Part 12

I shrugged my shoulders; the thing was inexplicable to me. “What did I say that demands death?” I demanded.

“That you intend to marry Duare.”

“In my world,” I told him, “men are killed for saying that they do _not_ intend marrying some girl.” I had been sitting at the desk in my cabin at the time that Kamlot had threatened me, and I had not arisen; now I stood up and faced him. “You had better kill me, Kamlot,” I said, “for I spoke the truth.”

He hesitated for a moment, standing there looking at me; then he returned his sword to its scabbard. “I cannot,” he said huskily. “May my ancestors forgive me! I cannot kill my friend.

“Perhaps,” he added, seeking some extenuating circumstance, “you should not be held accountable to customs of which you had no knowledge. I often forget that you are of another world than ours. But tell me, now that I have made myself a party to your crime by excusing it, what leads you to believe that you will marry Duare? I can incriminate myself no more by listening to you further.”

“I intend to marry her, because I know that I love her and believe that she already half loves me.”

At this Kamlot appeared shocked and horrified again. “That is impossible,” he cried. “She never saw you before; she cannot dream what is in your heart or your mad brain.”

“On the contrary, she has seen me before; and she knows quite well what is in my ‘mad brain,’” I assured him. “I told her in Kooaad; I told her again today.”

“And she listened?”

“She was shocked,” I admitted, “but she listened; then she upbraided me and ordered me from her presence.”

Kamlot breathed a sigh of relief. “At least _she_ has not gone mad. I cannot understand on what you base your belief that she may return your love.”

“Her eyes betrayed her; and, what may be more convincing, she did not expose my perfidy and thus send me to my death.”

He pondered that and shook his head. “It is all madness,” he said; “I can make nothing of it. You say that you talked with her in Kooaad, but that would have been impossible. But if you had ever even seen her before, why did you show so little interest in her fate when you knew that she was a prisoner aboard the _Sovong_? Why did you say that you thought that she was my sweetheart?”

“I did not know until a few minutes ago,” I explained, “that the girl I saw and talked with in the garden at Kooaad was Duare, the daughter of the jong.”

A few days later I was again talking with Kamlot in my cabin when we were interrupted by a whistle at the door; and when I bade him do so, one of the Vepajan prisoners that we had rescued from the _Sovong_ entered. He was not from Kooaad but from another city of Vepaja, and therefore none of the other Vepajans aboard knew anything concerning him. His name was Vilor, and he appeared to be a decent sort of fellow, though rather inclined to taciturnity. He had manifested considerable interest in the klangans and was with them often, but had explained this idiosyncrasy on the grounds that he was a scholar and wished to study the birdmen, specimens of which he had never before seen.

“I have come,” he explained in response to my inquiry, “to ask you to appoint me an officer. I should like to join your company and share in the work and responsibilities of the expedition.”

“We are well officered now,” I explained, “and have all the men we need. Furthermore,” I added frankly, “I do not know you well enough to be sure of your qualifications. By the time we reach Vepaja, we shall be better acquainted; and if I need you then, I will tell you.”

“Well, I should like to do something,” he insisted. “May I guard the janjong until we reach Vepaja?”

He referred to Duare, whose title, compounded of the two words daughter and king, is synonymous to princess. I thought that I noticed just a trace of excitement in his voice as he made the request.

“She is well guarded now,” I explained.

“But I should like to do it,” he insisted. “It would be a service of love and loyalty for my jong. I could stand the night guard; no one likes that detail ordinarily.”

“It will not be necessary,” I said shortly; “the guard is already sufficient.”

“She is in the after cabins of the second deck house, is she not?” he asked.

I told him that she was.

“And she has a special guard?”

“A man is always before her door at night,” I assured him.

“Only one?” he demanded, as though he thought the guard insufficient.

“In addition to the regular watch, we consider one man enough; she has no enemies aboard the _Sofal_.” These people were certainly solicitous of the welfare and safety of their royalty, I thought; and, it seemed to me, unnecessarily so. But finally Vilor gave up and departed, after begging me to give his request further thought.

