Polaris and the Goddess Glorian

by Charles B. Stilson

"Not I," Vedor said hastily, when it was suggested that he, as captain of the port, was the logical bearer of the news. "It were worth a man's life to tell the king that a slave has shattered his fleet. Besides, my duties here do not allow me to absent myself. Choose ye some other to carry the tidings to Bel-Ar."

Listening to the discussion was a rough old soldier of the guard. Brenak was his name, and he was a brave man. When it seemed that none of the gilded captains had heart for the task, Brenak stepped forward.

"I will carry the news," he volunteered. "Lend me a horse, and give me a few dekkars to buy wine at the wine-shops in the Street of Sherne, and I will go. It may be my last drinking, though I think not. I fought with the king in the wars, and I am known to him. I think he will spare me."

So Brenak rode up to the city and bought his wine. From the wine-shops he went to the palace and gained admittance to the king and told the tidings, which already were flying from mouth to mouth through the streets.

"Fool! You are crazed!" Bel-Ar exclaimed when Brenak had made a short tale of it. But in the eyes of the soldier the king saw the truth, and his pallid face turned a shade more pale. In his fury, scarce knowing what he did, he struck Brenak with his closed fist so that the soldier died from it.

For days thereafter the temper of the king was such that those who must come near him did so with fear and trembling. Even his queen, the petulant, flower-faced Raissa, who dared him more than most, avoided him and kept to her own apartments.

Weeks before, when it became known that the captives had escaped, little heed had been paid to their going. They were only slaves, and who cared what became of a slave! Interest in them had been swallowed up in the general indignation at the defection of Oleric the Red and the supposed treachery of Mordo. Only Bel-Ar and Rhaen, the arch-priest of Shamar, had chafed, and that because of the escape of the man whom they had doomed for the slaying of the sacred bull. The king had sent fademes to scour the sea, and one to go up the coast to Ruthar to head the fugitives, should they have gone that way. That fademe had never returned.

These happenings had irked the pride of the king, who, like all despots, was of a wild and ungovernable temper that flared to madness when he was crossed.

Came then the blow of Minos—a calamity which shook the nation and struck the foundation of Bel-Ar's dearest ambition. Without his fademes, his dreams of world-conquest vanished. Small wonder that his lords and ladies feared him and quaked at his approach.

But the king was of a courage and perseverance equal to his temper. When the first shock of the catastrophe had worn away, he took stock of the damage and set about to repair so much of it as might be. At the bottom of the harbor his divers labored among the sunken fademes. Some few of the vessels were raised and rehabilitated. By far the most of them were useless, save for the metal in their hulks. Minos had done his work thoroughly, and the priceless engines, the living power of which was mined from the depths of the earth only by great labor, were nearly all ruined.