Alan Akers - Swordships of Scorpio

I had to make a stand against casual killing of captives.

“You are throwing money away!” I said to Viridia. I stood with my hands on my hips on the deck of a fine argenter of Walfarg we had just finished sacking. The frightened people left of her huddled by the break of the quarterdeck. I wore a loincloth of that brave scarlet I favor, and a rapier and dagger taken from a prize swung at my sides. Viridia came to the quarterdeck rail and leaned on it and looked down on me.

“Stand aside, Dray Prescot!”

So she knew my name. I thought that odd, among so many new recruits to the render’s trade. A render is a pirate, and yet the name carries overtones associated closely with the swordships. She was looking down on me as I glared up. An odd expression crossed her face. She was a large woman, bulky, with muscles that could swing an ax with the best, and I had always thought of her as coarse, bloated, careless as to her dress and manners, oafish, almost. She looked different, now, as we glared at each other, eye to eye.

“Listen, Viridia. You intend to kill these wretched people and burn the argenter. How foolish!”

A murmur of surprise and shock went up from the gathered pirates. I motioned to them, calculatingly.

“By killing and burning you deprive your fellow renders of their fair share of the prize!”

She roared down, her dark hair flapping about her face, her blue eyes fairly blazing with wrath. “Have a care how you speak, Prescot! I am Viridia!”

“Aye! And you cheat your comrades!”

Viridia put out a hand to stay the automatic charging response of her chief Womox. He was a veritable giant, a good seven feet tall, and a formidable antagonist.

“Explain yourself, rast, before you die.”

“If I am a rast, then what are you, Viridia the Render? Send the ship into port, sell her for good silver dhems, claim a ransom for these people in our power. They are cash and they stand upon cash! Can you not see that, Viridia the Render?”

Some of the men at my back set up a yell supporting me, seeing the cash in their hands already, and chief among them was Valka, my oar comrade from Vallia.

“Silence!” shouted Viridia. Once she had fought her way up to captaincy she had not experienced resistance to her slightest whim or order. The experience came as a novel one to her. She frowned. I could sympathize with her. The problems she had overcome were capable of being overcome, as she, no less than Anne Bonney and Mary Read, had demonstrated. Birth control is well-understood on Kregen where beliefs are taught that teach it is better to have two or three fine healthy children for whom parents can give what of food and clothing and shelter is necessary, than it is to have a whole squalling brood of poor, undernourished, half-naked infants for whom there is not sustenance enough. Ignorant and wrong-headed religious feeling receives short shrift in these matters on Kregen, where what can clearly be seen to be so is taken as a guide. Because there are two suns in the sky images tend toward a dualism. Because unthought-out parenthood, selfish and cruel, can result in a family of misery, compassion and sympathy tend toward families of sizes where the children may receive all that is their due.

Now, no virgin but capable of love, unhampered, totally in command of her swordships, Viridia glared down on me and her knuckles whitened into skulls as she gripped the quarterdeck rail. In a second she could order me to be run through and tossed overboard. I would fight, of course, but there would be little of joy in that fight.

I had the impression that Valka, and one or two others, would fight with me.

“Why do you resist my wishes, Dray Prescot?”

“Because I know I am right and you are wrong.”

Her broad face, tanned and strong, flinched with a muscle tremor beneath those blue eyes. “I do not take kindly to-”

“Do you want the value of this argenter and the ransoms of these prisoners, or do you want a heap of corpses and a pile of ashes, Viridia the Render?”

Valka shouted, “Dray Prescot speaks good sense.”

The tenseness of the moment showed in the ridges muscling on the faces of the men gathered about, the way the Chuliks kept polishing their tusks, the Ochs twined their four upper limbs together, the Fristles kept stroking their fur. Viridia looked down on us and who of us could say how that mercurial brain of hers would decide to go — up or down in the scales of our judgment?

She was, as I have said, a large woman, and yet from the way she was standing and the drape of her gaudy and impossible clothes I caught the impression that she wore armor beneath that show, and the robes and clothes hung loosely outside, as though worn deliberately for effect. She half drew her rapier, and sheathed it — a motion that brought an instant reaction from her four Womoxes, a reaction as instantly stilled — and she put a hand to her mouth, which was large and generous, and pondered on the problems that I had brought into her ordered render life.

“And who would take the prisoners for their ransom? You, Prescot, you would? And would we ever see you again?”

“Aye!” shouted the men, swayed her way.

“Does honor, then, count for nothing, here along the Hoboling islands?”

A growl greeted this, and Viridia flushed darkly; but she knew as well as I that honor among renders was a matter of convenience. I went on, quickly, “Send someone you trust, if you do not trust me.” Then, as though clinching the argument, I spread my arms wide. “I simply want all the cash that is due me and my comrades. That is all.”

The upshot of it was that Viridia did not kill the prisoners but sent them in the argenter to Walfarg for ransom. We hung about off the coast, most uncomfortably, while her lieutenant transacted the business. But when he returned and the canvas bags were opened and rich fat gold coins spilled across the deck

— Lohvian gold! — everyone roared their approval. Even Viridia the Render was pleased. She called me into her ornate and stuffy aft cabin where zhantil pelts covered the settee, arms were stowed everywhere, bits and pieces of clothing lay scattered on the deck, and toiletries cluttered a side table beneath a port. She looked at me with an expression I tried to fathom, and could not. I knew I trod a tightrope.

With her, her lieutenant glared up at me in open distaste.

He was a man called Strom Erclan, rough and yet with a remnant of faded culture and manners. For

“Strom” is the Kregan title, I suppose, most nearly paralleled by “Count.” He liked the men to give him his title when they addressed him. I had considered it a harmless fad; but now, as I looked at the pair of them, I realized that this hankering after a titled man as her second-in-command was all of a piece with Viridia. Powers of life and death she had over the crews of her swordships. She fancied herself as one of those fabled Queens of Pain of ancient Loh. I thought of Queen Lilah of Hiclantung, who had been a Queen of Pain, with no pretense, and I sighed for poor Viridia the Render.

“You’re getting too big for your boots, Prescot,” said Strom Erclan. I glanced down. I was, of course, barefoot. Erclan snarled at me. He managed his snarl as well as a leem. “Insolent cramph!”

I said, “I understood you wished to see me, Viridia. Do you allow a kleesh like this to mock your authority in your own cabin?”

Before Viridia could answer Erclan’s rapier hissed from the scabbard and he was around Viridia’s table at me. I drew, parried, twisted, and halted my blade at his throat. I glared into his eyes. Almost, almost but not quite, I lost control and thrust him through.

“Kleesh, I said, Strom. Do you die now?”

Viridia shouted: “Hold, you fool, Prescot. If you slay him you’ll never leave this cabin alive.”