TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

  'You may wish the chance to freshen up from your journey,' the prince suggested.

  Entrapped like a netted songbird, swept over by the eerie, concentrated focus still engaged by the impact of Pesquil's news, Talith endured as Lysaer's regard encompassed her closed features and after, every soiled nuance of her dress. He grasped her loose hands, found them cold, and his urgency gentled to concern. 'You'll want a lady's maid, of course. Wait in the anteroom. My page will deliver you refreshment there and my equerry will build up the fire. At least you'll be warm until I can arrange for a suitable attendant.'

  Talith snapped back from his touch in offended fury. 'No thank you, my Lord Prince. If you're going to draw up plans to slay your nemesis, I shall stay exactly where I am.'

  'But of course.' Lysaer stroked a fallen curl from her cheekbone, his tenderness too sincere to be patronizing. 'I expect you back once you've changed. This is no mayor's realm, to keep women at home uninformed.'

  He smiled, sternly royal, and admonished, 'You shall be Avenor's princess on the equinox feast. Could you doubt for a minute? The responsibility to defend Athera's cities must be shared. Your place through this war council is nowhere if not by my side.'

  Outflanked and speechless, Talith inclined her head. She gathered mud-splashed skirts and swept headlong from the study.

  Just past the door, she lost composure. Weakened and shaking, she braced against the saw-cut boards of the corridor while Pesquil's rapid consonants rang through the panel at her back. 'Provisioning's your worst obstacle. How many veterans can you send at first thaw to earn their passage as caravan guards?'

  The Captain Mayor's point was too obvious: if Lysaer chose Etarra as the site to muster troops, the long march must be sustained across Tysan, through cities not yet won to his cause. To support an armed force across the continent before the harvest would require extensive planning and diplomacy. Any shortfalls created by logistics and supply must not disrupt the chance for alliance in the future.

  'Much care is needed,' Lysaer agreed. 'At least until we reach Rathain.'

  Most of the army had no choice but to hold back until the grass greened enough to graze for fodder. The roads would have dried, and ox carts would not mire in mud left softened by the thaws.

  'Diegan claims your men are ready,' Pesquil inter' jected. 'I would ask, are they good?'

  Lysaer answered in guarded excitement. 'We have four thousand, enlisted. An hour remains before sundown. Let us go and observe them, and see if their achievements can impress you.'

  As Talith overheard, her bitterness deepened, that once again her love must make way before the great quest to stalk down the Shadow Master. Her autonomy could not be sustained against Lysaer, and her anger fell powerless before yearning. She moved off, beaten humble by misery, to seek refuge in the quiet of the anteroom.

  Pesquil's last question pursued her. 'You can move armies from here to Sithaer and back, Prince. There's little to stop you. Except how will you know, once your muster is accomplished, where to corner the Master of Shadow?'

  'Trust my foresight,' Lysaer replied in iron-clad surety. 'When the time comes to march, I possess a sure means to find out.'

  Rendezvous

  Like a vulture cramped in a roost sized for finches, the brig Black Drake dominated the tiny, cove harbour of Merior. Crowded by the swing of her cable, the moored dories of each absent fishing lugger wallowed in her hulking shadow. Jieret Red-beard lounged at her rail, peeling across his hawk nose from the burn of the strong southland sun, the quilloned knife just used to pare his nails still unsheathed in his hand. Relaxed though he seemed, the sailhands who had shared winter passage from the Gulf of Stormwell maintained their distance. The lad had cold eyes and no patience for the fool who dared cross him while he simmered with impatience.

  A raucous flock of gulls arrowed up, disturbed by the sight Jieret waited for: rapacious under timed oarsmen, Drake's tender sheared through a wind-caught slash of spray to pull under the brig's leeward side.

  The only black head on board was Captain Dhirken's. 'He isn't here,' Jieret said, nettled. The thunk as his weapon struck upright in the rail rang across a closing gap of water.

  'Not,' Dhirken cracked, her jet braid dangled down her back as she aimed a poisonous glower upward. 'And damn you for scarring my brightwork in pique for your prince's bad promise. There's ale enough in my hold to nurse yer male temper till ye're witless, flat out, or paralysed.' Poised in the bow to snatch the line tossed down by a deckhand, she made the boat fast to a cleat. To the jinking swing of her cutlass, she scaled the side battens in scorching irritation.