“He seems even more concerned about the welfare of Duare than you,” I remarked to Kamlot after Vilor had gone.

“Yes, I noticed that,” replied my lieutenant thoughtfully.

“There is no one more concerned about her than I,” I said, “but I cannot see that any further precautions are necessary.”

“Nor I,” agreed Kamlot; “she is quite well protected now.”

We had dropped Vilor from our minds and were discussing other matters, when we heard the voice of the lookout in the crow’s nest shouting, “Voo notar!” (“A ship!”) Running to the tower deck, we got the bearings of the stranger as the lookout announced them the second time, and, sure enough, almost directly abeam on the starboard side we discerned the superstructure of a ship on the horizon.

For some reason which I do not clearly understand, the visibility on Venus is usually exceptionally good. Low fogs and haze are rare, notwithstanding the humidity of the atmosphere. This condition may be due to the mysterious radiation from that strange element in the planet’s structure which illuminates her moonless nights; I do not know.

At any rate, we could see a ship, and almost immediately all was excitement aboard the _Sofal_. Here was another prize, and the men were eager to be at her. As we changed our course and headed for our victim, a cheer rose from the men on deck. Weapons were issued, the bow gun and the two tower guns were elevated to firing positions. The _Sofal_ forged ahead at full speed.

As we approached our quarry, we saw that it was a ship of about the same size as the _Sofal_ and bearing the insignia of Thora. Closer inspection revealed it to be an armed merchantman.

I now ordered all but the gunners into the lower deck house, as I planned on boarding this vessel as I had the _Sovong_ and did not wish her to see our deck filled with armed men before we came alongside. As before, explicit orders were issued; every man knew what was expected of him; all were cautioned against needless killing. If I were to be a pirate, I was going to be as humane a pirate as possible. I would not spill blood needlessly.

I had questioned Kiron, Gamfor, and many another Thoran in my company relative to the customs and practices of Thoran ships of war until I felt reasonably familiar with them. I knew for instance that a warship might search a merchantman. It was upon this that I based my hope of getting our grappling hooks over the side of our victim before he could suspect our true design.

When we were within hailing distance of the ship, I directed Kiron to order her to shut down her engines, as we wished to board and search her; and right then we ran into our first obstacle. It came in the form of a pennant suddenly hoisted at the bow of our intended victim. It meant nothing to me, but it did to Kiron and the other Thorans aboard the _Sofal_.

“We’ll not board her so easily after all,” said Kiron. “She has an ongyan on board, and that exempts her from search. It probably also indicates that she carries a larger complement of soldiers than a merchantman ordinarily does.”

“Whose friend?” I asked, “Yours?” for ongyan means great friend, in the sense of eminent or exalted.

Kiron smiled. “It is a title. There are a hundred klongyan in the oligarchy; one of them is aboard that ship. They are great friends unquestionably, great friends of themselves; they rule Thora more tyrannically than any jong and for themselves alone.”

“How will the men feel about attacking a ship bearing so exalted a personage?” I inquired.

“They will fight among themselves to be the first aboard and to run a sword through him.”

“They must not kill him,” I replied. “I have a better plan.”

“They will be hard to control once they are in the thick of a fight,” Kiron assured me; “I have yet to see the officer who can do it. In the old days, in the days of the jongs, there were order and discipline; but not now.”

“There will be aboard the _Sofal_,” I averred. “Come with me; I am going to speak to the men.”

Together we entered the lower deck house where the majority of the ship’s company was massed, waiting for the command to attack. There were nearly a hundred rough and burly fighting men, nearly all of whom were ignorant and brutal. We had been together as commander and crew for too short a time for me to gauge their sentiments toward me; but I realized that there must be no question in any mind as to who was captain of the ship, no matter what they thought of me.

