TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  The scouts organized to depart.

  'One more thing,' Pesquil called after them. 'Any man not rescued by nightfall stays where he lies. All territory we've covered that's clean stays guarded. I want no barbarian foray skulking in to foul our backtrail in the dark.'

  Hand signals answered; his men were efficient, those few inclined to argue long since broken to sharp discipline. The scouts who served in the headhunters' league knew very well: the ones who followed orders stayed alive.

  Yet even for scouts grown crafty through experience, Valleygap offered no respite. The spring-traps set waiting in the path of the teams who laboured to help the wounded were not set to kill, but to cripple.

  'The scrub is full riddled,' a shaking veteran reported, arrived with the litters into the safety of the camp. Behind him, borne gasping in a stupor of pain, came the fallen, the arms which had attempted to help their fallen comrades staked through with sharpened slivers of wood; or their legs, gashed white to the bone, if the bones themselves were not snapped.

  Under full night, the moon scored the ridges like polish on ivory above the black swale of Valleygap. Hunched in a hellish flare of torch light, Pesquil counted the best of his scouts among this first round of casualties. Gripped by brittle patience, he regarded each one's suffering, then cracked orders that made men leap to fetch garrison healers to attend them. 'Let every town-coddled lancer see the cost of fighting Red-beard's barbarians. Then let them hear 'til they shake in their boots, for when they face the Master of Shadow on the field, they will suffer a thousand times worse!'

  Anger brewed like live current around the campfires. Wood was too scarce for the cooks to bake bread; the brick ovens stayed dismantled, while men choked down dry chunks of biscuit and chewed leathery slabs of sour cheese. Over talk and the measured tread of sentries, above the soft snorts of horses who pawed in complaint for scant fodder and the low of disgruntled oxen, they heard the brisk concern of their officers. Then chilling as nightmare came the shattering screams as a deep gash was cauterized, or a bone set straight for the splint. The cliff scarps shredded every cry into echoes. Clean wood smoke laced through the sickening stink of charred flesh. The men mustered to bring war to the southern spit at Merior lay that night in their blankets, unsleeping and stifled by raw dread.

  Caithdein of Shand

  Two days prior to autumn equinox, the workers in the shipyard at Merior cut seasoned lengths of pitch pine to start the new brigantine's decking. Arithon was not on hand to mark the occasion, nor would he be present as the keel was laid down to begin the construction of the second. Withdrawn from the company of his workers, he ferried the comatose person of Dakar aboard his painted little sloop. He had not returned to the Koriani herbalist's cottage even for the hour when the last splints were removed from the boy's wrist to show bone and muscle healed straight and smooth beneath a spiderlaced mesh of pink scars. The same morning, remarked by the fishwives, Talliarthe slipped her mooring and set sail.

  The course she steered through fair-weather swells was due northwest off the reefs; the passage she accomplished was brief. She made port in the harbour at Telzen to place orders at the mills for new lumber and to pick up a packet of dispatches. Bent to dark brooding by ill news from the north, and a recount of unmentionable tragedy, Arithon pressed on upcoast and dropped anchor in a forested cove twenty leagues distant from Elssine.

  Alone in the blaze of a cloudless, calm morning, he rowed his dory to the beach.

  At a time and place most carefully appointed, he grounded the boat in an exploding flock of terns and dragged her up beyond the tidemark. Wrapped in air that smelled of scrub pine and sea wrack, surrounded by the plaintive calls of fishing birds, he whistled a clear major triplet.

  Then he perched on the trunk of a storm-toppled palm and waited, hopeful that his past request for a rendezvous had been received in good grace. In time, a lanky clansman clad in deerhide emerged from the brush to meet him.

  No rustled foliage betrayed the presence of others, though such scouts were certainly there, crouched in concealment amid the vine-choked thickets and oat grass, and alert behind their strung bows. Well versed in his dealings with clansmen, Arithon understood the wrong move would see him skewered with a hail of broadheads at short range. Unprepossessing, a target limned in full sunlight, he showed no sign that he cared.

  The clansman spoke, and was answered by prearranged words in Paravian. A carved wooden token changed hands.

