TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  A kinetic sense of her wakening must have reached him.

  'Elaira?' Arithon inquired, softer than a sigh. 'The lad rests quietly. Forgive me, but for you, I had to stay to be certain. Someone had to watch over your recovery.'

  A frown marred Elaira's forehead, for his need to excuse what was obvious: had she failed to awaken from this backlash on her own, he alone held the masterbard's talents required to revitalize spirit with flesh. The initiates of Ath's Brotherhood owned the knowledge to help, but her collapse was immediate and their hostel lay leagues down the road.

  Arithon had ignored no contingency. His lyranthe lay as he had left her, leaned against the wall by the headboard and ready to his hand if need required. The filaments of fourteen silvered strings scribed lines in reflection, captured intact from the candleflame.

  Delivered into warmth from the haze of oblivion, Elaira realized another thing. Arithon s'Ffalenn had never before spoken her name while alone in her presence. That belated recognition shot a prickle of reaction clear through her.

  Attuned to the uneven catch to her breathing, Arithon lifted his hand from her waist. As he had many times through the hours of the night, he trailed reverent fingers through her hair to smooth an unruly wisp from her temple.

  The barest taut frisson knit the length of her back in response. A sound of dismay escaped him; as though he willed her to stay peaceful in her daze, and felt deprived by the speed of her recovery.

  Elaira could have laughed in that moment for sheer joy. His presence of itself had called her back, as no other living spirit ever could.

  Then event caught up with reality. Imprinted against the sounding board of his body, she felt him gather himself tense, to disengage and rise at once. Her plea escaped before thought. 'Please stay.'

  His words viced to indifference, Arithon said, 'Lady, I'm relieved to see you waken. On my way, I'll send Jinesse to attend you.'

  The desperate force of will in his effort to pull free shuddered through the contact between them. An awful, uglier truth arched across their tuned empathy: that what feeling he had would be denied out of selfpreservation. He still believed her interest was false, created on command by Koriani aim to manipulate him.

  And anger shocked through Elaira like white fire, that her attraction had been genuine long and long before Morriel's hideous plotting had seized on her love as a gambit. This she determined to let him see, before the consequences ruined them both.

  Strong, sun-browned from her long days of foraging, Elaira stirred against his move to rise. She pressed him back and looked up, and locked his gaze with her own. 'Before Ath, before life, I love you. That's been true, I think, since a rash escapade led to a hayloft in an inn yard.'

  She had just one moment to realize how weary he was himself, and how ill-prepared. No defence did he have, no ready barrier, as she moved in his arms, then closed the embrace and laid her lips against his in surrender. An immediate quiver lanced through him. The hands at her back closed hard and locked. His kiss met hers in a riptide of unleashed passion. Scalded, consumed, uplifted, exalted, for the unforgettable space of a heartbeat they were one flesh and one mind. The harmony between them stopped thought and waived every limiting fear for the future.

  Then Arithon s'Ffalenn made a sound like a man lashed to torture.

  His head turned, broke her hold and snapped aside. He jerked upright in a wildcat recoil, as a creature roped down for the knife might escape its deathblow in a slaughter pen.

  'Ath, oh Ath!' he gasped, his voice broken.

  Elaira sought his expression, and saw the face of a man betrayed.

  Her own pain re-echoed in devastated imprint, she saw his eyes, stretched wide and bleak in the candlelight as he forced his breath back into stopped lungs. 'What have I done? Dharkaron show us both mercy, your feelings are as mine, and I thought Morriel had sent you!'

  Pinned on the prongs of that ugly, dual truth, Elaira lost words. She had spirit in her only to endorse the more truthful obligation. Spurred by the overriding cry of her heart, she raised a hand in comfort to cup the side of his face.

  Her touch never connected.

  A whirlwind of motion heaved her up, flung her back. Arithon's hands turned wholly ruthless as he twisted out from underneath her. Discarded in a shivering heap upon the bed, Elaira clawed back tumbled hair and blinked to clear her vision from a ruinous, blinding fall of tears.

  She never heard his step cross the room. But his pose said all his speech could not: back turned, head bent, his expressive fingers fanned in white outline against the board wall, while his shirtless body was raked and raked over in wretched, quivering spasms.

