TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

  Between one breath and the next, the Kittiwake's overcrowded taproom erupted into bedlam with the wholesale abandon of a fiend storm. Whores snatched up skirts and petticoats and pulled out concealed bludgeons, or thin-bladed, pearl-handled daggers. Plates sailed and crashed against the walls; bodies flew airborne and hammered into chairs, and anything not tied down got snatched and brandished as bludgeons. Drawn by the bellows of their mate, Black Drake's insulted sail-hands rallied into a knot bent on bloodshed and murder. Fisticuffs and grunts and raucous bouts of shouting dismembered civilized conversation, while Dakar scrabbled to safety on hands and knees, an overweening smile on his face.

  Let Arithon try now to hire Captain Dhirken, he would justly get his liver diced for crab snacks.

  By the streetside window, spattered with meat shreds and stew broth, the stoic mermaid figurehead looked on with paintless eyes as the Kittiwake's landlord rammed shoulder-down to confront someone seated at the table. While shrill questions erupted into argument, Arithon watched, cat-still and poised, his face a mask of straightlipped irony.

  Even from his vantage on the floorboards, that expression moved Dakar to a pin stab of dread. The surge of the fight now behind him, he regained his feet, ducked a flying bottle, and side-stepped a wrack of splintered chairs. Somebody had drawn a cutlass; above the belling clang of parries, and a woman's spitfire obscenities, he cocked his ear to track the altercation.

  The landlord demanded payment for his damages, the sum he named exorbitant enough to redecorate a highclass brothel.

  'Come now,' Arithon said, his singer's tone liltingly amused. 'You're no stranger to the habits of sailors. This tavern's weathered a hundred such frolics. Any man with eyes can see every trestle in the place is still seeping green sap from the mill wright's.'

  Behind the landlord's planted stance, a pigtailed topman nipped into the rafters with his rigging knife. He screamed epithets at somebody else down below. Invective floated upward in reply. The chandelier swayed, cut loose from its mooring, and whooshed down. The spectacular crash as it struck the top of the bar made an end to further insults. Bottles toppled, fell; sloshed spirits sprayed through the wicks of rolling candles. Nobody stirred to run for water; the Kittiwake's floors were fired brick. As the puddles spat into curls of blue flame, the fighting near at hand jammed on its course like a hiccup. Pugilists and bystanders dodged and fell flat in a sliding crush to escape, while leaping tongues of fire blistered and licked at ankles and buttocks and casualties.

  Intent on the brawl's fresh developments as a tax collector calculating tithes, the landlord wrung his hands in chin-thrusting refusal to be placated. 'The Drake's crew are trouble. Always have been. On your word of surety, I let them in here. Well, now I've lived to be sorry. Any pack of scoundrels with a captain who's a -'

  'Don't say it,' snapped a silken alto voice.

  The landlord squeaked, blinked, and ceased speaking, his widened eyes turned downward to track the naked cutlass that indented the belly of his waistcoat.

  'Don't,' repeated the woman with the glossy, black braid, her consonants frigidly emphatic. She uncoiled to her feet, neatly compact, every inch of her primed for a stop-thrust. 'Presume again to say how my men should be handled, and I'll spit your guts just for joy. The Kittiwake's damages will be squared to my satisfaction; but only after my crew gets done with mending the slight to their competence.'

  Dakar stiffened in his tracks. Slack-jawed, he looked askance at Arithon. 'Captain Dhirken?' he mouthed, shaken silly by the concept that she had been female all along.

  The corners of Arithon's lips twitched. 'No other. You should have noticed. Whores don't generally dress in sea boots.'

  Dakar fumbled behind his back, hooked a fallen stool, set it upright and sat down. 'A woman,' he mouthed again. Then, plaintive and much louder, 'Ah, fiends! What stakes in Sithaer's chaos are you playing for?'

  But the Shadow Master's focus had already shifted beyond him to survey the taproom, and a turmoil whose direction was far from random. The raw-boned man and most of his fellow dicers were heaped prone and passed out cold, while shoulder to shoulder like brothers, the Drake's crew were acting in ferocious concert to level those combatants left standing.

  Recovered from his terror of the cutlass, the landlord had begun to natter on again.

