by Tad Williams
“Are we in danger?” Brother Cadrach shouted.
Gealsgiath laughed, his brown face wrinkling. The sound of his mirth was sucked away by the wind. “Only if you plan to go in for swimming. We’re already near the shelter of Ansis Pellipé and harbor-mouth.”
Cadrach turned to stare out into the swirling twilight, which was dense with rain and fog. “We’re almost there?” he shouted, turning back.
The captain lifted a hooked finger to gesture at a deeper smear of darkness off the starboard bow. “The big black spot there, that’s Perdruin’s mountain—‘Streáwe’s Steeple,’ as some do call it. We’ll be slipping past the harbor-gate before full dark. Unless the winds play tricksy. Brynioch-cursed strange weather for Yuven-month.”
Cadrach’s small companion snuck a look at the shadow of Perdruin in the gray mist, then lowered his head again.
“Anyhap, Father,” Gealsgiath shouted above the elements, “we dock tonight, and remain two days. I take it you’ll be leaving us, since y’paid fare only this far. P’raps you’d like to come down dockside and join me for a drink of something—unless your faith forbids it.” The captain smirked. Anyone who spent time in taverns knew that Aedonite monks were no strangers to the pleasures of strong drink.
Brother Cadrach stared for a moment at the heaving sails, then turned his odd, somewhat cold gaze onto the seafarer. A smile creased his round face. “Thank you, captain, but no. The boy and I will remain on board for a bit after we dock. He’s not feeling well and I’m in no hurry to rush him out. We’ll have far to walk before we reach the abbey, much of it uphill.” The small figure reached up and tugged meaningfully at Cadrach’s elbow, but the monk paid him no attention.
Gealsgiath shrugged and pulled his shapeless cloth hat farther down on his head. “You know best, Father. You paid your way and did your work aboard—although I would say your lad did the heartiest share of it. You can leave anytime afore we hoist sail for Crannhyr.” He turned with a wave of his knob-knuckled hand and started back along the slippery boards, calling: “—but if the lad ain’t feeling well, I’d get him below soon!”
“We were just taking some air!” Cadrach bellowed after him. “We’ll go ashore tomorrow morning, most likely! Thanks to you, good captain!”
As Old Gealsgiath stumped away, fading into the rain and mist, Cadrach’s companion turned and confronted the monk.
“Why are we going to stay on board?” Miriamele demanded, anger plainly displayed on her pretty, sharp-featured face. “I want to get off this ship! Every hour is important!” The rain had soaked even through her thick hood, plastering her black-dyed hair across her forehead in sodden spikes.
“Hush, milady, hush.” This time Brother Cadrach’s smile seemed a touch more genuine. “Of course we’re going off—nearly as soon as we’ve touched the dock, don’t you worry.”
Miriamele was angry. “Then why did you tell him…?”
“Because sailors talk, and I’ll wager none of them talk louder or longer than our captain. There was no way for keeping him quiet, Saint Muirfath knows. If we’d given him money to keep silent, he’d just get drunk faster and be talking sooner. This way, if anyone’s listening for news of us, they’ll at least think we’re aboard the ship still. Maybe they’ll sit and watch for us to come off until it sets out again, back to Hernystir. Meanwhile, we’ll be quietly ashore in Ansis Pellipé.” Cadrach clucked his tongue in satisfaction.
“Oh.” Miriamele considered silently for a moment. She had underestimated the monk again. Cadrach had been sober since they had boarded Gealsgiath’s ship in Abaingeat. Small wonder, since the voyage had made him violently ill several times- But there was a shrewd brain behind that plump face. She wondered again—and not for the last time, she felt sure—what Cadrach was really thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “That was a good idea. Do you really think somebody is looking for us?”
“We would be fools to suppose otherwise, my lady.” The monk took her elbow and headed back coward the limited shelter of the lower deck.
