by Jeffrey Lord
A man just behind Blade died with a high scream. Blade turned to see Pelops withdrawing a bloody sword from a chest. The little man stared at Blade as though he did not know him, his teeth showing in a feral rictus. He slashed again and again at the dying man.
“Save it for the live ones,” Blade grunted, and plunged forward.
The slaves aboard the flagship now began to throw down their weapons and beg for mercy. To all slaves it was granted. Officers and freemen who cried for quarter were butchered. Blade dispatched a last man and stood on the battle deck just below the poop. From the top of the ladder Equebus stared down with an enigmatic smile.
It was over. Nearly over. Blade gave a few brisk orders - he did not want the catapult officer slain yet - and his officers set about bringing some order out of the bloody charnel house that was now the flagship. The fires, though somewhat under control, still blazed and Blade did not want them spreading to Pphira. He gave orders to get the dead overboard, all the while keeping an eye on the shore. There came a great tumult and outcry from that direction, and some rioting was evident, but Otto the Black and the Queen were still on their thrones.
There was no present danger. The Queen had no ship left for Otto to commandeer and his own fleet, save for the small escort that had brought him to Sarma, was far out on the Purple Sea. Such had been his contempt for Sarma.
A quiet fell over the ship now. They were all waiting. All watching Blade and the Captain Equebus. Equebus who stood on his command deck and had not even drawn his sword.
Blade plunged his stained sword into the deck planking. It quivered and stood upright. Arms akimbo, he stared up at Equebus. The Captain stared back, a leer of contempt on his bearded lips.
“Well,” said Blade, “do you come down to fight, or must I come up?”
He was prepared for anything but what came.
Equebus smiled. “I will not fight you, Blade. I am not a fool. I surrender and demand that you seek ransom for me - if you are fool enough.”
Taken aback, Blade still did not believe it. He was genuinely puzzled.
“I know you are called the Cruel,” he said at last. “I know also you have earned that name. But I had not thought you worthy of still another name - Equebus the Coward!”
Outcry began to burgeon in the packed ranks about Blade. Pelops, that now fierce warrior, spoke for all when he said: “Give him to me, Captain Blade. We will make him fight - or wish he had.”
A shout went up. Blade stilled it with an upraised hand and grinned at Pelops. “You have grown very bloodthirsty, little man. But I command here and I decide what is done with Equebus. Anyone who doubts that had better speak up now.”
There was only a little muttering.
Blade turned back to the Captain, still strutting and preening on his deck as though he had not lost a battle. Yet now Blade thought he saw terror in the man. Terror well masked, but terror just the same. If so, Blade was the only man who saw it.
Blade asked once again, “Will you fight?”
Equebus smiled his smile and flung down his sword. It clattered at Blade’s feet. Along with the smile of contempt there was honest puzzlement in the Captain’s eyes.
“You will not kill me, Blade. What could it gain you? You are already, my strange friend, in a great deal of trouble. You have spoiled the games and slain a great many of the Queen’s officers and freemen. You missed the point, Blade. You were to lose and so be spared your own life, for I know how the Queen feels about you. Or did feel about you. Now I am not so sure. Are you mad, Blade? Really mad?”
Equebus shot a glance at the pier, where Otto and Queen Pphira still watched from their thrones. He frowned.
“You are mad. Or it was a plot - you and Pphira! But would she dare so much against Otto?”
“You should know of plots,” said Blade. “You were deep enough in one against your own Queen.”
Blade saw a flicker of movement in the cabin beneath the poop deck. He gave an order. “In there and fetch me that priest. It is Kreed, I think, hoping to be overlooked.”
The young officer, a slave promoted by Blade only the day before on the word of Pelops, hesitated. Blade’s smile was grim.
“Make up your mind, young man. Who do you fear more - Bek-Tor and his priests, or me?”
The officer led five men into the cabin and came out a moment later dragging Kreed, the High Priest, cringing and sniveling and begging for his life.
Blade gave the slaves time enough to take in the sight. “There is your Bek-Tor,” he said. “A false God and falser priests. As much a coward as the Captain there.”