  'Don't come,' he forced out as he sensed her intent to arise.

  The slithering fall of the blanket turned informer, or maybe the shift of air across his skin: she would disregard his plea. This time, he would be pressured too far. Integrity, joy, the bright, tragic fabric of the miracle shared between them would unstring all of his control. 'Don't come. I beg you, for your life's sake, don't.'

  'For my life?' Elaira gasped. Her surprise yawned as wide as the night that pressed inward, to drown the failing candle on its stand. 'Beloved, what is there of me that is not yours before anything?' She advanced a step toward him, and the creak of a loose floorboard seemed to peel his raw nerves and wring out a drawn, silent scream.

  The next second, her raised hand would touch him. He sucked an agonized breath, then in scalpel sharp diction, launched into flat recitation: 'All states of fleshly desire to renounce, this I vow. All ties of the heart, of family, of husband and lover to put aside, this I vow.'

  Elaira stopped, stunned, between steps.

  The words fell and chilled her, unflinching as steel sliced through a fall of running water, and familiar: hatefully abhorrent to the last, most damning consonant. Arithon gave her, line by line from a masterbard's knowledge of law, the binding oath sworn by a Koriani initiate over the Prime's master crystal.

  The phrases continued, implacable. 'And should I weaken or falter and come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be forfeit, body and mind. This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint as surety through all my living days.'

  There came a space, rasped to dissonance by the chirp of the cricket.

  Elaira masked her face and muffled her ears, helpless. She could not escape fate. No move forward was possible, now, even to unman him, even to defeat the unassailable integrity that acted in sacrifice to spare her: not without admitting that her Prime Matriarch had a hand in this design. To say that leave had been granted to break her order's primary vow was to gut an inviolable trust.

  What Elaira felt for this man was real, untarnished. Yet she could not wrench hope back into her hands, nor cross the gulf, nor complete the desire between them. Not without sullying forever the shining truth of her love, that Morriel's manipulation had no part of.

  No word existed under earth or sky to explain that her presence here was less due to Koriani intrigue than to the burden of Sethvir's warning prophecy.

  She must have made a sound in her torment.

  For Arithon gathered himself again and forced speech. 'Lady, for the love that I bear you, let me leave. Your order's vows cannot tolerate my claim. Give me torture and loss, give me death, before I become the instrument that seals your utter destruction. Of all the atrocities I have done in the past, or may commit in the future, that one I could never survive.'

  There was nothing to do, nothing at all, but stand aside, mute, and let him pass.

  Convergence

  While the craftsmen at Merior's shipyard whisper among themselves that the night at the healer's has brought their master back changed, his tolerance thin-drawn as wire, the brig Black Drake makes port bringing word that city garrisons in Rathain have been called to muster at Etarra; and the news causes Arithon to send his request, asking rendezvous with a clan lord who dwells in the forest of Selk
wood ...

  Since the portent which slashed the night sky in the hour of Lady Maenalle's execution raised the city of Isaer into panic, and while Lysaer's officers labour to dispel fraught dread among the troops, Asandir rides out from Althain Tower to seek the clan encampment along the Valenford River and invest the caithdein's grandson with Fellowship sanction to inherit her powers of office ...

  When word from the watcher on the seventh lane reaches the Koriani Council that Elaira's attempt to bind the Shadow Master through affection has been met with flat failure, Morriel Prime issues sharp rebuke as her First Senior questions the outcome: 'Our initiate did not fail to gain Arithon's trust. On the contrary, rather her prince has outmanoeuvred us, and through flaws in our own design..

  XIII. WAR HOST

  High summer cast blistering light over the anvilled stone summits and knife-edged cornices of the Mathorn Mountains. Under their frowning rims, the taint of pine resin filled the copses, huddled in their tangles of black shade. Witch hazel grew riot in the defiles, floored in moss and speared sedges, and hazed silver in clouds of midges where springs trickled down from the heights.

  But where the garrisons from Rathain's allied cities mustered on campaign to destroy the Shadow Master, the land bore a seamed, brown scar.

