TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

  A kindly neighbour volunteered to douse the widow's fire and close up her vacated cottage. Over their laundry and their baking, Merior's gossips warmed to loquacious speculation. Lulled under mild southern sunlight, they remained unaware that larger threads of happenstance tied their favoured visitor to an imminent muster of armies.

  The prophet whose gift of sight might have warned them held himself oblivious by acrimonious design. Having twice stifled the onset of his talent for prescience, Dakar sprawled in a drunken stupor in the berth he had inhabited since the hour of the little sloop's launching. He moaned green-faced in his blankets, while the waters broke into chop and shoaled with the tide off Scimlade Tip, and the neat, painted dory bobbed to her destination. The vituperative outrage of the widow mingled with gulls' calls and the delighted shouts of children. Talliarthe's insolent, black-haired master boarded his passengers and cleated his tender to a towline. Then he slipped the pretty sloop's mooring and spread smart, tanbark sails to the wind.

  * * *

  Five days of fair-weather winds coaxed Jinesse from the grip of pale nerves. The sloop sailed through her shakedown like a pert, saucy lady, the slack as the breeze stretched new stays drawn in daily, and the promise of her design proven through in a smooth dance of passage. Jinesse emerged from clenched fear to final, exhausted recognition that her dread of blue waters gnawed her hollow and sick to no purpose. The twins thrived on clean sun and hours spent fishing from the stern rail. Arithon's company proved polite but evasive. His assiduous good manners at last reassured her that his plans matched his stated intent: to wean away her visceral distrust of the sea.

  At dusk, with the black, notched forests of the southcoast a lacework border to a cobalt sky strung with stars, the little sloop's decks offered peace. While the moon spilled a path of molten light on dark waters, Talliarthe sailed lightly west. Soothed by the whisper of the wake against the crocheted caps on the wave crests, the widow perched on the cabintop with her knees tucked up in clasped arms. The strung tension she had suffered since her husband's loss had eased with the days. She could breathe the sea air, content, while the breeze off the sail combed her loose hair and spun the ends into tangles.

  A lithe shadow against the frame of the cockpit, the Prince of Rathain stood in his loose linen shirt and plain jerkin, the tiller braced in hands that other nights, in quiet anchorage, had woven wizardly magic on his lyranthe. The twins slept below, entangled like kittens in a berth; Dakar lay wedged in the forepeak, his bilious temper stilled by the ale provisioned in casks at Shaddorn. Enspelled by the moment's tranquillity, enervated by the unaccustomed freedom of having no household and no cares, Jinesse gave timid rein to curiosity. 'Why did you come to Merior?'

  Arithon's face turned, his steep, angled features inscrutable against stars and sky. His answer came back unhurried, in the form of a chorus from a sailor's chantey. "'Where sands lie like sugar, heave, me bully boys, ho! Where flowers bloom red, and the lily fair maids, boys, the maidens never say no."'

  When his light lines met with prying silence, he did not again shy from the subject. 'Why ask?'

  'Somebody must.' A film of moisture cemented her palms to her shins. 'Nobody harmless has scars such as yours, and you made a free gift of your blazon.'

  The sloop rocked over a swell, cupped a gust in taut gear, and thrummed into a complacent heel. Arithon braced a foot against the leeside locker and nursed his weight against the helm as water chuckled past the rudder. 'No secret there. Dakar will spill anything, drunk.' Jinesse matched his evasion with flat truth. 'He hasn't, you know. He's wary of you as the man who burned his tongue once too often at the feast.'

  Arithon flashed her a smile. 'Well he should be. Did you dare ask him why?'

  Warned by a note like the slick draw of steel from its scabbard, Jinesse raised thin forgers to hook wind-riffled hair from her lashes. 'The cobbler's wife tried. She said afterwards she'd take the simpler challenge and pry open an oyster barehanded.'

  Arithon gave a musical, soft laugh. 'You know who I am. You'll have heard the dire rumours. Since you never exposed me, I prefer the belief that my conduct has lent foothold for trust.' A headsail whispered into a luff. He stretched, flicked a line off a cleat, and with the strength that was his most understated attribute, hardened a line with deft precision. The sloop quickened and sheared ahead to a clipped lisp of foam. Disturbed phosphorescence scattered like dropped sparks in the ploughed black waters of her wake.