Kiron had called them to attention as we entered, and now every eye was on me as I started to speak. “We are about to take another ship,” I began, “on board which is one whom Kiron tells me you will want to kill. He is an ongyan. I have come here to tell you that he must not be killed.” Growls of disapproval greeted this statement, but, ignoring them, I continued, “I have come here to tell you something else, because I have been informed that no officer can control you after you enter battle. There are reasons why it will be better for us to hold this man prisoner than to kill him, but these have nothing to do with the question; what you must understand is that my orders and the orders of your other officers must be obeyed.

“We are embarked upon an enterprise that can succeed only if discipline be enforced. I expect the enterprise to succeed. I will enforce discipline. Insubordination or disobedience will be punishable by death. That is all.”

As I left the room, I left behind me nearly a hundred silent men. There was nothing to indicate what their reaction had been. Purposely, I took Kiron out with me; I wanted the men to have an opportunity to discuss the matter among themselves without interference by an officer. I knew that I had no real authority over them, and that eventually they must decide for themselves whether they would obey me; the sooner that decision was reached the better for all of us.

Amtorian ships employ only the most primitive means of intercommunication. There is a crude and cumbersome hand signalling system in which flags are employed; then there is a standardized system of trumpet calls which covers a fairly wide range of conventional messages, but the most satisfactory medium and the one most used is the human voice.

Since our quarry had displayed the pennant of the ongyan, we had held a course parallel to hers and a little distance astern. On her main deck a company of armed men was congregated. She mounted four guns, which had been elevated into firing position. She was ready, but I think that as yet she suspected nothing wrong in our intentions.

Now I gave orders that caused the _Sofal_ to close in upon the other ship, and as the distance between them lessened I saw indications of increasing excitement on the decks of our intended victim.

“What are you about?” shouted an officer from her tower deck. “Stand off there! There is an ongyan aboard us.”

As no reply was made him, and as the _Sofal_ continued to draw nearer, his excitement waxed. He gesticulated rapidly as he conversed with a fat man standing at his side; then he screamed, “Stand off! or some one will suffer for this”; but the _Sofal_ only moved steadily closer. “Stand off, or I’ll fire!” shouted the captain.

For answer I caused all our starboard guns to be elevated into firing position. I knew he would not dare fire now, for a single broadside from the _Sofal_ would have sunk him in less than a minute, a contingency which I wished to avoid as much as he.

“What do you want of us?” he demanded.

“We want to board you,” I replied, “without bloodshed if possible.”

“This is revolution! This is treason!” shouted the fat man at the captain’s side. “I order you to stand off and leave us alone. I am the ongyan, Moosko,” and then to the soldiers on the main deck he screamed, “Repel them! Kill any man who sets foot upon that deck!”

XIII CATASTROPHE

At the same moment that the ongyan, Moosko, ordered his soldiers to repel any attempt to board his ship, her captain ordered full speed ahead and threw her helm to starboard. She veered away from us and leaped ahead in an effort to escape. Of course I could have sunk her, but her loot would have been of no value to me at the bottom of the sea; instead I directed the trumpeter at my side to sound full speed ahead to the officer in the tower, and the chase was on.

The _Yan_, whose name was now discernible across her stern, was much faster than Kiron had led me to believe; but the _Sofal_ was exceptionally speedy, and it soon became obvious to all that the other ship could not escape her. Slowly we regained the distance that we had lost in the first, unexpected spurt of the _Yan_; slowly but surely we were closing up on her. Then the captain of the _Yan_ did just what I should have done had I been in his place; he kept the _Sofal_ always directly astern of him and opened fire on us with his after tower gun and with a gun similarly placed in the stern on the lower deck. The maneuver was tactically faultless, since it greatly reduced the number of guns that we could bring into play without changing our course, and was the only one that might offer him any hope of escape.

There was something eery in the sound of that first heavy Amtorian gun that I had heard. I saw nothing, neither smoke nor flame; there was only a loud staccato roar more reminiscent of machine gun fire than of any other sound. At first there was no other effect; then I saw a piece of our starboard rail go and two of my men fall to the deck.

