Space Viking, H. Beam Piper [best classic romance novels txt] 📗

and couldn’t find it; she looked about in confused embarrassment. Amused, Lucas picked it from the shrub onto which she had tossed it and draped it over her shoulders, his hands lingering briefly. Then he gestured to the older man to precede them, and they entered the arbored walk. At the other end, in an open circle, a fountain played; white marble girls and boys bathing in the jade-green basin. Another piece of loot from one of the Old Federation planets; that was something he’d tried to avoid in furnishing Traskon New House. There’d be a lot of that coming to Gram, after Otto Harkaman took the Enterprise to space.

“I’ll have to come back, some time, and visit them,” Elaine whispered to him. “They’ll miss me.”

“You’ll find a lot of new friends at your new home,” he whispered back. “You wait till tomorrow.”

“I’m going to put a word in the Duke’s ear about that fellow,” Sesar Karvall, still thinking of Dunnan, was saying. “If he speaks to him, maybe it’ll do some good.”

“I doubt it. I don’t think Duke Angus has any influence over him at all.”

Dunnan’s mother had been the Duke’s younger sister; from his father he had inherited what had originally been a prosperous barony. Now it was mortgaged to the top of the manor-house aerial-mast. The Duke had once assumed Dunnan’s debts, and refused to do so again. Dunnan had gone to space a few times, as a junior officer on trade-and-raid voyages into the Old Federation. He was supposed to be a fair astrogator. He had expected his uncle to give him command of the Enterprise, which had been ridiculous. Disappointed in that, he had recruited a mercenary company and was seeking military employment: It was suspected that he was in correspondence with his uncle’s worst enemy, Duke Omfray of Glaspyth.

And he was obsessively in love with Elaine Karvall, a passion which seemed to nourish itself on its own hopelessness. Maybe it would be a good idea to take that space trip right away. There ought to be a ship leaving Bigglersport for one of the other Sword-Worlds, before long.

They paused at the head of the escalators; the garden below was thronged with guests, the bright shawls of the ladies and the coats of the men making shifting color-patterns among the flowerbeds and on the lawns and under the trees. Serving-robots, flame-yellow and black in the Karvall colors, floated about playing soft music and offering refreshments. There was a continuous spiral of changing costume-color around the circular robo-table. Voices babbled happily like a mountain river.

As they stood looking down, another aircar circled low; green and gold, lettered Panplanet News Service. Sesar Karvall swore in irritation.

“Didn’t there use to be something they called privacy?” he asked.

“It’s a big story, Sesar.”

It was; more than the marriage of two people who happened to be in love with each other. It was the marriage of the farming and ranching barony of Traskon and the Karvall steel mills. More, it was public announcement that the wealth and fighting-men of both baronies were now aligned behind Duke Angus of Wardshaven. So it was a general holiday. Every industry had closed down at noon today, and would be closed until morning-after-next, and there would be dancing in every park and feasting in every tavern. To Sword-Worlders, any excuse for a holiday was better than none.

“They’re our people, Sesar; they have a right to have a good time with us. I know everybody at Traskon is watching this by screen.”

He raised his hand and waved to the news car, and when it swung its pickup around, he waved again. Then they went down the long escalator.

Lady Lavina Karvall was the center of a cluster of matrons and dowagers, around which tomorrow’s bridesmaids fluttered like many-colored butterflies. She took possession of her daughter and dragged her into the feminine circle. He saw Rovard Grauffis, small and saturnine, Duke Angus’ henchman, and Burt Sandrasan, Lady Lavina’s brother. They spoke, and then an upper-servant, his tabard blazoned with the yellow flame and black hammer of Karvall mills, approached his master with some tale of domestic crisis, and the two went away together.

“You haven’t met Captain Harkaman, Lucas,” Rovard Grauffis said. “I wish you’d come over and say hello and have a drink with him. I know your attitude, but he’s a good sort. Personally, I wish we had a few like him around here.”

That was his main objection. There were fewer and fewer men of that sort on any of the Sword-Worlds.

II

A dozen men clustered around the bartending robot⁠—his cousin and family lawyer, Nikkolay Trask; Lothar Ffayle, the banker; Alex Gorram, the shipbuilder, and his son Basil; Baron Rathmore; more of the Wardshaven nobles whom he knew only distantly. And Otto Harkaman.

Harkaman was a Space Viking. That would have set him apart, even if he hadn’t topped the tallest of them by a head. He wore a short black jacket, heavily gold-braided, and black trousers inside ankle-boots; the dagger on his belt was no mere dress-ornament. His tousled red-brown hair was long enough to furnish extra padding in a combat-helmet, and his beard was cut square at the bottom.

He had been fighting on Durendal, for one of the branches of the royal house contesting fratricidally for the throne. The wrong one; he had lost his ship, and most of his men and, almost, his own life. He had been a penniless refugee on Flamberge, owning only the clothes he stood in and his personal weapons and the loyalty of half a dozen adventurers as penniless as himself, when Duke Angus had invited him to Gram to command the Enterprise.

“A pleasure, Lord Trask. I’ve met your lovely bride-to-be, and now that I meet you, let me congratulate both.” Then, as they were having a drink together, he put his foot in it by asking: “You’re not an investor in the Tanith Adventure, are you?”

He said he wasn’t, and would