TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Aid might be garnered from Jaelot and Alestron; a fast courier was dispatched southward through the post relay to Minderl, where petition could be sped on by galley.

  'How much of an army must we have to strike at Merior?' Lysaer said in forceful conclusion. His trimmed blond hair feathered shadows over his ringed and tired eyes, yet weariness stole nothing from his character. No trace of his gnawing anguish flawed his voice or his bearing as he added, 'The village there has no resources, no garrison, nor any natural advantage of landscape beyond its troublesome access. My troops from Avenor are hardened. They'll survive a winter march. The core of our veterans from Etarra have the heart to weather setbacks. Let's look to patch together a reduced fleet, and find captains stung to rage enough to sail them.'

  Impelled by royal influence, the dignitaries of Werpoint and the factions of disgruntled officers plunged into a night of rapt planning. By first light, to a marvel of swift decisions, the process of reorganization had been detailed and begun. Lysaer scarcely ate or slept. Every moment he could spare from arbitration and the thankless, unending task of smoothing the ruffled tempers of the merchants, he spent at the bedsides of the wounded or scribing letters to the widows of the dead. No detail was too small for his attention, no diplomacy too petty to express.

  Men came into his presence worn, or frustrated, or enraged to the point of violence. Without exception, they left inspired to fresh purpose.

  Sundown of the following day saw the bedchambers requisitioned for the royal suite cluttered under layers of nautical charts, discarded stacks of dispatches marked urgent, and plates of gnawed fish bones couched upon crusts of stale bread. The carpets were gritted with sand and soil from the tramp of petitioning officers. Red-eyed, hoarse from talking, chapped from prolonged exposure to the whipping winds off the harbour, Prince Lysaer s'Ilessid cast himself with irked force into the depths of a cushioned chair.

  He looked pale enough to be ill. The speech just delivered to the garrison captains of Rathain had been a masterwork of hard statecraft. Thwarted in purpose, cast down in defeat, the prince had shown not a flicker of despair. While in the public eye of his troop captains, he had been the unbent picture of royal pride.

  Only Lord Diegan could imagine the cost and the heartache such care for his following had cost. Every promise Lysaer had made had been ruined; every hope built over the course of eight years crumbled down in one hour of fire and trickery.

  The main force would begin the laborious process of disbanding on the morrow, lest they starve where they camped in the onset of winter. The order should have caused mayhem, when trail-worn, hardened captains were told to turn back, and retrace the steps of every brutal league they had crossed since departure from Etarra. No one spoke of the fatalities they would suffer from weather and sickness throughout the arduous march home. Brought to fighting pitch, forged into a magnificent weapon, they were to turn tail with their steel unblooded. The tight-knit purpose, the hard work, the tremendous expenditure of effort and gold: all had gone for naught.

  Captain Mayor Pesquil lay under a stone cairn in Valleygap, his death reduced now to a sacrifice without purpose, another name on a list awaiting vengeance.

  For Lysaer s'Ilessid, who had dedicated himself to the cause of Arithon's defeat, there could be no more bitter a debasement.

  From his place by the emptied command table, Lord Diegan waited for the officers, petitioners, and city councilmen who clustered in knots in the corners to clear themselves from the room. As the glitter of the last jewelled pourpoint disappeared in the shadow beyond the doorway, he knuckled his eyes, crusted and stinging from the documents and tactical maps perused for hours by candlelight. 'Your Grace, you must rest. To recoup from this setback will be daunting enough. You'll never stay fit if you drive yourself harder to ease what cannot be changed.'

  Insurmountable problems would grow no less. What steps had been taken in salvage had been completed at whirlwind expediency. The markets were emptied of food. Those ships still fit to restock them had sailed for Jaelot, crammed with Avenor's best troops; the rest were a loss, sad snarls of burned spars on the beachheads.

  The tap at the chamber door was unwelcome, another needless, petty worry the s'Ilessid prince could do without, since every visitor came bearing his burden of complaints. Lord Diegan straightened sore shoulders as the mayor's chamberlain poked in his head, his sorry, hound's face a pale blur against the wilted lace of his collar. 'Your Lordship? Your Grace?' He hurried to stave off rebuttal. 'A sea captain's here. He demands to be granted admittance.'

  Lord Diegan lost his temper. 'By Ath! Send him on with the others.'

  'I tried. He wouldn't go.' The chancellor's flurried excuses cut off as Lord Diegan shot straight, hands mired to the wrists in the litter on the tabletop.

  'What ever it takes, throw him out!' A quill pen tossed awry by the Lord Commander's agitation sliced in arced flight to the floor. 'He can present his requisitions until the roof falls in and get no more joy from the effort. No stores remain to be issued.'

  'Your pardon, my lord.' The chancellor coughed in forbearance. 'This man bears no supply writ. He's from the brig Savrid, and he claims on some authority to bear a message from the Master of Shadow.'

  'He has a whole ship?' Lord Diegan cut in, astonished enough to relent. His query entangled with Lysaer's clipped gesture to hasten Savrid's master in for audience.

  The seaman wore a merchant's broadcloth. Fair haired, his sturdy frame fleshed on the spare side of corpulent, he had honest blue eyes and a wary stance on the carpet. The cap in his hands showed crushed prints in the velvet from the fretted grip of thick fingers. Too independent to bow before royalty, he bestowed a curt nod of respect. 'My Lord Prince.'

  Lysaer regarded him in the unblinking, even quiet he kept while hearing out arbitrations. 'You may sit,' he said first, then waited in regal patience while the man found a chair by the chart table. 'You say you've met with the Master of Shadow. I would know in your own words exactly how that came about. No one will question until you've finished. Take your time and be careful to tell everything.'