When at last she saw Perdruin, it was as if a great ship had risen out of the unquiet ocean, coming suddenly upon their small, frail craft. One moment it was a deeper blackness off the bow; in the next, as though a final curtain of obscuring mist had been drawn away, it loomed overhead like the prow of a mighty vessel.
A thousand lights gleamed through the fog, small as fireflies, making the great rock sparkle in the night. As Gealsgiath’s cargo-hauler glided in through the harbor passages, the island continued to rise above them. its mountainous back a wedge of darkness pushing ever upward, blocking out even the mist-cloaked sky.
Cadrach had chosen to remain below decks. Miriamele was quite satisfied with the arrangement. She stood at the railing, listening to the sailors shouting and laughing in the lantern-pricked darkness as they furled the sails. Voices rose in ragged song, only to end abruptly in curses and more laughter. The wind was gentler here, in the lee of the harborside buildings.
Miriamele felt a strange warmth climb up her back and into her neck, and knew without thinking what it signified: she was happy. She was free and going where she chose to go; that had not been true for as long as she could remember.
She had not set foot on Perdruin since she had been a small girl, but she still felt, in a way, as if she were returning home. Her mother Hylissa had brought her here when Miriamele had been very young, as part of a visit to Hylissa’s sister, the Duchess Nessalanta in Nabban. They had stopped in Ansis Pellipé to pay a courtesy call on Count Streáwe. Miriamele remembered little of the visit—she had been very young—except a kind old man who had given her a tangerine, and a high-walled garden with a tiled walkway. Miriamele had chased a long-tailed, beautiful bird while her mother drank wine and laughed and talked with other grown people.
The kind old man must have been the count, she decided. It was certainly a wealthy man’s garden they had visited, a carefully-tended paradise hidden in a castle courtyard. There had been flowering trees and beautiful silver and golden fish floating in a pond set right into the path…The harbor wind gained strength, tugging at her cloak. The railing was
cold beneath her fingers, so she tucked her hands under her arms.
It had been not long after the visit to Ansis Pellipé that her mother had gone on another journey, this time without Miriamele. Uncle Josua had taken Hylissa to join Miriamele’s father Elias, who was in the field with his army. That had been the journey which had crippled Josua, and from which Hylissa had never returned. Elias, almost mute with grief, too full of anger to speak of death, would only tell his little daughter that her mother could never come back. In her child’s mind, Miriamele had pictured her mother captive in a walled garden somewhere, a lovely garden like the one they had visited on Perdruin, a beautiful place that Hylissa could never leave, even to visit the daughter who missed her so…
That daughter lay awake many nights, long after her handmaidens had tucked her into bed, staring up into the darkness and plotting to rescue her lost mother from a flowering prison threaded by endless, tiled paths…
Nothing had been right since then. It was as though her father had drunk of some slow poison when her mother had died, some terrible venom that had festered within, turning him into stone.
Where was he? What was High King Elias doing at this moment?
Miriamele looked up at the shadowy, mountainous island and felt her moment of joy swept away as the wind might snatch a kerchief from her hand. Even now, her father was laying siege to Naglimund, venting his terrible rage on the walls of Josua’s keep.
Isgrimnur, old Towser, all of them were fighting for their lives even as she floated in past the harborlights, riding the ocean’s dark, smooth back.
And the kitchen boy Simon, with his red hair and his awkward, well-meaning ways, his unconcealed concerns and confusions—she felt a pang of sorrow as she thought of him. He and the little troll had gone into the trackless north, perhaps gone forever.
Miriamele smiled bitterly. So many impostures. She was free now of her father’s court, but she was still posing. As a sad child in Nabban and Meremund, she had often pretended happiness. The lie had been better than answering the well-meaning but unanswerable questions. As her father had retreated from her she had pretended not to care, even though she had felt that she was being eaten away from within.
Where was God, the younger Miriamele had wondered; where was He when love was slowly hardening into indifference and care becoming duty? Where was God when her father Elias begged Heaven for answers, his daughter listening breathlessly in the shadows outside his chamber?