  Dakar was past listening. Incensed by his victim's nerveless patience; well aware the saucy captain would seize due revenge for every separate provocation, he indulged his vicious urge to crack the s'Ffalenn equilibrium. 'Why so hot a bother, miss? Your crew seems to like their recreation.'

  Dhirken whirled on him, her face a slim, tanned oval scattered across nose and cheeks with freckles like fine sienna ink. 'You!' Her cutlass whistled and changed target. 'Haven't I enough problems on me without your baiting my mate for sheer fun? Take your meddlesome self elsewhere before I slit your gizzard to oil the Black Drake's brightwork.'

  'Lady,' Arithon said, softly laughing. 'Desist, please. That one's on our side.'

  Caught at a loss, too dignified to gape, Captain Dhirken spiked an exasperated glance toward the pair of them. She shrugged, finally, helpless to stay angry before Arithon's infectious bent of humour.

  'Sithaer's damned, a conspiracy?' She loosened strong fingers and sheathed her blade with a hiss of whetted steel. 'If you wanted my attention, you have it. But by Dharkaron's hairy bollocks, your business had stinking well better make me rich!'

  Arithon gestured toward the table, pulled out a bench, and settled to a quiet round of bargaining. Outfaced and excluded from the conversation, the landlord stalked off to tally every coinweight of his losses. Dakar stood in flat-footed amazement, forgotten as a useless piece of furniture. Disgruntled, sullen, stinging from every scrape collected through his hands and knees scuttle across the bricks, he dragged up his stool and parked his elbows on the trestle to rethink the failure of his strategy.

  A tavernmaid ventured out to bring whisky. No mugs being available, she left an opened crock, which Arithon and Dhirken passed between them, the latter with her sea boots propped crossed in front of her. She braced her back against the opened window sash, and through placid, half-lidded eyes, gauged the ongoing progress of the fight.

  Over a volley of fresh shouting and a soprano spray of breaking glass, she said, 'If my mate winds up crippled or killed, I'll press-gang you both as common seamen.' She swallowed, passed the crock, and waited while Arithon drank in turn.

  Dakar could not choke down his sarcasm. 'Last I saw, your precious first mate was tearing the face off some ugly brute who went at him with a butcher's cleaver. At best, your worries are misplaced.'

  Captain Dhirken took back the jug. Her hands were large-knuckled, callused; no stranger at all to a whisky crock. She downed her draughts straight, and softened into a dreamy, full-lipped smile that somehow fell short of reassurance. Well, that's my mate's style, sure enough. Got his ears notched by a bully when he was ten. Steel's made him jumpy ever since. Almost killed my cook, in one of his sick bouts of nerves. Remember that. He slit a man's belly while sleepwalking, once.'

  Unfazed by the grotesque, Dakar scavenged a plate of roast chicken lying abandoned on a windowsill. Beyond the split trestles, over the snapped struts of downed benches, he could see the remaining roisterers were part of Drake's infamous crew, or else hapless onlookers fallen by chance onto the winning side. The Kittiwake was settling. A drudge with a broom and a basket sallied out to sweep up splinters and smashed crockery. Here and there in the corners, survivors gathered, to exchange boasts and nurse cuts and compare bruises.

  The landlord rounded up his barmaids, shrewd enough to judge that good custom would be lost if beer and spirits were not available.

  Then, too crafty to indulge herself in drunkenness, Dhirken banged down the crock and pushed loose sleeves back to her elbows. Over an end of gnawed bone, Dakar sighed in disappointment: whether the captain's wrists were delicate or mannish, no connoisseur's eye could tell. She wore leather bracers
studded with brass and laced on with wrapped silver wire.

  'You set the stage,' she said in tart opening. 'My men performed. Meet their damage fee and I'll hear out your offer. But first you must let me clear them out of here.'

  Arithon gave a nod and tipped a clanging spill of coins across the trestle.

  'That's too much,' snapped the lady captain. Brass studs scraped the table as she leaned toward him. 'Since I don't like bribes, what's the show for?'

  'Rum, to celebrate the Black Drake's triumph at the Kittiwake.' Possessed of a bard's charm when it suited him, Arithon grinned. 'Piggin, firkin, or by the whole barrel, whichever vessel gives your heart pleasure.'

  Dhirken regarded the glimmering wealth with jaundiced disdain. 'Not for my pleasure, matey. That of my men, more likely, and for them, it's me who speaks. Let it be a piggin apiece, since it's my intent to have them wakeful to sail on the ebb tide at midnight.'