  Regaled in a man's velvet knee breeches, red shirt, and a flamboyant vest with pearl buttons, the event of her presence had raised a storm of wild gossip in the sleepy fishers' village where Arithon s'Ffalenn had signally failed to keep his rendezvous.

  The settlement was pitilessly remote, its quiet less idyllic than a calm that threatened stagnation, with its rows of shuttered cottages and a near-deserted market stacked with fish barrels, rancid and reeking in the turgid noon heat. Impatient with the soporific rustle of palm fronds, and the chink of clay charms to keep iyats from unravelling tired fish nets, Jieret wondered why his liege had chosen the site in the fast place.

  The longboat rocked as the rowers shipped oars. Arrived at the rail, their captain talked still with inspired venom. 'May the whore's pox plague your vaunted prince. If he's light with his word as all that, I'm sore tempted to act in kind. Myself and my mates, we could live like fat mayors on his contraband.'

  Jieret freed his blade and stepped back as Dhirken vaulted aboard. 'You know where to look for Prince Arithon?'

  Dhirken's lips split into a nasty grin. 'Aye. He's at Innish. So said a wee, pale snip of a woman. It's to do with a promise he chose to honour.'

  'You'll sail there?' Jieret pressed.

  Poised on braced legs, her back stiff as nail stock, Dhirken shrugged. 'If I don't, you'll walk, is that so? With all his blighted treasure on your back? You've got lint between your ears to think he's worth it.'

  A pause ensued, while the busy wind flicked through the laces on Jieret's jerkin and ruffled his raw-spun copper beard. The tropical sky scored glints in hazel eyes that seemed to view a sight very different.

  When Dhirken snapped her rings against her cutlass hilt to recoup his attention, the Earl of the North stated baldly, 'If not for my liege, I wouldn't stand here alive.'

  'Well at least sheath that dirk before you stick somewhat else with it.' Brazen in distaste for loyal sentiment, Dhirken spun away to chastise the longboat's oarsmen, now crowding the rail at her shoulder. 'Do I pay you my silver to gawk? Smarten up and haul in that tender!'

  'We're sailing for Innish.' Jieret grinned unrepentant over his knife blade. 'And don't say for the sake of sparing my dastardly back.'

  'The whore's pox on you, also!' Dhirken's sidelong glance in malice scored somewhere in the middle of the earl's chest. 'Your royal friend left no charts for the southcoast. If you don't want to dance on the equinox as shreds for some crab on a reef, you'd better pray there's a merchant's galley laid in at Shaddorn willing to sell her spare rutter.'

  Baleful enough to scald air, the lady captain turned her raunchy invective to send her hands flying to make sail.

  Burdened under full canvas, Black Drake ran hulldown, driven by the hard, pranking winds that partnered the shift in the season. The coast slipped past, green and gilt, the land breeze a pomade of citrus blossom spiked through with the resin of slash pine.

  At Shaddorn, a fickle squall and a running, high swell had the traders' galleys battened down in sheltered waters like boiled crabs salted in a barrel.

  'Damned merchant captains!' Incensed and soaked from a rain shower, Dhirken peeled off her oilskins in the musty gloom below decks. 'Stupid down to their toenails. My Drake tries on an honest charter forbye, and look at them! All huddled together like sheep gone spooked by a wyvern.'

  She stalled her tirade long en
ough to accept a mug of soup from the cook. 'No charts for sale, they say.' Broth sloshed the rim as she gestured in sulky frustration. 'It's all spite. Just because I tail-whipped their tubs in the Eltair ports and undercut their prices, they'll nurse useless grudges and obstruct us every way they can.'

  Days were lost as sails were reefed to slow their passage. Drake nosed her way forward, a leadsman in her chains to call the mark, and a lookout posted aloft to spy out reefs lest shoaling waters set her aground. Forced to find anchorage each night by dark, Dhirken stalked her brig's quarterdeck like a panther, while Jieret cursed the tropical airs that mouldered his leathers and patched rust on his daggers and sword. He refused to think of his clansmen. By now, the news out of Jaelot had reached Etarra; in the lapsed months since he left to track Arithon, a storm of war would be brewing.