A slave muttered, “Too bad we are not on the plain - Kreed would burn well in the maw of his God.”
Kreed fell to his knees and began to gibber. . “No fire for him,” said Blade. “Water.”
He picked Kreed up by the scruff of the neck and carried him to the side and dropped him overboard. The ship roared with laughter.
Blade made a signal by prearrangement. A black flag was run to the masthead. He hoped the Queen would see it and understand.
The catapult officer who had been spared was taken to his huge sling and given instructions. A rock half as large as Blade himself was selected and placed in the basket.
Blade touched his sword. It quivered in the decking. “For the last time, Equebus, will you have an honorable death? I will not ask again.”
The Captain was on the verge of breaking. He glanced at the chain across the harbor mouth, then back at Blade, and his mouth worked under the beard. His eyes were haunted. Yet he tried.
“I do not understand, Blade. You cannot escape. The chain bars that. In time you and all these slaves will be hunted down and slain. The quicker if you harm me. Why not take your victory, try to survive it if you can, and put your trust in Pphira? I doubt she can save you now, but she might try. Or if you let Otto have his way with you - ” And Equebus grinned lewdly through his terror.
Disgust filled Blade. Get it over with. He made a great lap up the ladder and seized Equebus and flung him down. The Captain did not so much as struggle. He was dazed, still not quite believing that Blade would dare what he feared Blade would dare.
Blade made a sign. A screen was raised before the catapult and Equebus hustled behind it. Blade looked shoreward. Queen Pphira had read the black flag and was not in view. She had made some excuse and left. Otto the Black, enormous blob of fat on his throne, was peering out at the harbor and fuming. A small boat was already halfway to the two locked ships. Otto’s couriers coming to find out the truth of matters.
Equebus, gagged now, watched in growing fear and disbelieving wonder as he was bound to the great rock. His eyes widened and he made pitiful sounds behind the gag. He and the rock were readied for flight.
Blade put his sword to the throat of the catapult officer and explained: “I have seen the accuracy of these weapons. I want it now. You will adjust and lever it so that the rock, and Equebus, falls directly on Otto the Black. Fail and you die. It is as simple as that.”
The officer blanched. His knees were knocking together. “But I - that is, sire, one cannot always hit a target. Sometimes there is bad luck and the wind, er, yes, the wind. That is very chancy. The wind is - “
The wind was indeed rising, just as Ixion had promised. It was setting steadily from the land. Blade probed the man’s throat with his sword point. “Adjust for the wind. You are a expert - now save your own life. Get ready.”
He had no intention of killing the man. He knew how chancy the catapults could be at times, though they were marvelously accurate. Yet he wanted the officer’s best efforts and fear would ensure that.
The long springy arm was twisted back, this being masked by the screen of matting. The levers were all in place and the trigger only awaited a slight tug of the cord. Equebus, staring over his gag in horror and supplication, trussed to his rock like any fowl, kept shaking his head and drooling horrible sounds.
“A low trajectory,” Blade ordered. “I do n
ot want his Fatness warned in time to run away - if he can run.” Slaves tittered.
Blade raised his arm. Equebus moaned behind his gag. The screen fell away. Blade dropped his arm.
PTHWANGGGGG.
The arc was low. Blade saw the crowd around Otto begin to scatter, tardily, as they realized what was happening. The huge boulder with its human cargo hissed through the air.
Blade, who had not really expected too much - the gesture would have satisfied him - watched with gleeful amazement as the great stone zoomed at its target. It was zeroing in like a guided missile back in Home Dimension.
Otto the Black, who had never known a threat to his person in all his royal life, was equally astounded. When at last he screamed there was no one to help him. They were all running away.
Otto could not stand easily without assistance. He was too fat. Now he tried and fell to his knees. He rolled. He scrabbled. At the very last he cowered and screamed a command at the descending rock. In his very last moment of life Otto saw, or thought he saw, a very strange thing. Something, a man, was bound to the boulder that was about to crush Otto. No! Such things could not be. But this could not be, either. Not to Otto the Black. Death.