By this time our bow gun was in action. We were in the swell of the _Yan_’s wake, which made accurate firing difficult. The two ships were racing ahead at full speed; the prow of the _Sofal_ was throwing white water and spume far to either side; the sea in the wake of the _Yan_ was boiling, and a heavy swell that we were quartering kept the ships rolling. The thrill of the chase and of battle was in our blood, and above all was the venomous rattle of the big guns.

I ran to the bow to direct the fire of the gun there, and a moment later we had the satisfaction of seeing the crew of one of the _Yan_’s guns crumple to the deck man by man, as our gunner got his sights on them and mowed them down.

The _Sofal_ was gaining rapidly upon the _Yan_, and our guns were concentrating on the tower gun and the tower of the enemy. The ongyan had long since disappeared from the upper deck, having doubtlessly sought safety in a less exposed part of the ship, and in fact there were only two men left alive upon the tower deck where he had stood beside the captain; these were two of the crew of the gun that was giving us most trouble.

I did not understand at the time why the guns of neither ship were more effective. I knew that the T-ray was supposedly highly destructive, and so I could not understand why neither ship had been demolished or sunk; but that was because I had not yet learned that all the vital parts of the ships were protected by a thin armor of the same metal of which the large guns were composed, the only substance at all impervious to the T-ray. Had this not been true, our fire would have long since put the _Yan_ out of commission, as our T-rays, directed upon her after tower gun, would have passed on through the tower, killing the men at the controls and destroying the controls themselves. Eventually this would have happened, but it would have been necessary first to have destroyed the protective armor of the tower.

At last we succeeded in silencing the remaining gun, but if we were to draw up alongside the _Yan_ we must expose ourselves to the fire of other guns located on her main deck and the forward end of the tower. We had already suffered some losses, and I knew that we must certainly expect a great many more if we put ourselves in range of those other guns; but there seemed no other alternative than to abandon the chase entirely, and that I had no mind to do.

Giving orders to draw up along her port side, I directed the fire of the bow gun along her rail where it would rake her port guns one by one as we moved up on her, and gave orders that each of our starboard guns in succession should open fire similarly as they came within range of the _Yan_’s guns. Thus we kept a steady and continuous fire streaming upon the unhappy craft as we drew alongside her and closed up the distance between us.

We had suffered a number of casualties, but our losses were nothing compared to those of the _Yan_, whose decks were now strewn with dead and dying men. Her plight was hopeless, and her commander must at last have realized it, for now he gave the signal of surrender and stopped his engines. A few minutes later we were alongside and our boarding party had clambered over her rail.

As Kamlot and I stood watching these men who were being led by Kiron to take possession of the prize and bring certain prisoners aboard the _Sofal_, I could not but speculate upon what their answer was to be to my challenge for leadership. I knew that their freedom from the constant menace of their tyrannical masters was so new to them that they might well be expected to commit excesses, and I dreaded the result, for I had determined to make an example of any men who disobeyed me, though I fell in the attempt. I saw the majority of them spread over the deck under the command of the great Zog, while Kiron led a smaller detachment to the upper decks in search of the captain and the ongyan.

Fully five minutes must have elapsed before I saw my lieutenant emerge from the tower of the _Yan_ with his two prisoners. He conducted them down the companionway and across the main deck toward the _Sofal_, while a hundred members of my pirate band watched them in silence. Not a hand was raised against them as they passed.

Kamlot breathed a sigh of relief as the two men clambered over the rail of the _Sofal_ and approached us. “I think that our lives hung in the balance then, quite as much as theirs,” he said, and I agreed with him, for if my men had started killing aboard the _Yan_ in defiance of my orders, they would have had to kill me and those loyal to me to protect their own lives.

The ongyan was still blustering when they were halted in front of me, but the captain was awed. There was something about the whole incident that mystified him, and when he got close enough to me to see the color of my hair and eyes, I could see that he was dumfounded.

