating there, and with rapier-thrusts through their bellies, like as not.

In the future I wouldn’t be slow, and I’d hit first — as I usually did. Worry over Delia had fogged my mind. Here I was, actually on the same landmass as her, breathing air that might waft down for her to breathe and so waft back to me. An idiotic notion, but one that suited my idiotic mood.

Through the water toward me the smooth stem of a narrow boat bore on. I saw the gaily painted strakes and the fanciful representations of monsters and flowers, musical instruments, and spreading proudly to either side of the stem, the lavishly decorated picture of a Talu, one of those eight-armed mythical — as I still thought — dancers of the sloe eyes and the cupid’s-bow mouths. I had seen such a Talu carved from the mastodon tusk in that perfumed corridor of a decadent palace, when a slave girl in the gray slave breechclout had dropped and smashed a jar of water. I had cannoned into the statue and toppled with it in my arms, the eight arms a wagonwheel of wanton display about me, the fingertips touching. I confess I was still thinking about that mastodon-tusk carving as the rope hissed into the water and I was hauled aboard.

The majority of Vallians have been blessed with the kind of strong beaked nose I have myself, and the man who stared down on me now wiped a hand across his powerful nose, and grunted:

“Welcome aboard-”

He did not add the customary Koter, or even dom, or, given the circumstances, Ven. I saw the expression on his face and knew precisely what he was thinking. If you’re not a canalman, he was saying, without speaking, then you’re a dead man.

“Thank you for pulling me out. It’s all right. The water won’t harm me.”

He perked up at that, and smiled.

“You’d best come below. Dry you off.” As I nodded to thank him and bent to descend the short companionway ladder, he whistled. I had lost my hat.

“That’s a crack you’ve had on the back of your head, Ven. Like to have killed a man.”

“I’ve a tolerably thick skull. Too thick for some folk.”

Someone yelled from up forward and my host halted to yell back. “He’s of the canalfolk. He’s had a knock, but he’ll live.”

In the small but beautifully appointed cabin with everything in its place I sat at the table and drank strong Kregan tea. Made with the canalwater, it tasted somehow as good as any tea I have ever had. “I am Yelker, skipper of the old Dancing Talu.” I knew, from my talk with Borg, that he would be Ven Yelker nal Vomansoir, for this was the Vomansoir Cut.

Thinking of Ven Borg made me remember my resolve.

“I am Drak ti Valkanium,” I said. This was true.

“We’re headed south so I can’t offer to take you back to Therminsax. It is a pleasant town, and we always enjoy our stopovers there. But we are for Vomansoir.”

My clothes were drying, so I sat there with a blanket about me as a girl bustled in, tut-tutted at the way my tunic had been clumsily hung up by Yelker, glanced a quick and intense look in my direction, gathered up my gear, and started up the ladder again. She paused and tossed her heavy brown hair back and stared over her shoulder. She wore an off-the-shoulder white blouse, attractively tailored beneath her bodice, and the movement emphasized her beauty, as she well knew it would. I could guess all too easily why she did not wear one of the tunics or jerkins common to the canalfolk.

“You men can’t look after a thing. I’ll hang these on the line.”

When she had gone with a flash of long bronzed legs, Yelker sighed. “That’s Zyna, my daughter. Her mother didn’t spank her enough when she was young enough for it to be effective.” Then he roared into the speaking tube that led forward, the brass mouthpiece dazzling. “Mother! That girl of yours is showing off again.”

A muffled series of shrieks and squawks spattered from the brass mouthpiece. Yelker shoved the whistle back and sighed.

“I don’t know what good canalfolk are coming to these days.”

“Ven Yelker. Will you take me south with you?” I reached for the lesten-hide bag of money I had taken from the dead men, and realized it was in the pocket of my tunic. “I will be happy to pay you-”

He held up a hand. “Not so, Ven Drak. You are a canalman, and I am a canalman. If one cannot do the other a goodness without seeking reward, then the spirit of the canals is dead.”

“Did you see how I came to be in the canal?”

“I did not. I would not ask, but I own I am curious.”

I told him of the incident. He frowned and bashed a fist down onto the table.

“Pardon me for saying it, Ven Drak. But you are a fool!”

I sat.

“Don’t you have Emperor’s barges on Valka?”

“I have not seen one. We pull our own boats, there.” I had expressed my astonishment to Borg over the non-use of draft animals, and he had simply scratched his head and said that men and women always pulled the boats. How otherwise would they get exercise and build their muscles? Animals, to haul narrow boats! He thought the conceit highly amusing.

“Well, you surprise me. We hate them. They are unfair competition. And the poor devils who are sent to the Emperor’s canal barges — well, just steer clear of them, that’s all. They have absolute priority and right of way on any cut. They force us out into the center and make us drop our tow as they pass. Oh, and they do pass!”

I had seen what I had seen. I could imagine the horror of the haulers, racing to drag their unwieldy barges past the elegant narrow boats of the canalfolk, driven on by the whip and the knout.

“I do not like it, Ven Yelker.”

“Neither do I, Ven Drak. But neither you nor I can do ought about it. And here comes Mother.” I stood up, clutching my blanket, as Sosie descended into the cabin, a plump, smiling, brown-eyed dynamo of a woman. I saw that she kept Yelker in order. I wondered where he hid his booze.

“You’ll need feeding up, young man,” she said, and the sharpness of her tones made me smile — me, Dray Prescot, made me smile — for I detected the warmth and humanity aboard this narrow boat Dancing Talu. Other members of the family were introduced. There were ten of them, not all blood relations but crew members indentured from other families and other boats. More often than not two or three families crewed a boat. The big thing was to keep moving. Once the initial inertia of the boat had been overcome and she was gliding with that stately smooth passage of a craft on inland waters, the whole gang could cease hauling and leave two or three to keep her moving. Naturally, I took my turns at hauling. We were all busy at locks. Then we would sweat and haul until our muscles cracked and Dancing Talu was under way once more. Then young Wil would go haring off to close the paddles down and shut the lock gates, and then come racing back along the towpath to take a wild flying leap onto the deck. If young Wil with his wild mop of hair and his agility had been unable to drink the canalwater he’d have been a dead rascal inside a day.

We were going south!

We were riding the Vomansoir Cut and going south toward Vondium. I knew a man, a Chuktar, the Lord Farris, who came from Vomansoir. I had met him once, briefly, aboard the Vallian Air Service airboat Lorenztone. I did not think I would make inquiries and look him up. He knew me as Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombor, and the man who aspired to the hand of the Princess Majestrix. I needed to be a lot closer to Delia than Vomansoir when I revealed my identity. Vallia is riddled with canals. Traffic flow remained dense and constant. The local authorities of towns maintained the cuts, under the Emperor’s personal fiat, and they had put into operation a system of traffic control at intersections. Every lock worked and was efficient, and did not lose too much water. The suns shone, the sky remained clear, I hauled at the tow ropes, operated the locks, fetched and carried, and all the time we rode on southward and I was drawing nearer and nearer to my Delia. I think I achieved a kind of tranquility. I had always underestimated canals, I now realized. Also, I observed the strong fellow-feeling of the canalfolk, and as I absorbed their language and its peculiarities, a task made easy by the potency of the genetically-coded language pill given me in Aphrasoe by Maspero, I reached the understanding that they considered themselves not only a people apart from ordinary Vallians, but a cut above the rest. I was not going to give them an argument on that.

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.