The boulder made a squishy sullen thud on impact. Blade was happy that he did not have to see the result. He leaped to the poop and raised his sword and barked out a string of orders. There was much to be done, to be done quickly, before the Queen could come out of shock and realize that Blade did not intend to return to her. And he had killed her only son.
An hour later, during which there was no interference - three small boats sent out to investigate were turned back by the catapults - Blade had the trireme, the Pphira, under way again. The flagship was burning and slowly sinking. Blade had lost all his galleys, though saving some of the men, and only one of Otto’s ships, a bireme, remained afloat. It fled to an inlet and refused to fight.
The wind was strengthening all the while. Blade, with a new helmsman, put the Pphira straight at the massive chain. Pelops, who had not wiped the blood from his sword, stood beside him on the deck.
“What of Ixion?” Blade asked.
“He lives, sire. The arrow missed a vital point, though he bled a great deal. I cut oft the arrowhead and withdrew the shaft very skillfully. I am somewhat skilled in medicine, you know, and thought to be the ship’s doctor. But now that I am a warrior - “
Blade patted his shoulder. “Now that you are a warrior you had better pray a little. The chain is coming up. If we cannot break it all our trouble has been for nothing. If we cannot make the open sea we are all as good as dead.”
He turned to the man at the tiller. “Bear steady. I want the full weight of the wind. Pelops, tell them to step up the oar beat by thirty. We must snap the chain at our first try - if not I doubt that we can do it at all.”
Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum—
They rowed for their lives. The big square sail bellied out, full of a following wind. The oars Hashed down and in and up and down again.
Blade took the tiller, Pelops hovering beside him. “We must hit it dead center,” Blade muttered. “We must strike the weakened link. Otherwise we are as much prisoners as before.”
“I wish now,” said Pelops, “that I had believed in Bek-Tor. At least He-She might answer my prayers.”
The Pphira struck the chain at full speed. There was a grinding sound, a crunching, as the boat ran up a bit on the chain. The big vessel shuddered and lost way abruptly. The chain held.
Blade cupped his hands and bellowed. “Row, damn you, row! Row for your lives!”
Long oars threshed water into creamy frenzy. A moaning song came up from the rowing benches.
“Row!”
The chain parted. The big trireme was free.
Chapter Sixteen
From the writings of Aknir, Palace Philosopher of Greater Sarma, in the year 10536 AB - After Blade - concerning the Secret of the Oxem:
(Oxem is an old Sarmaian word for leather, now generally considered archaic and in some disrepute.) The reference is to a leathern bottle, made water tight with gum, in which the strange writings of Captain Richard Blade were reputed to have been found, washed up by the Purple Sea, after many years, near a small fishing village in what was formerly called Tyranna but has long since been annexed by Sarma. IE - War of Liberation, circa 10344-10350. That Blade ever existed is doubtful, yet the myth persists to this day, and in some parts of Greater Sarma he is regarded as a quasi-deity nearly on a par with Bek-Tor. In writing so long after the events a scholar must go with care, weighing fact against fiction and myth, and I hope I have been sufficiently circumspect in this regard. I myself am disinclined to believe that a Blade ever existed, so the writing in the leather bottle must have been some kind of a hoax. Why? By whom? I cannot answer. There is no question that the myth persists strongly - do we not now date our moon sequences thus, After Blade? The sad truth is that we can never really know for sure. And it is sad because I, Aknir the Philosopher, commissioned by Her Majesty Queen Fertti, Ruler of Greater Sarma, would like to believe in Richard Blade. On the evidence available, as a man of reason, I cannot. I can only present the writings, purported to be written by Blade in the ancient Sarmaian script and translated by me.
A final word about the translation. There were great, almost insurmountable difficulties. If Blade did exist he was certainly no Sarmaian. His grammar is execrable, his choice of words poor, his style - if one may presume to call it by that name - barely on a level with the barest beginner today. Whoever the writer he seems to have had the barest smattering of Old Sarmaian. Many times he uses words that, if not made indecipherable by time and the sea, were surely never spoken by a Sarmaian tongue. This translation had been a labor of love and, in many times, very nearly a labor of hate. My personal physician, Cyclo, will testify how many times I have come to him pleading hysteria as a result of working on this manuscript.