  Jinesse bit her lip, uncertain. If the prince who had knitted a torn thread in her destiny seemed content to leave matters there, she owned no such depths of selfassurance. 'If your purpose in bringing me is served,' she pressed, 'then why not put about and sail back?'

  That annoyed him; the line of his shoulders stiffened under the rippling play of his shirt. 'It is night. There is quiet. Why pick at intangibles like a harridan?'

  Hers, now, the power of reticence. Her children were belowdecks, all their safety given into his hands. If he was not a criminal, she wished him to explain why the talk of the traders should malign him.

  An impatient moment later, Arithon answered, inflectionless and curt. 'I have not deceived. I have business to attend in Southshire, and a personal pledge to meet at Innish.'

  A puff of wind dashed the sloop forward. The challenge Jinesse barely dared to utter fell eclipsed in the leap of white spray from the bow. 'Why not return me to Merior first?'

  He heard anyway; over the work of the tiller, she met his blunt exasperation. 'Because I am not free, lady. Time is the hunting pack set at my heels, and the future, the thorn in my conscience. Your dread of seafaring is assuaged. Your children are able to develop their given gifts as they mature. At Southshire, you need not go ashore.'

  'And at Innish?'

  A queer catch of grief half-strangled itself in his throat. He said in forced lightness that had everything to do with shedding defences he had no wish to lower, 'Did you never think that I might need comfort or reassurance in return? What awaits me at Innish is a bereaved wife, and a grown daughter who never knew her father. Their loss is not beyond pity to encompass. But as a man raised in the absence of close family, I find myself disadvantaged. The ways of women's hearts are written in no chart. I go as a dead friend's emissary into a hostile home. Forgive my presumption, for asking the kindness of a stranger for my guide.'

  Shamed, Jinesse averted her face. But the damage was done, his veneer of contentment peeled away. Her questions had distressed his faith in her trust beyond her small powers to mend.

  'You wish a swift end to this passage, lady?' Arithon prodded.

  With scarcely a pause, he bent, caught a line and lashed his tiller. Needled to sharp, restless energy, he leapt onto the foredeck to end a conversation she had no more heart to pursue. The topsail and flying jib were broken out and trimmed in merciless hard curves to slice the wind. Talliarthe responded. The heel of her deck became animated, then violent, in concert with her master's mood. Arithon returned, soaking wet, to shoulder the pull of her tiller. He forced her painted bow three points nearer to the wind; and halyards and rigging thrummed to the plaintive keen of forced speed.

  To remain above deck was to become showered with spindrift raked up like blown ice off the bow.

  Stung by cruel salt and whipped by a dank lash of hair, Jinesse retired to her berth. A last glimpse through the hatchway before she fell asleep showed Arithon's profile notched in silhouette against a frost-point backdrop of white spray. Withdrawn and determined, he pitched his sloop before the brute winds as though the triumph of his handiwork against the elements could vindicate her rejection of his integrity.

  * * *

  Even had Jinesse been inclined to resume her appraisal of his conscience and character, Arithon s'Ffalenn gave her no chance. He drove his little sloop in a wreath of white wake to Southshire, made landfall in the dead of night, and rowed himself ashore before his passengers wakened at dawn.

  Left no tender at an anchorage outside the moor
ings used by the traders' galleys, too distant to hail a shoreside lighterman, Dakar paced the decks and fumed. Like Jinesse, unless he wished to swim the broad mouth of the channel, he could do naught else but wait.

  Arithon returned before nightfall in a dory laden with fresh provisions. The sacks of flour and the casks could not account for the telltale scent of tarred rope and sawdust, or the madcap glint in his eyes. If he refused to confide in the joy of his success, neither did he keep overt secrets. The papers he cached in the sloop's tiny chartlocker were contracts, ribboned with the seals of the shipwrights' guild. His commerce had been with craftsmen and ropemakers; a blind half-wit could deduce his intent to found a shipyard. What use he would make of that asset, Jinesse balked to contemplate. She shared, where she could, the blooming, self-sufficient contentment of her children and left Dakar to muddle his wits with beer.

  As plainly as she might, she let the Prince of Rathain keep his peace with the secrets of his past. Her tolerance did little to win back his easy company; no ploy she tried stayed his drive to pitch himself and his sloop to the bleak, wilful limit of performance.