Perhaps He believed my lies, she thought bitterly as she walked down the rain-slicked wooden steps onto the lower deck. Perhaps He wanted to believe them, so He could get on with more important things.
The city on the hillside was bright-lit and the rainy night was full of masked revelers. It was Midsummer Festival in Ansis Pellipé: despite the unseasonable weather, the narrow, winding streets were riotous with merrymakers.
Miriamele stepped back as a half-dozen men dressed as chained apes were led past, clanking and staggering. Seeing her standing in the shadowy doorway of one of the shuttered houses, a drunken actor turned, his false fur matted with rainwater, and paused as if to say something to her. Instead, the ape-man belched, smiled apologetically through the mouth-hole of his skewed mask, then returned his sorrowful gaze to the uneven cobblestones before him.
As the apes tumbled away, Cadrach reappeared suddenly at her side.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “You have been gone nearly an hour.”
“Not so long, lady, surely.” Cadrach shook his head. “I have been finding our certain things that will be useful. Very useful.” He looked around. “Ah, but it’s a riotous night, is it not?”
Miriamele tugged Cadrach out into the street once more. “You’d never know there was war in the north and people dying,” she said disapprovingly. “You wouldn’t know that Nabban may soon be at war, too, and Nabban’s just across the bay.”
“Of course not, my lady,” Cadrach huffed, matching his shorter strides to hers as best he could. “It is the way of the Perdruinese not to know such things. That is how they remain so cheerfully uninvolved in most conflicts, managing to arm and supply both the eventual victor and the eventual vanquished—and turn a neat profit.” He grinned and wiped water from his eyes. “Now there’s something your Perdruin-folk would be going to war about; protecting their profit.”
“Well, I’m surprised no one’s invaded this place.” The princess wasn’t sure why the heedlessness of Ansis Pellipé’s citizens should nettle her so, but she was nevertheless feeling exceedingly nettlesome.
“Invade? And muddy the waterhole from which all drink?” Cadrach seemed astonished. “My dear Miriamele…your pardon, my dear Malachias—I must remember, since we will soon be moving in circles where your true name is not unfamiliar—my dear Malachias, you have much to learn about the world.” He paused for a moment as another gang of costumed folk swirled by, engaged in a loud, drunken argument about the words to some song. “There,” the monk said, gesturing after them, “there is an example of why that which you say will never come to pass.
Were you hearing that little debate?”
Miriamele pulled her hood lower against the slanting rain. “Some of it,” she replied. “What does it matter?”
“It is not the subject of the argument that matters, but the method.
They were all Perdruinese, unless my ear for accents has gone wrong from all that ocean roar—yet they were arguing in the Westerling tongue.”
“So?”
“Ah,” Cadrach squinted his eyes as if looking for something down the
crowded, lantern-lit street, but continued speaking all the while. “You and I are speaking Westerling, but except for your Erkynlandish fellow-countrymen—and not even all of them—no one else speaks it among their own people. Rimmersmen in Elvritshalla use Rimmerspakk; we Hernystiri speak our own tongue when in Crannhyr or Hernysadharc. Only the Perdruinese have adopted your grandfather King John’s universal language, and to them it is now truly their first language.”
Miriamele stopped in the middle of the slickened roadway, letting the press of celebrants eddy around her. A thousand oil lamps raised a false dawn above the housetops. “I’m tired and hungry. Brother Cadrach, and I don’t understand what you are getting at.”
“Simply this. The Perdruinese are what they are because they strive to please—or, put more clearly, they know which way the wind is blowing and they run that direction, so the wind is always at their backs. If we Hernystir-folk were a conquering people, the merchants and sailors of Perdruin would be practicing their Hernystiri. ‘If a king wants apples,’ as the Nabbanai say, ‘Perdruin plants orchards.’ Any other nation would be foolish to attack such a compliant friend and helpful ally.”