“This is an outrage,” shouted Moosko, the ongyan. “I will see that every last man of you is destroyed for this.” He was trembling, and purple with rage.

“See that he does not speak again unless he is spoken to,” I instructed Kiron, and then I turned to the captain. “As soon as we have taken what we wish from your ship,” I told him, “you will be free to continue your voyage. I am sorry that you did not see fit to obey me when I ordered you to stop for boarding; it would have saved many lives. The next time you are ordered to lay to by the _Sofal_, do so; and when you return to your country, advise other shipmasters that the _Sofal_ is abroad and that she is to be obeyed.”

“Do you mind telling me,” he asked, “who you are and under what flag you sail?”

“For the moment I am a Vepajan,” I replied, “but we sail under our own flag. No country is responsible for what we do, nor are we responsible to any country.”

Pressing the crew of the _Yan_ into service, Kamlot, Kiron, Gamfor, and Zog had all her weapons, such of her provisions as we wished, and the most valuable and least bulky portion of her cargo transferred to the _Sofal_ before dark. We then threw her guns overboard and let her proceed upon her way.

Moosko I retained as a hostage in the event that we should ever need one; he was being held under guard on the main deck until I could determine just what to do with him.

The Vepajan women captives we had rescued from the _Sovong_, together with our own officers who were also quartered on the second deck, left me no vacant cabin in which to put Moosko, and I did not wish to confine him below deck in the hole reserved for common prisoners.

I chanced to mention the matter to Kamlot in the presence of Vilor, when the latter immediately suggested that he would share his own small cabin with Moosko and be responsible for him. As this seemed an easy solution of the problem, I ordered Moosko turned over to Vilor, who took him at once to his cabin.

The pursuit of the _Yan_ had taken us off our course, and now, as we headed once more toward Vepaja, a dark land mass was dimly visible to starboard. I could not but wonder what mysteries lay beyond that shadowy coast line, what strange beasts and men inhabited that _terra incognita_ that stretched away into Strabol and the unexplored equatorial regions of Venus. To partially satisfy my curiosity, I went to the chart room, and after determining our position as accurately as I could by dead reckoning, I discovered that we were off the shore of Noobol. I remembered having heard Danus mention this country, but I could not recall what he had told me about it.

Lured by imaginings, I went out onto the tower deck and stood alone, looking out across the faintly illuminated nocturnal waters of Amtor toward mysterious Noobol. The wind had risen to almost the proportions of a gale, the first that I had encountered since my coming to the Shepherd’s Star; heavy seas were commencing to run, but I had every confidence in the ship and in the ability of my officers to navigate her under any circumstances; so I was not perturbed by the increasing violence of the storm. It occurred to me though that the women aboard might be frightened, and my thoughts, which were seldom absent from her for long, returned to Duare. Perhaps she was frightened!

Even no excuse is a good excuse to the man who wishes to see the object of his infatuation; but now I prided myself that I had a real reason for seeing her and one that she herself must appreciate, since it was prompted by solicitude for her welfare. And so I went down the companionway to the second deck with the intention of whistling before the door of Duare; but as I had to pass directly by Vilor’s cabin, I thought that I would take the opportunity to look in on my prisoner.

There was a moment’s silence following my signal, and then Vilor bade me enter. As I stepped into the cabin, I was surprised to see an angan sitting there with Moosko and Vilor. Vilor’s embarrassment was obvious; Moosko appeared ill at ease and the birdman frightened. That they were disconcerted did not surprise me, for it is not customary for members of the superior race to fraternize with klangan socially. But if they were embarrassed, I was not. I was more inclined to be angry. The position of the Vepajans aboard the _Sofal_ was a delicate one. We were few in numbers, and our ascendency depended wholly upon the respect we engendered and maintained in the minds of the Thorans, who constituted the majority of our company, and who looked up to the Vepajans as their superiors despite the efforts of their leaders to convince them of the equality of all men.

“Your quarters are forward,” I said to the angan; “you do not belong here.”