  Weather at least showed him favour. The winds stayed fair through the Drake's coast-hopping run down to Southshire. Tucked between the hill country and the oak hammocks of Selkwood, the seaport's shingled roofs pricked taut angles through the smoke from the rendering of resins and turpentine. A coin tossed to a lighterman across shining water bought Dhirken her assurance: the maze of the Harbour Street markets included a chartmaker's stall. Packing a minor arsenal of knives along with her favoured cutlass, Drake's captain rowed herself ashore. While her crewmen grumbled on shipboard mending sail, she quartered the city on foot.

  The thoroughfare was packed. Gourd sellers burdened under poles and baskets plodded between rumbling drays from the stone quarries at Elssine, behind mules panniered in silk bales from Atchaz, and abalone shell from Telzen, bound for the furniture makers. Chipped wood littered the gutters by the shipyards, with the half shaped hulls of galleys rowed like picked bones on their ways. Under wind-flapped awnings, Dhirken prowled the shaded alleys of the shoreside market, with its glass blowers and snake venom sellers, its fragrant crates of citrus and its stalls that reeked of strong cheese, where robed bands of Sanpashir nomads drove nimble goats.

  Dhirken elbowed through a begging squad of urchins to reach the chartmaker's shop, slammed inside, and confronted a gnome-like old man enthroned amid pens and coloured inks.

  His moist eyes regarded her in scholarly curiosity. Then a cheery smile stirred his drooping moustache. 'I expect you're after maps for the coastline to Innish?'

  At the captain's stiff glare, he waggled a moth-eaten goose quill. 'Ach, there'd scarcely be two of you, yes? The young master sent word in a letter last month, along with pay to see your needs met.' The cartographer bobbed beneath his counter, rattled aside rulers, tufts of string and worn nibs, and popped erect with a ribboned roll of parchment. 'Your chart, lady captain, with yon mannerly gentleman's compliments.'

  'Dharkaron's hairy bollocks!' Dhirken advanced a nettled step. 'I'm nobody's bound lackey! It's naught but a stray slip of fortune that I bothered to visit here at all!'

  'Aye, well, you needn't stay riled for my sake.' The little man's spirits stayed unshaken. 'Yon fellow made demands of the shipwrights that were fair preposterous. They howled just as loudly. He still got everything he wanted. Are you going to take this, or spit on it?'

  Dhirken snatched up the offering as if it held poison. Back in the street, she fished out the notepaper nestled inside. The strong, concise hand that had first taught her letters requested her to offload two bullion chests at the shipwright's mansion near the harbourmaster's office.

  'Smoke his Grace out for a louse!' Dhirken snapped through gritted teeth. 'Let the Prince of Rathain pay his own debts.'

  But the shipwright had evidently received another letter, for when the captain reached her command, hot and distempered, a tender manned by a liveried lackey lay tied to the Black Drake's anchor cable.

  The fast man she met after off-loading coin chests was Earl Jieret, slouched with his boots braced in bald-faced insolence on her chart desk. 'Daelion's two-eyed vigilance,' she swore. 'Is your liege lord always as conniving in his ways as a thief ?'

  Eyes underlit by jittered reflections as he whetted the blade of his longsword, Jieret shrugged.

  Too aware the selfsame steel would be turned against her in challenge should she balk at resuming the brig's course, Dhirken gave a wicked, joyous laugh. 'Oh, I'll sail on to Innish, if only to deliver to Arithon's royal face my word on his bloody-handed arrogance.' She breathed deep and added in stringent offence, 'But damn you, earl or no, if your loutish feet stay parked on my chart locker, we'll not stir up sweat getting out of this port!'

  Black Drake made Innish by the spring equinox. Anchored out of smuggler's habit in position for speedy departure, Dhirken needed no invective to see her sails stowed and longboats launched in a stream of seamless industry.

  'What did you promise them?' Jieret asked from his armed stance by the portside companionway.

  Hard by the mainmast pinrail, shredding a leg of roast lamb with neat teeth, Dhirken tipped him a guileless glance. 'What else but shore leave, to scour the taverns in search of yon mountebank prince?'

  'Ath forfend!I Jieret threw back his bearded chin and laughed. 'I wish I could go along, just to watch your mate break townborn heads.'