  'As you wish.' Arithon masked his disappointment, that the bulk of his sweetening offer remained on the table. The captain shoved off to collar her rollicking crewmen and awarded him not one glance back.

  Dakar worked a shred of gristle out from behind a rear molar. 'Are you possessed, or simply in love?'

  'It's too early to tell, don't you think?' Too cold-nerved to be baited, Arithon stretched. 'I wanted the boldest captain to ply Eltair Bay. Dhirken fits that requirement. She handles the men well.'

  A true observation, Dakar allowed, while across the littered taproom, her crew of ruffians gathered mollified around her, blotting cuts and split lips and jostling in back-slapping high spirits. The last few still engrossed in combat broke off at the first direct order from their captain. Whatever she said in her lecture did not carry; but return phrases struck through with 'insulted' and 'provoked' carried over the rising stew of voices as the tavern's battered patrons resumed their rowdy entertainments.

  His last wing now stripped of its cartilage, Dakar crooked a finger at a bar wench and ordered another plate of food. 'Anyway, how did she come by her ship?'

  'Brig,' Arithon corrected. 'The story goes that Black Drake was her father's. He died of fever while at sea. The first mate tried to seize command. That version holds that she cut out his heart with a cutlass and named herself master, and nobody else cared to argue.'

  Dakar blotted grease on his sleeve. 'And the other version?'

  Arithon hitched his shoulders into a tight little shrug. 'That she was the original captain's lover and cut out his heart with a cutlass, and nobody else -'

  'I believe the second tale,' Dakar cut in, his gaze torn between searching out his coming meal, and the female captain in her fitted scarlet breeches and loose, seaman's tunic that spilled in uninformative folds over what he could see of her chest. In sullen and contrary conclusion, he added unthinkingly aloud, 'Probably binds her dugs flat, if in fact she has any.'

  'You think you'll pinch her to find out? Don't whine to me when she gelds you.' Arithon tipped back the rum jug, lit to merciless merriness. 'Since I plan to buy up her services, you're just going to have to get along.'

  'Fatal starvation on the dockside might be preferable,' Dakar flared back. When the barmaid arrived with a plate of thick bread, batter-fried vegetables, and a bowl of fish stew, he chose in scowling forethought to amend his three days of starvation. Enough silver lay strewn on the tabletop; Arithon could well afford to pay.

  Except for bruised and battered faces, and the occasional set of bloodied knuckles, the fight might as well not have happened. The least pummelled patrons in the Kittiwake righted trestles and resumed their disrupted pleasures; the wounded consoled themselves with doxies or strong drink, and the noise level swelled, as newcomers stepped over the prone and the unconscious to vie for their chance at the whores.

  Black Drake's crew were not among them. Their highhearted cheers as Captain Dhirken announced a rum ration could not obviate her final warning. 'Keep yourselves in hand! I'll hear no excuses for layabouts. Black Drake sails with the tide. My business here won't take long. I want my gig smart and waiting, and any man who's swilled too much to handle himself in the rigging gets pitched on the shoals for the sharks.'

  Dismissed back to shipboard, the men dispersed in grumbling, happy knots and steered through the crush toward the doorway. Dhirken returned to the table, the lift of her hip as she sat less a flaunt of her sex than practical allowance for the hang of her brute-sized sabre.

  Immersed in his meal, Dakar let discussion flow across him as captain and Shadow Master settled to haggle over terms. Arithon's list of requirements caused the woman to narrow dark eyes.

  'Say again?' She leaned on crossed arms, the fingers hooked into her coarse linen sleeves tensed to a sudden, stark white. 'You want the Drake, for time unspecified, to sail to a destination, also unspecified, with added contract, that your judgement overrules mine in unfamiliar waters? Lunacy. What about cargo? My holds are filled. Or are your very bodies the contraband?'

  Only Dakar caught the fleeting, bitter irony that prefaced Arithon's smile. 'I only have cargo for pick-up, and it's held in another harbour. Outbound, I don't care what you carry. The return run's all that concerns me.'

  Dhirken blinked. 'Lunacy,' she repeated. 'You've wasted my time and gained an unkindly debt, through your friend's stupid meddling with my crew.'