“Then you are saying that the souls of these Perdruin-folk are for sale?” Miriamele demanded. “That they have no loyalty to any but the strong?”
Cadrach smiled. “That has the ring of disdain, my lady, but it seems an accurate summing up, yes.”
“Then they’re no better than –” she looked around carefully, fighting down anger, “—no better than whores!”
The monk’s weathered face took on a cool, distant cast; his smile was now a mere formality. “Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess,” he said quietly. “Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.”
Miriamele thought about the obvious truth of what Cadrach had said as they walked on, but could not understand why it made her so unutterably sad.
The cobbled paths of Ansis Pellipé not only wound tortuously, in many places they climbed in gouged stone steps up the very face of the hill, then spiraled back down, doubling and redoubling, crossing each other at odd angles like a basket of serpents. On either side the houses stood shoulder to shoulder, most with windows shadowed like the closed eyes of sleepers, some ablaze with light and music. The foundations of the houses tilted upward from the streets, each structure clinging precariously to the hillside so that their upper stories seemed to lean over the constricted roads. As her hunger and fatigue began to make her giddy, Miriamele felt at times that she was back beneath the close-stooping trees of Aldheorte Forest.
Perdruin was a cluster of hills surrounding Sta Mirore, the central mountain. Their lumpy backs rose up almost directly from the island’s rocky verges, looking over the Bay of Emettin. Perdruin’s silhouette thus resembled a mother pig and her feeding young. There was little flat land anywhere, except in the saddles where high hills shouldered together, so the villages and towns of Perdruin clung to the faces of these hills like gulls’ nests. Even Ansis Pellipé, the great seaport and the seat of Count Streáwe’s house, was built on the steep slopes of a promontory that the residents called Harborstone. In many places the citizens of Ansis Pellipé could stand on one of the capital’s hill-hugging streets and wave to their neighbors on the thoroughfare below.
“I must eat something,” Miriamele said at last, breathing heavily. They stood at a turnout of one of the looping streets, a place where they could look down between two buildings to the lights of the foggy harbor below. The dull moon hung in the clouded sky like a chip of bone.
“I am also ready to stop, Malachias,” panted Cadrach.
“How far is this abbey?”
“There is no abbey, or at least we are not going to such a place.”
“But you told the captain…oh.” Miriamele shook her head, feeling the damp heaviness of her hood and cloak, “Of course. So, then, where are we going?”
Cadrach stared at the moon and laughed quietly. “Wherever we wish, my friend. I do t
hink there is a tavern of some repute at the top of this street: I must confess I was leading us in that general direction. Certainly not because I enjoy climbing these goirach hills.”
“A tavern? Why not a hostel, so we can find a bed after we eat?”
“Because, begging your pardon, it is not eating that I am thinking about. I have been aboard that abominable ship longer than I care to think. I will take my rest after I have indulged my thirst.” Cadrach wiped his hand across his mouth and grinned. Miriamele did not much like the look in his eyes.
“But there was a tavern every cubit down below…” she began. “Exactly. Taverns full of drunken tale-passers and minders of others’ business. I cannot be taking my well-deserved rest in such a place.” He turned his back on the moon and began stumping away up the road. “Come, Malachias. It is only a little farther, I am sure.”
It seemed that during Midsummer Festival there was no such thing as an uncrowded tavern, but at least the drinkers in The Red Dolphin were not cheek to cheeky as they were in the dockside inns, only elbow to elbow. Miriamele gratefully slid down onto a bench set against the far wall and let the wash of conversation and song flow over her. Cadrach, after putting down his sack and walking stick, moved off to find himself a mug of Traveler’s Reward. He returned after only a moment.
“Good Malachias, I had forgotten how nearly beggared I am from paying our sea passage. Do you have a cintis-piece or two I might employ in the removal of thirst?”
Miriamele dug in her purse and produced a palm full of coppers. “Get me some bread and cheese,” she said, pouring the coins into the monk’s outstretched hand.