  His other lean fist never far from his knives, the scout fingered the incised falcon set against a shaved crescent moon, device of Shand's past high kings. 'Ath!' He pulled a vexed frown. Beneath mottled streaks of stain to mask the line of his profile, he looked little older than Jieret. 'It's his Grace of Rathain? Our chieftain's going to lose silver. He wagered on a galley flying banners and a retinue prinked with large emeralds. Is your vaunted prince still on board?'

  A smile flicked Arithon's lips as he rose. 'My sloop holds a fat prophet with a belly ache. He was much too sick to come ashore.'

  A pause ensued. When the visitor listed no further passengers, the young scout recovered slack manners with a flush that left him dusky to the hairline. The unassuming figure before him was given a second, piercing study, though prior assessment had been accurate: the black-haired arrival carried no visible badge of rank. Small and neatly made, he wore the loose, shabby dress of a fisherman and carried no weapon beyond a longsword in black metal, the sleek line of its sweptback quillons half-buried in a fold of linen shirt. 'Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn? Your Grace?'

  'Just Arithon, if you please. As well, you can call off your hunting pack.'

  The clan scout jerked up his chin. 'Not so fast. Any man could carve out an old high king's device or parrot a phrase in the old tongue. Show me proof. I'd be certain of your bloodline.'

  'None but a fool would lay claim to my name, with half of the north roused to arms.' Turned brisk in distaste, Arithon yanked loose his right cuff tie. He peeled back the sleeve and bared for inspection the deep, welted scar seared into the length of his forearm. The brand had been left by the light bolt cast against him by his half-brother that had doomed him to Desh-thiere's curse.

  'That will satisfy.' Relieved to be spared a proving wrought of magecraft or shadows, the scout pursed his lips and shrilled the piping call of a plover into the thicket behind him.

  A movement behind the pine branches revealed the form of a man, who unfolded from a crouch and emerged on a cat's stride onto the sandy verge. He topped the seed tufts of the oat grass by a head. A black and tan laminate bow made of horn hung from his immensely broad shoulder. He had a beard like rooted wire, clipped short. A fat black pearl strung on a braided cord nested in the tanned hollow of his throat. His hair capped his skull, glossy as a sable's pelt licked through with silver, and salted pure white at the temples. The bones of his face were like fitted, stamped bronze, and imposing, coupled with straight brows and eyes of lucent turquoise.

  'As your Grace may see, the hunting party consisted of one,' he addressed in a baritone flawed in the grain like burred oak.

  He side-stepped to display the arrows in his shoulder quiver, fletched with grey heron quills and pointed for small game. The sword he carried was a masterwork of arms, figured with interlace that made its great size appear deceptively delicate.

  Arithon tilted his head to measure the frame that towered over him. He did not repeat the error of the scout. 'Lord Erlien s'Taleyn, High Earl of Alland?'

  'To a prince who wears rags, plain Erlien will do.' Frost-crystal eyes swept the scion of Rathain and dismissed the whole man in fierce challenge. 'Your mother descended from our own s'Ahelas royalty, it's said. Well, I set no truth to the claim. The blood of the kings my forebears served was substantial, and you but a mouse with scarcely the growth to do more than bloody my kneecap.'

  Arithon shrugged, grave-faced. 'Be warned then, my lord. Since I favour my father, that should charge you to keep careful guard on your kneecap. What's mor
e, if you've lost any silver over galleys and flags, I shall pay off the debt myself.'

  Erlien burst into deep-chested laughter, while the pearl at his neck danced on its tether of thong. 'Dharkaron himself! I'll admit we tested your presumptions. Since in fact you have none, you're most welcome to the Kingdom of Shand.' He drew a black-handled dirk from the back of his belt, kissed the reversed blade, then intoned in overdone courtesy, 'As caithdein and this realm's steward, my life's pledge as surety for visiting princes. I beg for the sake of tradition that you leave my poor shanks intact.'

  'Dharkaron witness, I might.' Arithon stretched his stride to fall in step as the chieftain and his scout led off through the undergrowth. Not about to seem cowed by the massive man looming beside him, he added, 'Should my sloop be left anchored in plain sight?'