  Talliarthe made landfall at Innish a fortnight past the winter solstice.

  To her dying day, Jinesse would recall her first sight of the city; the spindled, coral towers meshed into sky, a gilt-edged silhouette that turned slowly rose against a fringe of dawn clouds. While Feylind and Fiark curled at her sides, she marvelled at the long, lean lighters that ferried the ships' crews ashore, black shapes like cut paper, with talisman scrolls or carved heads of beasts snarling at bow and stern. The cries of fish sellers drifted over lavender water, then the riffling stir of wind, with its mud-soaked scent of green river delta skeined with incense from the balcony braziers lit in brothels and rich ladies' boudoirs. Jinesse watched the light brighten the lace-roofed, pennoned towers; the scalloped merlons of the curtainwalls where Shand's old-blood royalty had walked; the pastel drumtowers with their odd, paned windows where the high king's council once held its yearly court; and in her ears rang sweet showers of harmonics as the living prince of quite another kingdom tuned a new set of strings on his lyranthe.

  Innish was famed as the jewel of the Shand. As though spell-wrought, the moment held nothing mundane: no blackening smoke from a chimney fire, no wind-borne taint of rot from the tanneries. Even the catcalls the sailors flung at the whores who plied the dockside sounded lyric, slurred as they were in the broad-vowelled southcoast dialect.

  Then Arithon damped his last, ringing chord and arose, a groomed stranger in a black doublet corded with silver. He wore hose and boots with embroidery and buckles, and a silk shirt with points tipped with pearls. Jinesse slipped her grip on the twins, kissed them both, and, unasked, remained in position at the sloop's rail.

  'If you desire my presence, I'm ready,' she said.

  That won his most fleeting smile. 'Dakar has been bludgeoned into sobriety. If he falls overboard, do you trust your twins to fish him out of the harbour?'

  Arithon waited until her nerves softened, then lashed the fleeces to protect the lyranthe, slipped thin, grey gloves over his fingers, and handed her down into the bobbing dory. He climbed in himself and settled to his rowing with wordless, defined concentration.

  Seen up close, the wharfside of Innish wore her decor like a tawdry, overdressed granddame fallen from wealth on hard times. The pilings were shagged green with weed, like harbour landings anywhere else. The air reeked of grease, decayed fish, and blood sausage, and the pretty pastel arches that reared above the crowd wore a pox of grey mildew and mould. The whores by city edict were required to wear bells. Their jingle chimed in sour descant over the oaths of the longshoremen bent under loads of boxes and bales. The gutters lay pooled with sewage dammed from egress down the culverts by thrown offal from the vendors, who cleaned hares for roasting over ramshackle portable braziers.

  'I'm sorry,' Arithon said as Jinesse shrank from the stench. He peeled off a glove. 'Here, cover your nose. The streets will be cleaner past the waterfront.' He left the dory in the paid care of a street-child, took her arm, and drew her into turmoil like a carnival.

  Brushed and buffeted, harried by stall keepers who pressed her to buy pins and ribbons and braided loaves of sesame bread, Jinesse longed for sleepy Merior, with its palm-shaded beaches and its huckstering squabbles between the gulls that flocked and dipped above the women who sat salting the fish barrels.

  By the time they had crossed the dockside market and climbed the low, graded streets that led into the affluent upper town, Jinesse looked overset. Arithon sat her down beside the lip of a public spring, shaded by the stooped branches of a damson tree. A girl with a goose switch and three honking charges loaned her a jug for a drink. Inside a grilled mansion window, a caged bird trilled. A fat gander chuckled its bill in the water that ran, metallic with iron, over the jaws of a gryphon's-head fitting.

  'The house isn't far,' Arithon said presently. While her head had been spinning, he must have asked for directions.

  Jinesse gave back his glove and looked up as he helped her to rise. She found his face shuttered like quartz. 'You dread this.'

  His step stayed deliberate on the cobbles. The polished buckles on his boot cuffs reflected trapped bits of sky as the leaf-filtered light flicked across them. 'No,' he said finally. 'But I do feel inadequate for the burden my master laid upon me.' His hand tightened, unthinking, on the cover of his lyranthe, and she realized he had reached his destination.

