Alan Akers - Prince of Scorpio

“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.

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.