Alan Akers - Swordships of Scorpio

No chance guided her choice of head thus to parade.

Every oar-slave recognized that hated face.

The uncanny contrast between that lithe slip of a girl, all gleaming beautiful and pink in the streaming moonlight, and that hideous severed head, dropping its blood as she walked so gracefully along, with a swing of her hips, laughing, affected every single one of us profoundly. Not a man so much as moved. No one spoke. Every eye fixed on her and her burden, glaring like the jungle denizens stare upon their prey.

Drop by drop the blood fell upon the planks of the gangway.

Every oar-slave recognized that hated face. In a deep and scarcely comprehending silence we watched the girl carry the head along, laughing, swinging her hideous burden. We knew that dead face.

It was the face of the chief whip-deldar.

We were given the usual alternatives.

Given them, I do not believe a single oar-slave took the choice that would see his carcass hurled over the side and feathered with arrows in sport.

What others considered as an omen I took, also, I confess, as some kind of pointer to the future, for all the seven moons of Kregen floated in the night sky above as Viridia spoke to us.

“Never disdain the power of women,” said Viridia. “For my fighting-girls have laid the whole crew of this King’s Swordship low, and have taken her, and now she is ours.”

I could not see Viridia very clearly, for the stump end of a varter interposed its ratchets and its winding windlasses and loosing mechanism between, so that I caught only fragmentary glimpses of her as she moved about, gesticulating. Seeing her like that, however, meant that I immediately recognized that gaudy, pendulous, barbaric figure as the one I had seen strutting the quarterdeck of the swordship when Dram Constant had been destroyed, and when I had indulged in that pleasurable contest with the blue-feathering bowman of Erthyrdrin.

Her girls had successfully seduced the swordship’s crew, poured them drugged wine, and seen them off to the Ice Floes of Sicce. To me, the masterstroke of psychology had been to parade the severed head of the man whom we slaves would recognize immediately as the instrument of our daily torture. Now we were members of the pirate band of Viridia. I hesitate, even now, and remembering her as I do, to call her a lady pirate. Viridia was no lady. She was a woman, wild, free, gross, sudden, a woman who always — or, nearly always, as you will hear — kept herself in complete control. She knew what she wanted, she knew how to go about getting it, and she did what was necessary; and if the blood reeked along the blades of her people, both women and men, halflings and beast-men, then that was the price she was prepared to have them pay.

Her control was normally such that when she indulged in her killing frenzies and heads rolled one who knew her could almost judge to the mur when she would snap out of it. The pirates who infested these islands where through the geography of the region there would of necessity be heavy maritime traffic did not employ slaves to tug their oars. Through this area passed the commercial traffic from Pandahem and Loh, north and south, east and west. Many armadas tried to avoid the area as the admiral of the armada in which Captain Alkers’ Dram Constant had sailed had attempted, and many ships simply avoided the islands altogether, as Tandy, the Hoboling, had so bitterly informed us; but, despite all that, the needs and demands of cities and peoples meant that ships must sail these seas. Viridia was only one of a great host of pirate chiefs. And, she was not the only woman pirate chief.

Everyone has heard of the famous women pirates of our own Earth. Lady Killigrew, Anne Bonney, and Mary Read all made the headlines of their day. Anne Bonney, who deserted her husband for John Rackam, the notorious pirate Calico Jack, was powerful enough as a lady pirate to make Calico Jack take second place in the fighting and boarding and arguments that are inseparable from a pirate’s life. Mary Read, already a girl who had led an adventurous life in that she had fought as a soldier in Flanders by the side of her husband, was captured by Calico Jack. The joke was — at least by Kregen standards

— that when the pirates were taken they were all drunk with the exception of the two women, who alone attempted to fight off the British warship. A ray of light does exist to alleviate the story in that both women, although sentenced to death, were not hanged and did escape Execution Dock.

“We carry no passengers,” Viridia informed us. At her back stood four immense fellows, all rolling muscle and corded thews, bull-necked, their heads jutting forward so that the two stumpy but formidable horns they carried on their foreheads could jab in with ferocious power at an opponent’s eyes. They had two arms and legs, massive and bulky, it is true, and their bodies were recognizable human torsos and stomachs, plated with muscle. They wore the gaudy clothes of the pirate trade. They also carried short swords of a heavier pattern than the merely cut-down rapiers often found among the pirates. Rapiers and daggers also swung from their belts.

These were Womoxes. As I have mentioned previously, there are many and various peoples inhabiting Kregen beneath Antares, and I give some idea of any individual people, either halfling or human, when they come onto the stage of my narrative. By this time in my sojourn on Kregen I had seen many strange and marvelous peoples of whom I have given no idea here simply because I did not personally come into contact with a representative of them. When I did — then I describe them, as I believe to the benefit of your understanding. I had not previously encountered the Womoxes. They came from one of the islands off the coast of Vallia. They are a people at once fierce, independent, not overly original — their native art is markedly copyist of another people on an adjoining island — and much given among the males to head-butting contests to decide who shall do what or who shall mate with which maidens. In all this they never, at least to me, suggested very much of the bovine.

Perhaps I could mention here that I believe that the many differing races and peoples of Kregen are not distributed over that marvelous globe by any laws of nature that are easily discernible as they are on our own Earth. I believe, further, that the races of Kregen have been arbitrarily placed in the locations of their origin. If this be the work of the Star Lords, as I have more than half a mind it is, then more remains to be learned of their dark and secret purposes than I, even now, fully comprehend. I do not think the Savanti had a hand in the locations of the populations of Kregen; but their task, as I know, is the amelioration of the lot of all peoples.

There have been many ups and downs in my life and in this present situation, because for the moment there was nothing else to do, I flung myself into the business of being a pirate aboard a swordship plundering along the Hoboling islands. We took Pandahem ships and ships of Loh. Sorry as I was for the people who suffered, I had worked out a theory that of the Pandahemic nations none could be construed as friendly to me except Tomboram, and of that country only, really, could I look for real friendship from Pando and Bormark. I was worried over that imp’s handling of his people. I hoped Tilda and Inch would be able to hold in check his very natural desires to go for a fight and cut a fine figure and make a name for himself. War, as I have learned, is not a game.

The nations of Pandahem, always at loggerheads, were driven in part by economic rivalries, partly by the ambitions of their kings to become emperors of all Pandahem. They had the bitter example of Vallia to spur them on. Vallia might make a treaty of friendship with one nation of Pandahem, and another would ignore that and raid Vallian shipping, with the consequence that Vallia quickly lost patience with all Pandahem.