  'Don't trouble.' Erlien flashed back a bear's lazy grin, hands flexed in a disquieting, powerful contrast as he sheathed his enormous knife. 'Your boat's a fine morsel of bait. Should a galley put in to investigate, we'll lighten her cargo as forfeit. City captains well know to steer clear of these coves. We've sunk the keels from under the rash ones, or any who played cocky and forgot.'

  Affable, even easy, as the chieftain's manner seemed, the stalking grace of his tread reflected resounding unease. He carried paired dirks in the cuffs of his boots, and he skirted his native thickets like quarry.

  Vexed to quick chills by his bardic intuition, Arithon offered, 'I'll surrender my sword, if that would reassure you.'

  Erlien slammed to a stop. Spattered with sun through the chinks in high pine trees, his shoulders stayed unrelaxed. The eyes turned to Arithon were narrowed and sullen amid a wind-lined mesh of crow's feet. 'And that would do me good with your full command of shadows at my back?'

  'It might.' Arithon sustained that burning, light gaze, though his palms broke into a fine sweat. 'The blade is the same one carried by my ancestors. She bears the name Alithiel.'

  'Paravian-wrought. I'd heard of her.' As a thrush took wing in a whir of drab feathers, Erlien smothered a hairtrigger start. 'Then the legend is true, that your sword is enspelled to dazzle an attacker into blindness?'

  'Only if the defending cause is just,' amended Arithon. 'We'll both keep our sight. I didn't come here to force any favours through sorcery.'

  'Yet you're a peril in our midst all the same.' Erlien tapped his weapon hilt, the fringes on his buckskins the only ripple in resinous air. Cut off from the sea-breeze, the scrub forest was stifling, the sky through green and bronze needles cerulean as feed enamel. 'If you'd give up your arms, what would you balk at? Being tied, or blindfolded, or dragged through the salt bogs at knife point? To put the issue baldly, does any means exist to disarm the dire powers of your birthright?'

  The scout drawn in as witness of a sudden looked jaggedly unsettled.

  Very still, his eyes wide open under spiked, dark lashes, Arithon forced his stance to stay easy despite the prickles that stabbed down his spine. 'Dharkaron as my witness,' he said at length. 'If when you're finished I can stop Lysaer's headhunters from reiving through Shand after scalps, no paltry indignity you might name lies outside the reach of my patience.'

  'And if I prevented you leaving?' Erlien pressed. 'There's a price on your head, in Alestron.'

  The scout momentarily forgot to breathe, as the bristling tension between the two men strained thinner and tighter and more deadly.

  'For that cause, I would certainly fight.' In a blinding, smooth move, Arithon unsheathed his longsword. Paravian steel sang faintly at the kiss of the air to its edge. The black metal shimmered flint-sharp with highlights: scribed along its length, the interlaced angles of silver runes gleamed, rainbowed like chipped crystal, but raised to no pulse of ancient magic. Only the commonplace reflections of green pine and bright sunlight grazed its polish as Arithon held the tip at guard point.

  'Why fence with manners?' invited the Prince of Rathain to Shand's top-ranking chieftain. 'Let's settle this now, then talk like sane men afterward.'

  'To first blood, then,' Erlien agreed in fierce pleasure. He shrugged off his bow and quiver and cleared his own steel to do battle.

  With no appointed arbiter and not a second's breath of warning, he attacked with all the force of his muscular height and stature.

  Arithon matched that killing thrust with a parry that staggered him backward. Small, compact, he moved like wind itself. But no feat of quick footwork could counter Erlien's greater reach. The high earl pressed his advantage of size to the fullest. His weapon slapped back in riposte with a skill that whistled air; clanged into Arithon's guard like a forge hammer.

  The dismayed scout jumped back in avoidance, while paired blades whined and clashed, flat ground to flat in a nerve-painful scream of separation.

  Whatever Erlien's claim at the outset, the offensive he waged against a man not an enemy implied no possibility of quarter.

  Caged in caught sunlight, the whickered beat of steel was unsparing of life and limb. Before the clan lord's bracing, fast offensive, Arithon was driven hither and yon like a wasp at the whim of a gale. The shocking clash of each parry left him no space for recovery. He required full strength to turn the battering blows, to deflect the chieftain's larger blade away from a crippling strike.