So I can only offer this with the comment that I have don'a9 the best I can. Whether or not Richard Blade ever lived in Sarma, the old Sarma, each reader will have to decide for himself. One thing is sure - there is a vitality, a crispness of spirit, a motivation of freedom and determination, about the tale that strikes the heart even over rational disbelief. This is, to my belief, the first transliteration of the Log, or the Secret of the Oxem, into Modern Sarmaian. I think it will take a firm place in our literature.
LOG OF THE TRIREME PPHIRA.
I must cast back a bit to bring this log up to date. Probably a lot of damned foolishness anyway, keeping a log, but Pelops found writing materials in the same village where we took on food and water, and it helps to kill the time. Odd, that, because I may not have as much time as I reckoned on. Yesterday I had a pain in my head, frontal lobes, and though it might have been only a headache it might also be Lord L probing for me with the computer. I hope not. I am, at the moment, a hell of a long way from finding my doppelganger.
(Despairing note of translator - I have consulted planet wide authorities and can find no meaning for doppelganger.) The Pphira is well found and clean bottomed. There is enough of sail cloth and cordage, spare oars, and all nautical supplies. This I can only suppose to be another oversight by the officers of the late Otto, when they were selecting the ships for the sea games. Pelops says they were all drunk on kippe at the time.
Speaking of kippe, I found several casks, aboard and had them moved to my cabin. The stuff is a little like rum,
though with less body, and Pelops tells me it is brewed from berries found only in the swamps of Sarma. I think I will keep it away from the men, though I had thought of emulating the British Navy and doling out a pint a day, or so, but decided to hell with that. This is not the British Navy!
I have been following the Sarmaian coast south and sending occasional parties ashore for information. The Word I get is that all Sarma is in revolt against Tyranna now that Otto is dead - what a mess that must have been - and that Queen Pphira is organizing an expeditionary force to invade
Tyranna before Otto’s son - what in hell was his name? - can invade her. I hope she gets away with it.
I have wasted the better part of a week in getting the ship organized and in working out a few problems. One of the problems is that I just have too damned many men! Pphira is over-crewed with 200 and I have 400. All former slaves. My only solution is to find another ship. Have called Ixion - who is recovering well - and Pelops into conference and explained the situation to them. Ixion just grinned and said no problem - capture another ship and put half my crew aboard her. I think he is right. Pelops, who is getting to be something of a problem himself, went into a long lecture about how that would make us pirates. I asked him what matter, so long as we did not kill when it was not necessary, and told him to shut up. Pelops took it badly. He actually put his hand on his sword and glared at me. I had a hard time not laughing, for I do not want to hurt his feelings. The little man has found his manhood now and I like that, but I wish he was not such a little bastard about it. He shines his armor all the time and neglects his work, and struts around like he owned the ship. Hate to do it, but sooner or later will have to take him down a peg.
No more head pains. Maybe it was only a headache after all.
The goddamnedest thing happened today - I wonder how stupid a man like me can really be! It has been right under my nose all the time and I didn’t see it. Uranium. Mountains of uranium. Now, if I make it back to Home Dimension alive, all Lord L has to do is invent teleportation and England will be a great power again. The stuff will be so cheap that we will be making atom bombs for a shilling each. That is good?
To hell with it. I am an agent, not a do-gooder nor yet a bleeding heart or philosopher. Uranium is a fact of life. And His Lordship hasn’t invented teleportation yet, though I wouldn’t bet against it. But to get to the facts, m’am, as they used to say in that Yank TV show - Christ, I hope nobody ever reads this log! I really let my hair down in it. Sometimes I feel like a girl with a diary. But it does fill the time and I sort of enjoy it. I am no writer and don’t have to be, and anyway Pelops says that nobody, but absolutely nobody, will ever be able to read my Sarmaian. He tried to read one page and got to laughing so hard that I finally had to kick him out of the cabin.