  'Just pray that's all he dunts.' Dhirken shut ale-dark eyes, mouthed a silent wish, and tossed her stripped bone landward in a sailor's habit that kept the harbours infested with glossy rats. 'My mate's in a fair rotten temper, let me warn you. The tropics give him itches in places he'd rather use to tup doxies.' Pitched to a sulky froth of tension herself, she licked grease off her fingers and grimaced. 'Your prince, when we find him, had better show something more than a whim for veering off his course. Southcoast ports are too lax to charge tariffs. As a contraband runner in these waters, we're wasting and useless as whore's bells strung on a corpse.'

  'Don't have me speak for my liege,' Jieret said, too apprehensive himself to show sympathy. 'It's a likely guess his Grace won't welcome the tidings I bear from the north.'

  'Don't think to weep on my shoulder,' Dhirken retorted. 'A thousand times, I've wished I'd never met the man.'

  Packed with crewmen in ribald, high humour, the Drake's longboats raked shoreward across waters pooled molten brass under sunset.

  Earl Jieret remained alone at the brig's rail, too proud to shelter in the stem cabin despite full awareness that by city law, his clipped clanbred accent was enough to arraign him for execution. He leaned on damp wood, his cold-cast patience a mask for wound nerves and anxiety. Once again, he waited, fingering the wom quillon dagger, looted seven years past off the corpse of a headhunter killed for the murder of his family. The touch of whetted steel made him wonder whether Arithon s'Ffalenn still cherished the boy's knife for whittling given that day for remembrance.

  A breeze frisked ripples on the harbour. Up the river delta, a fitful flash like turned mica, a millwheel revolved in lowered light. A cormorant flew, pursued by squabbling gulls. Jieret breathed in the tang of cinnamon from a spicer's shed and watched the southern waters fade from rose to ice purple between the peaked rambades of the galleys. The daytime commerce of the dockfront wound down, chanting stevedores replaced by the fluting whistles used to summon lightermen. Dogs barked, and cliff swallows skimmed in the dying glow above shell-coloured towers. Vendors' carts and ale drays rumbled to the clatter of muleteams while the working crowd dispersed homeward, to reappear, thicker, clad in festival ribbons and bearing a weaving swarm of brands. The massive brass fire pans on their pilings were lit, each one twelve spans apart, and crackling hot sparks across the quay. Lamps burned in the brothel galleries, on the decks of ships at anchor, to skein on black waters a serried, fire-dance of reflections.

  The towers blazed in necklaces of candles, and the cymbals of street singers chimed through the dusk. The feast of spring equinox, at Innish, was a mad, dizzy whirl of gaiety dressed out in lights.

  Aboard the darkened Drake, jumpy as a caged wildcat for the fact he lay surrounded by enemies, Jieret listened to the shrieks of the doxies, and the deeper rasp of male rejoinder; the frene
tic laughter from the puppet theatres, and the thumps on the water as boats collided to slurred apologies from handlers too drunken to trifle over chipped paint or marred brightwork. Haunted by distant memories of the spring bonfires from his childhood, Jieret tried not to wonder how the feast might be celebrated, had his clans not been hunted by townsmen, and were his prince not accursed by Desh-thiere.

  An overloaded boat crammed with roisterers rocked under the stern. Screaming laughter, lit by a frenzy of lamps, the rowers banged their oars against the strakes at the load line and demanded feastday alms. 'Call down a blessing for the night, good master! Toss us a copper. Or we come aboard to bring you joy.'

  Jieret jerked back from the rail, hand gripped to his dagger. He dared not reply, even to send the bears packing; as a clanborn earl taken captive in a town, he would be publicly maimed before death.

  While the pranksters thrashed oars to manoeuvre their boat alongside, he gripped his knife and weighed hopeless odds, that he could stay alive long enough to deliver the news of Lysaer's muster to his liege.

  Amidships, something banged in the galley. 'Muckle plague o' fiends!' The heavyset cook came on deck, a kettle slung in meaty hands. He peered in harried temper at the straggle of dandies, who passed a wineskin as their fellows argued and drew lots to determine which man should lead the boarding party.

  Jieret flourished his blade in grim salute, while below, to a tempo of mistimed oars and obscenities, the pair of gallants who picked the short straws swayed upright and clawed to locate the strakes.

  'Look how they sparkle, the pansies. Mighty lot o' jewels on a bunch come whining for largesse.' The cook turned a soulful glance to Jieret. 'No need for that hog sticker, man. This is the Drake they're bothering, and our Dhirken, she don't like visitors.' His take on the matter neatly practical, he raised his pot and tipped out a scalding rain of broth.