  The ground itself offered hazard. Rotted trunks lay matted in creepers and thicket, any open space between laced with roots and littered in sticks and fallen pine cones. Too beset to mind his footing, unable to glance behind to secure a clean path for retreat, Arithon ducked and twisted by cat's reflex. Only the catch of greenbriars against a calf, or a poke of stemmed scrub, warned when his way lay impeded. Sand and matted needles offered dismal purchase, a sore disadvantage. He must meet each of Erlien's strikes in perfect form, or risk a slipped step. To be jostled off-balance would bring disaster. He would be run through or cut before he fell, and time and again, the treacherous soil gave and parted under his light tread. Too hard pressed for speech, he pitched his body to the limits of speed and reflex in a stripped labour of self-defence.

  Inevitably, the strain told on Arithon fast. Blade locked to blade in a screaming bind, his hands ran hot sweat, and his lips peeled back from his teeth as wrist and sinew resisted the twisting pressure that sought to disarm him. The spiked limbs of a deadfall hedged his back. He could not spring clear, but had to muscle his sword against Erlien's, for agonized seconds bearing up under the levering brunt of the chieftain's remorseless weight. A twist of his body unlimbered his sword from Erlien's. He jumped left, the only way open to him.

  And ready for that saving step yet again was a whistling blue fence of steel.

  Taxed sinews this time could not respond soon enough. Arithon had his blade up, but not positioned. The blow whined into black steel and slid through, diverted from a chest strike, but not clear of his left upper arm. A line of scarlet opened through Arithon's sleeve.

  'First blood!' the scout cried in close to hysterical relief. 'My lord, the match is yours.'

  But the same hair-trigger instinct that had saved Arithon from being mired in a thicket warned him now not to lower his guard.

  Erlien's next riposte clanged into a solid parry, and the next and the next, the very same. Driven into a hollow bristled with saplings, the Shadow Master thrashed a near-fatal step into the grabbing twigs of the brush. Then, inspired perhaps by extremity, he leaped backward into the deep undergrowth. To reach him, Erlien must follow. Swords pinged and sheared through green sticks. Pruned bits of foliage took scything flight. Arithon burrowed backwards like a rabbit and emerged on clear ground, while Erlien smashed blundering after him. For the fast time since the duel started, they were parted by more than a sword's length.

  Arithon stood, desperate for respite, heaving painful, fast breaths, his sleeves plastered to lean limbs by running sweat and blood. He did not look like a mage or a prince. Beaten to graceless exhaustion, he had no breath for words, no vitality left to frame expression. The sword still raised over an arched mesh of briars tre
mbled in the struck fall of sunlight through the high crowns of the trees.

  No less tired, his buckskins patched dark on his shoulders and his fringes flecked in hacked leaves, Erlien lowered his blade, braced the pommel against his hip, and deliberately stripped to the waist. Then, without speech, he discarded his shed leathers, caught up his weapon and resumed.

  Every rule of mercy was abrogated. To the scout, watching agonized as blade met blade in a screech of choked-off vibration, disaster seemed unavoidable. The odds had been pushed too far. Cornered beyond recourse against an opponent who outmatched him, Arithon was going to be forced to use sorcery or shadows just to avoid getting butchered.

  The driving brilliance had gone from his speed. His steps in retreat were clumsy. Snatched off his rhythm by roots and dense brush, time and again he had to grasp his blade two-handed to stave off Erlien's assault. Blood flew in shocked droplets from the marked arm that, even bracing, quivered from sapped strength.

  Fatigue had blunted the edge from Erlien's style also. Pared to a bare framework of training, he was solid and methodically sure. The force of his body behind each attack wore and worried and hammered his slighter opponent past telling. Blade sheared on blade through a harried retreat that strained the nerves in suspension. Each riposte that threatened ending became snatched back and sustained by Arithon's beleaguered guard, enjoined in dogged effort to defy his inevitable fate. He took a cut on the elbow, shallow, but distracting for the sting; then, in short succession, two more marks on his shoulder.

  Sawn to a tortured pitch of tension, the scout scrubbed sweat from his eyes. He watched Arithon crash into another thicket. Twigs whipped. Steel snicked through leaves and clanged in indignant embrace. Tattered greens fluttered down to the whistling grunt of effort through locked teeth as Arithon smashed sidewards through sticks to evade a lethal cut to the head.