  The painted little town cottage had once been a milking parlour, though the narrow, high windows were now graced with shutters, and the doubled door fastened with wrought brass. Nestled in a border of carob trees, walls of baked clay kept out the heat, and moss caked the barrel-tiled roof. Poised on the grained marble doorstep, Arithon gripped the knocker and tapped.

  The door snapped open, as if the raw-boned woman inside had been watching the street through a spy hole. She wore straw-coloured hair swept back in combs, and despite a cherry-round nose and full lips, her expression was pinched and unfriendly.

  'The sorcerer said we might expect you,' said Halliron's daughter in clipped greeting. Her gaze swept the bard and the woman in his company as if she hoped to find something to lend her the excuse to send them packing.

  Only Jinesse knew the man well enough to discern the tension in his shoulders; his voice as he spoke was civil. 'My name is Arithon s'Ffalenn. As you have surmised, I was your father's last apprentice.'

  'We were told. You've taken your time, have you not, to deliver his final bequest?' The woman jerked the door wide. 'By all means, come in and get this over with. I can't imagine the experience will mean very much, though my mother may feel differently. I could ask that you not make her cry. She hasn't been well, and further suffering will scarcely be a boon to her.'

  Arithon entered the gloom of a pretty, tiled foyer. Potted flowers in enamelled crockery mantled the air in perfumes that failed to cut the underlying astringency of herbal pastes dispensed for sore joints. The woman gave a self-conscious sniff, fingered a crock as she passed in an unconscious check for dust, then. led onward, over floors of fired tiles that made civilized replacement for rows of wooden stanchions for cattle. In a quiet parlour, she bade her visitors to wait.

  'Let me see whether Mother's awake.' She did not look back as she spoke, but bustled in prim hurry through a door sleek with old copal varnish.

  Arithon glanced about, at the tasselled, stuffed hassocks, scattered footstools and cushioned chairs with their painstaking squares of embroidery; at walls tiered with shelves and glass cabinets jammed with alabaster ornaments, figurines twined out of jeweller's wire, and cloisonne flasks too small to be other than bric-a-brac. He turned once, full circle. Small as he was, the room begrudged even his neat grace. The seats set waiting at every quarter were a bastion, a wall, that had failed to repel boredom and solitude. Pressed on all sides by collected clutter, mute evidence of empty lives crying out to be filled, Arithon bent his head, hands folded on
the cord that hung his lyranthe.

  Jinesse bit her lip, half-suffocated. In this house, she recognized a trace of herself, and a fate but narrowly escaped; widowed, embittered, she had nearly done as this mother had, and hemmed in her children between tidy walls and old grief. Talliarthe had delivered her from far worse than fear, but she had no chance to share gratitude.

  The closed door whisked open and Halliron's daughter beckoned the pair of them on.

  Arithon stepped through into a bedroom alcove deep and musty with shadows. Jinesse entered on his heels, into air that smelled of age and sickness and lye soap. An armoire held a clutter of creams and jars, prinked with hard glints off cut glass. The bed, made up in ivory linen, cradled a narrow-eyed crone, propped boardstraight amid a froth of lace-edged pillows.

  'We know how he died,' the former Masterbard's goodwife opened in quavering, vitriolic rudeness. 'We heard he lived like a wastrel, travelling between towns in a cart.'

  Arithon managed a smile with his bow. 'Dame Deartha,' he said in formal greeting. 'I am sent at Halliron's bequest. Have I leave?'

  The hag jerked a clawed wrist. 'It was the music, he insisted. That's what took him from us.' Her mouth tucked into colourless pleats. 'I much doubt his blankets stayed empty, all those years.'

  Discomfited by the beldame's evil glance, Jinesse looked in vain for a place to sit down. The bedchamber's single chair was already occupied by the daughter's angular bulk, which left only a footstool for Arithon. He took it, uncomplaining. His ringless hands wasted no motion as he unstrung the cord and slipped the lyranthe from her wrappings.

  Jinesse found an unobtrusive corner by the clothes chest. The daughter tapped an impatient foot. The old lady jerked out a handkerchief and honked her nose while, nerveless in patience, the musician corrected the pitch of his strings.

  'We have no use for songs, you know,' the daughter said in jaundiced scorn.