Alan Akers - Prince of Scorpio

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.