Warrior of Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers

with a sharpness to his voice, “You are not a Vallian?”
    Vallians, I knew from the example of the glorious hair of my Delia, were often brown-haired, as I am. I had successfully passed as Kov Drak in Magdag, acting the part of a Vallian duke. But I did not wish to lie unnecessarily to Seg Segutorio.
    “I am Dray Prescot of Strombor,” I said.
    “So you have told me. But — Strombor. Where might that be?”
    Of course — what was now the enclave of Strombor would have been Esztercari for all Seg’s life. A fierce joy welled up in me as I thought of my Clansmen riding across the Great Plains of Segesthes, of the way with good friends’ help we had taken what was to become my enclave fortress of Strombor within the city of Zenicce.
    “Strombor, Seg, is in Zenicce—”
    “Ah! A Segesthan — well, even that I wonder about, for I call you a stranger of strangers, and I know what I know.”
    “What do you know, Seg?”
    But he would not answer. That fey quality associated with mountain folk must have alerted his senses; but I was doubtful that he could guess I came from a planet distant from Kregen by four hundred light-years.
    He swung away from that as the muldavy creamed through the night sea and the stars once more reappeared above. The twin second moons of Kregen, the two that revolve one about the other as they orbit the planet, sailed above the horizon and in their wash of pinkish light, strengthened by the presence of two more of Kregen’s seven moons, I saw Seg watching me with an enclosed and contained look on his lean face. He brushed a hand through his black hair.
    “Very well, Dray Prescot, of Strombor, I will go with you to Pattelonia.” He chuckled. “For all that the army in which I served lost the fight, the Proconians still owe me my fair hire, and they shall pay me.”
    “Good, Seg,” was all I considered necessary to say.
    “And I refuse by all the shattered targes in Mount Hlabro to return to slavery.”
    We slept on and off during the night and when the twin suns rose to burn away a few patches of mist, there, broad on our larboard beam, lay one of the many islands that dot the inner sea. I steered to pass it with plenty of sea room, for islands are notorious as the lair of pirates and corsairs — I had used them enough times myself — when Seg noticed what I had seen and mentally filed as part of the habitual stock-taking of a sea officer the moment he reaches the deck.
    He pointed aft where a low black and purple cloud like a massive bruise against the gleaming sky whirled onward.
    “A rashoon!”
    At the moment I was more concerned with the identity of the swifter shooting out from the lee of the island. She was large, that I could tell — and then as flags broke from her mast and flagpoles I saw their color. My lips compressed.
    Every flag was green!
    “A Magdag swifter,” I said to Seg. “Hold on — we are going into some fancy evolutions now—”
    And then the rashoon enveloped us and we fought the lug down until I could control the muldavy in the screeching wind. The seas piled and knotted about us. We went sweeping on, and the swifter was left floundering. Even then I noted the seamanlike way in which her skipper brought her around and scuttled back with all his double-banks of oars stamping the sea in neat parallel lines, back into the shelter of the island. We were sent weltering past and out to sea. When the rashoon had blown itself out and we could get back to an even keel and rehoist the lugsail and take stock, I found Seg with an expression on his face which, allied to the green tinge around his jaws, gave me an odd feeling of compassion and unholy glee.
    I offered him a thick juicy slice from the vosk thigh.
    He refused.
    It pains me now, in recollection, to think how badly I treated Seg Segutorio then as we hauled up for Pattelonia across the Eye of the World.
    We called in at various islands on the way to water and to acquire fresh provisions, mostly fruit and