  Sunset glared over Etarra's brick walls, a dull, red eye through the dust churned up by its war camp. Lysaer s'Ilessid and his force from Avenor were a fortnight overdue. Under crowding and the added strain of delay, the masses of idle troops and their uneasy convocation of commanders strained loyalties and stressed the ties of diplomacy.

  Men grew to hate the scrape of crickets in the scrub as they quartered the stripped hillsides to meet the insatiable need for wood to fuel their cookfires. Outside the high walls, the heat at day's end hung over the stubble of grasses, sucked brown by the rainless season or else milled to chaff by the hooves of foraging livestock. The breezes settled at nightfall, to leave a rank, unhealthy morass: the reek of urine-soaked muck from the picket lines; of unburied garbage and open latrines; and the meadow scent of hayfields flattened under the burden of field pavilions and provision tents. Each day brought more arrivals, with yoked teams of thin-flanked oxen hauling their groaning supply wagons past the knots of beasts and the stalled carts of the trade caravans displaced by right of war.

  Last to arrive, Avenor's companies marched in to the snap of blazoned flags and the horn calls of officers. Wilted as any other troop in their sweat-dampened surcoats, the discipline on them sparkled. In deadly, polished order, they raised their camp in a landscape powdered ghostly monochrome by the endless haze of gritted dust.

  The Prince of the West made his entry through the city gates at twilight to a thunderous welcome from the populace. Under the cut-brass light of a dozen torches, his jewels sparked like fallen stars amid his attendant guard of riders. At his side, Lord Commander Diegan cut a proud figure, resplendent in his silk and white diamonds and his hair ruffled sable under the bullion fringe of the royal standard. Poor folk and craftsmen thronged the wayside to throw rose petals and call appreciation. The wealthy, the guild merchants and their families, cheered and waved scarves from the balconies, which made the horses curvette and shy. The brick-trapped heat arose off the cobbles. Even the scent of the flowers crushed under the hooves of the destriers became clogged with the alkaline tang of parched earth.

  Diegan regarded his sovereign lord with critical care. Fear had blunted support from the cities in Tysan after the sorcerous portent that crossed the sky during the barbarian chieftain's execution. Lysaer had exhausted himself in diplomacy to ease the guilds' entrenched sus picion of wizardry. Only Pesquil's iron-clad handling had kept the troops in discipline through the confines of a near windless crossing to reach port at Narms.

  Now, strain and weariness masked in gay decorum, Prince Lysaer caught a posy thrown by a blushing young girl in a window. He inclined his head to a row of clapping merchants, and through teeth clamped in a fixed smile, said to Diegan, 'These were your people, once. You could show them a bit of gracious interest.'

  Straight in his saddle despite the suffocating heat, Diegan stayed stiff-lipped and obstinate. The laughing, light-hearted gallants who called his name were as strangers to him, changed as he was from the man who had ridden from these same streets two years ago. Now, chiselled lean by rough training, in fact more than title the hard commander of troops, no change in physical prowess could blunt the instinct for politics bred into his bones since childhood.

  'You're stepping into a snakepit!' he snapped to his prince. 'Sithaer's devils and furies! You've left the garrison captains of sixteen cities alone for hours to fret and wait upon your pleasure. Don't be astonished when their arguments rip your plans to useless shreds. They'll never let your officers have charge of their commands. They'd cut their own throats or see you dead, first.'

  'To the everlasting victory of our enemy,' Lysaer replied in that honeyed tone which dealt reprimand like a slap. Eyes the heavy blue of his sapphire studs stayed trained on the throngs in the street. Still smiling, he tossed the posy in his hand to a grinning, toothless grandmother, then curbed his mount hard to forestall a shy as a sprig of dried lavender winnowed down from the dormer of a perfumer's shop. 'If the prospect of bearding a few snakes leaves you squeamish, I don't need you at my side.'

  'I wouldn't miss this.' Reckless in challenge, Diegan countered, 'Etarra's guilds have a nasty, short memory for favours, and for years your sweet war camp at Avenor's been a bottomless drain on their treasury. If you're offering yourself for political sacrifice, be very sure I want to stay and watch.'