  Her phrasing raised a sudden, queasy thrill that flattened Dakar's appetite. He ceased chewing, a half-gnawed fin dangled in one hand and grease glistening in his beard. For the Shadow Master across from him did nothing, ever, without thought; he had embraced a hostile try at insurrection without a ripple of annoyance. Yet whatever tangled wiles coiled behind his mild calm, his expression stayed guileless and shuttered.

  'Think about this,' he said to Dhirken, a little amused, but not patronizing. 'Black Drake would become the fastest, richest ship to ply the ports of the continent.'

  'Hah!' Dhirken straightened, hooked the flask, and banged it to a strident clash of coins between Arithon's hands, which lay relaxed on the table; soft next to hers. Not horned in callus like a sailor's, but with fingers long and fine as the musician he was, under his deep layers of subterfuge. With a scorn that presumed him inept with a sword, she gave him her sneering refusal. 'Drink, fool, and dream. My brig is already fast enough to outrun the patrols in the strait. I don't need to risk her planks to a ham-fingered idiot who would likely see her smashed on a shoal.'

  The pair locked eyes, Arithon unwilling to rise to provocation, and Dhirken, cross enough to knife him. As if drawn by their dissent, the Kittiwake's owner strode back to claim his due for damages.

  By chance, Dakar saw, his final accounting matched the quantity of the silver on the table. Not without forethought, the landlord was accompanied by two brute-thewed giants armed with cudgels.

  'Pay my reckoning,' he demanded. Confident the loom of his heavies would leave the slighter man cowed, he bent to scoop up the coins.

  Snake-quick, Arithon moved. The landlord's grab entangled with the brandy jug. One thrown silver glittered spinning through gloom, caught before it landed by a street waif half-hidden in the cranny behind the wooden mermaid.

  Dirty, ragged, grinning through missing front teeth, the creature tugged a bundle from the depths of his niche, and said, 'Master, here is your instrument.'

  Arithon stood. He accepted the wrapped bulk of the lyranthe, his amity toward the landlord turned baleful. 'You'll have your coin, I gave my word. What made you think you'd need force to claim my debt?'

  'Fiends! You're a bard?' The landlord chewed his lip, less apologetic than uncertain. The last musician to show his face in the Kittiwake had left with his lyranthe in splinters. Flanked by Dhirken's cynical regard, and the dull-witted interest of his thugs, he hesitated just long enough to note the gleam of fine metal and jewels as Arithon unveiled the priceless instrument bequeathed him by a master now dead.

  Then the last veiling leather fell away. Arithon braced his hip on the trestle edge, scattered off a run like white spark
s, and tenderly nursed the abalone and ebony pegs that tuned fourteen silver-wound strings. Bright sound sheared across the Kittiwake's din. By the time he had finished, conversation had lapsed. Heads turned, and fraught silence webbed the close air to the dimmest alcove in the room.

  For an instant the musician paused, head tilted that familiar fraction to one side, fingers poised above fret and string as he measured the temper of the crowd. They offered no easy, willing audience. Their wants were varied as their roughest tastes and trades: the tar-stained sail-hands with wenches like gaudy birds in their laps; the cordwainers from the shipyards, shirtless, their muscled arms glistening hot sweat; the knife-scarred, off-duty garrison soldiers grouped in tight knots over a battered pair of dice.

  Before that suspended opening could pass, Arithon reeled off through a dance tune. He played saucy and fast, in heartfelt, glorious tribute to Halliron's best style. And the Kittiwake's riff-raff roared back an approval that rattled the crockery on the shelves.

  The landlord backed off, stupefied. Past the first, stiff moment of surprise, Dhirken laid her elbows in spilled spirits and coins, her chin cupped in her palms to listen.

  The measures spun faster, and faster still, alive as the crackle of summer lightning. A few of the doxies sprang up to dance a jig, and soon the floor planks were shaking. In minutes the whole Kittiwake rocked in celebration, while more customers packed in from the street. By then, Arithon had bent his head to his soundboard. Black hair veiled his expression, wholly; even Dakar, who was closest, never noticed the flash of the tears that splashed and wet his flying knuckles.

  Halliron Masterbard was dead; gone. In a headlong, passionate harmony of celebration, the man proven fit to succeed him made the most coarse-mannered dive in Ship's Port reel with ruffians who stamped and clapped and shrieked. As if by whipping up joy to bring catharsis, he could fill the bereft void in his heart.