Krozair of Kregen by Alan Burt Akers Page B

frighteningly vulnerable with his flushed face and scowling lips. He whipped out his longsword. “I fight with the prijikers today and show the world I am not as my father!”
    “No!”
The word was shocked from me. I could not stop it.
    He glowered at me, half turned, ready to storm off to the forecastle and be among the foremost of the prijikers who would swarm along the beakhead when it thumped down onto the argenter’s deck.
    “No? I am a fighting-man. I am — I was, nearly— What do you mean, Dak;
no?”
    I couldn’t explain. He was my son. I didn’t want him in the forefront of the most dangerous part of the attack. A prijiker, a stem-fighter, joyed in his honor and glory and danger. I reckoned they were all more mad than other sailors. They bore the most wounds; from their numbers the most men made holes in the sea.
    “I want you to be at my side.”
    “But why? Do you deny me the glory?”
    “There’s no damned glory in getting killed in a stupid render affray!” I roared at him. “It’s only loot out there. Are you so greedy for gold you’d throw your life away?”
    He drew himself up in that faintly ridiculous way a young man indicates that he is grown up in his own estimation.
    “You cannot stop me from fighting with the prijikers. If I get killed that is my affair.” He swung his sword violently at the argenters. “Anyway, they are enemies of my country.”
    We were closing now and the arrows were feathering into the palisade across our forecastle. The beakhead swayed with the onward plunge of the ship. Men crouched up there, ready to spring like leems onto the decks, ready to smash in red fury to victory.
    “And is that your marvelous reason?”
    “It will do for now!”
    And he swung off along the gangway. I glared after him. I knew practically nothing about the way he would act. He was a headstrong and violent youth, suffering under a sense of shame and outrage, carrying a heavy burden of hatred that ate at his pride. But as the fight developed and we smashed into the argenter and the beakhead went down and we roared across her decks, I had to understand that I could not do as I had unthinkingly sought to do. I had acted, I conceived, as any father would act. I did not want my son to go off fighting. But I could not hold him back. His own instincts, his pride, his youthful folly, all impelled him to rush headlong into the thickest of the fight.
    Can any father thus shield his son from reality and expect to produce a man?
    Sometimes the burdens of fatherhood are too heavy for a simple man to bear. Sometimes, I think, nature should have invented some easier way to carry on the generations. I did not enjoy that fight. I drew the great Krozair longsword and I went up the gangway after Vax, and I bellowed back to Fazhan to conn the ship, and I plunged into the fray like the madman I am, striking viciously left and right, thrusting and hacking, carving a bloody path through those poor devils from Menaham. We took the argenter all right. I had known we would take her. Everyone knew we would take her. It seemed idiotic to me that my son should imperil himself in so obvious a way over so obvious a fight.
    But he did.
    He was my son.
    He was just as big a fool as I am.
    When it was over and the flag came fluttering down in a blaze of blue and green and the shouts of “Hai!” rose, I saw that Vax, although splashed with blood, was unharmed. He had fought magnificently. I had been near him and there had been no single time when I had had to intervene. He could handle himself in a fight, that was plain. I knew he had been under training with the Krozairs of Zy. Their wonderful Disciplines had molded him well. He must, I guessed, have been very near to the time when he would have been accepted into the Order as a full member and have been allowed to prefix that proud
Pur
to his name.
    But, all the same, despite his prowess, I was mighty glad when the fighting ceased.
    Vax it was who spotted the danger