  A double-edged pride backed Diegan's stab of mockery, as much for the masses of craftsmen and brown-clad apprentices who made deferent way for their cavalcade, as for the wedge of officers, turned out in glittering and lethal perfection at their backs. This city had been his turf. The pedigree birthright he had forsaken to serve Avenor and Lysaer s'Ilessid brought a swell of tightness to his chest. As they rounded the last corner of the thoroughfare, by perverse urge, he wished the whiplash instability of Etarran intrigue to unstring this prince's self-assurance: to have just one unanticipated setback carve his insufferable royal confidence to proportions more malleably human.

  None but a fool would refuse to fight beside Lysaer s'Ilessid against the Shadow Master. But on the advent of new war, against the ugly, blood-soaked memories still carried from the past campaign in Strakewood, Lord Commander Diegan desperately wished back his lost equilibrium. He needed the cat-cool independence of the dandy he had been that gave no man leave to lead his heart.

  Heat rode the air like a blanket, thick with the reek of packed humanity. Oily fumes drifted from the great bronze pans of the braziers, lit to commemorate the arrival of s'Ilessid royalty. Above the swept marble stair, the copper-leafed doors of the council hall stood closed and latched behind guards in red and gold livery who held back the crowding, raucous throng which loitered to stare and speculate.

  Inured to the flare and temper of Etarran street mobs, secure amid the ring of Lysaer's captains, Lord Commander Diegan dismounted. He left his horse with the prince's equerry. Humidity bogged the night, like liquid glass, freighted with the calm of pending storm. Lysaer should have looked hot in his mantling layers of state finery. For this meeting, no symbol of dress had been spared: the fingers of both hands flashed jewels; his fullsleeved, damascened shirt was hemmed with bullion braid; and bracelets cuffed the bones of his wrists. Over a tabard of indigo silk, he wore Avenor's linked chain of office. Dusky red against the purer gleam of his hair lay the gemmed circlet of his royal rank.

  Every move he made embroidered by the flash of costly tailoring, he mounted the shallow stair. The duty guardsmen made way to admit him with servile humility.

  The royal escort entered the foyer, with Lord Diegan tense enough to suffocate. The knit weight of his mail bore him down beneath his surcoat, and the hair at his temples clung with sweat. To affirm his unease, the clash of the officers' we
apons and the grate of their tread across the tiles became overwhelmed at once by the clamorous argument that raged inside the great hall.

  Amid a shouted uproar and the crash of someone's banging, vain efforts to restore order, Etarra's minister of city finances mounted to a pitch of hysterical fury. 'Would you beggar the treasury? To move thirty-five thousand to sea before winter cannot be done without ruinous use of borrowed funds.'

  'Cost be damned!' cut in Lord Commander Harradene in his grinding, martial bellow. 'You want this Shadow Master dead? Then use the two eyes Ath gave you and take a long look at the map!'

  'Listen to Harradene,' a garrison captain interrupted in the clipped style of Rathain's northern coast. 'It's a dead simple case of wise tactics! Merior's the Fatemaster's very nightmare of a place to mount a large scale attack. The coast road through Shand is no option. Did your counting clerks think of supply costs over a thousand league march? Never mind we'd have no morale left to fight with. Yon sorcerer would've flown his little coop before we could hack our way down the peninsula.'

  'Ath!' In the hallway, Lord Diegan spun in alarm to his prince. 'Who told them Arithon's location! I'll have the head of the fool who spilled the secret!'

  'That could be awkward,' Lysaer said with a maddening, mild glance. 'Since the fool, as you call him, was myself.'

  Diegan's attempted rejoinder was lost as Commander Harradene's declaiming bellow rattled the glass in the sconces.

  'To Sithaer with your whining trade ministers! The only chance we have is to surround and attack in force by sea. Harry the sorcerer against a lee shore. Once he's dead, you can natter over debts and owed interest 'til you kill yourselves with sheer worry. At least our people will be safe!'

  While captains representing a dozen city garrisons raised a storm of yelping objections, and the thumping for order on the tabletops gave way to a clangorous bell of steel, the steward on duty by the entry took notice of the movement behind him: the quiet guard of officers, advancing, then the bejewelled presence they escorted. Obsequious in relief, he hurried to offer obeisance. 'Your Grace, my Lord, they are frantic. Let me announce your arrival.'