  The brig captain draped his mangled cap on his knee. The same clear-eyed squint he used to trim his sails measured the stately prince by the casement. The weariness on the royal features did not escape him, nor the glacial, forced control behind the facade of poised patience. The captain spoke at length, a mulish set to his chin. 'The man told me you were cursed by the Mistwraith to fight.'

  'Arithon s'Ffalenn is a sorcerer,' Lysaer replied. 'He would say anything to undermine your moral faith.' The royal sincerity moved the seaman to visible distress. His boot scraped the carpet, and his troubled glance flicked aside. 'In this case, I don't think so.'

  Lysaer's regard turned hard as chipped aquamarine. An imperious sidewards gesture stilled his Lord Commander's affront as he urged, 'Say why, and plainly. You need not fear for what you believe to be the truth.'

  The story of Savrid's part in the raid upon Werpoint harbour unfolded in slow, precise phrases, from the efficient act of piracy that had requisitioned her use, to the neat manner she had been abandoned at an anchorage on the north side of Crescent Isle.

  In devilish ingenuity, every one of her yards had been unshackled from the masts, with the halyards of headsail and spanker left flaked in cut coils over her pinrails. Her gear was left whole, but unable to carry sail. Nor was her captain entirely certain he would have pursued the small sloop that Arithon had used for his escape, even had the option existed. Whatever Lysaer claimed, however he framed his grand cause, the prince he called enemy was not the born killer he was named.

  Until his last breath, Savrid's captain would recall the black sword in the hands of the clan liegeman who had slaughtered pride, even broken the man's will to hold him to a desperate act of prevention.

  'We knew of the ship stolen from the fringes of the straits,' Lysaer said. 'You have the audacity to claim the theft was not done under Arithon's auspices?'

  'I said,
not by Arithon's hand,' the brig captain cor- rected. 'His reason was plain, when I asked him. He said he'd rather a liaison with a shiftless seaman for the risks he undertook to stop your fleet. He wished no honest man to suffer in the backlash, if his intentions chanced to go awry. He worried. Any ally of his might be tortured, if caught. He seemed anxious to keep that from happening. If the captain he paid met a felon's death, at least such an end would serve justice.'

  Cocked on the edge of explosive movement, Lysaer gripped his hands to the arms of his chair, his chiselled features turned wry. 'An admirable and plausible excuse. The s'Ffalenn were born clever to a man. You say you bring me a message?'

  The captain wrung out a breath in trepidation, his blunt fists clamped on his knees. He closed his eyes and spoke, haunted by the stark event as the Prince of Rathain had knelt at his side to cut his bonds.

  'I'm going to set you free,' Arithon had said. 'But in return, I ask for one service. Go as my messenger to Lysaer s'Ilessid. Tell him in my name that I chose to destroy his fleet and strand his war host at Werpoint. Bid him remember, should he make disposition to pursue me. The burning was provoked by my fullest intent while the vessels at anchorage were not loaded.'

  For the blood on his hands, Arithon s'Ffalenn had made no apology. Seamen would be dead in the wreckage and the flames, and some, from drowning and exposure. But the stabbing, awful facts lent him credence through hard truth: the death toll by design could effortlessly have been five times that of the losses inflicted by Tal Quorin. Not only the fleet, but the war host raised against him might have been decimated in the selfsame stroke.

  Thirty-five thousand lives had been spared an untimely pass beneath the Wheel.

  The stillness in the royal chamber as the captain finished speaking was absolute. Outside the latched casements, the whistle of a lampsman drifted up from the street. The jingle of harness bells on a rich lady's carriage overlaid distant shouts from the waterfront. Sailhands from wrecked vessels packed the taverns and the brothels, most of them penniless and stranded. The town watch spent increasing hours stopping brawls, and theft was a mounting problem.

  Lysaer s'Ilessid surveyed the ship captain whose message skirted very near to treason. Whether the man would ever have lent his unstinting service was now moot. His part at Werpoint had compromised his trust through delusion that the Master of Shadow was no murderer. Rather than pressure the issue outright in judgement, Lysaer clasped his fingers in a flaring sparkle of sapphire rings.

  He used a short interval to balance his thoughts, and to damp back the sting of private shortcomings. Once he, too, had been beguiled into trust by his half-brother's disingenuous, glib tongue. 'If I ask,' he said gently to the captain, 'would you lend your Savrid to my cause? She is needed more sorely than ever in the past to bear me south as an envoy to Alestron.'

  Still shaken by the memory of the clear, harmonic tone roused from a spelled edge of swordsteel; pierced in conscience by recollection of Arithon s'Ffalenn on his knees, unmanned by horror and begging release from the trials laid on him by his oath to a widow in Merior, Savrid's captain sighed and shook his head. 'I'm sorry, your Grace.' A scar on his heart he lacked words to express forced his reluctant decision. 'Your cause is not mine. If you insist on pursuing Rathain's prince in the south, you must do so with no help from me.'

  'The Shadow Master compromised your ship!' Lord Diegan protested. 'Are your crewmen complacent at his handling?'

  'My crewmen are alive and untouched by the fires.' The captain snapped his cap off his thigh, jammed it over his hair, and without awaiting royal leave, shoved in spare haste to his feet. 'Prince Arithon did not a man of them harm. I would have things remain as they are.'

  Stolid as seasoned oak, he spun on his heel to depart. 'You can't just let him go,' Lord Diegan bristled to his sovereign, while Savrid's master excused himself and closed the door. Cat-touchy in his annoyance, the Lord Commander ploughed through the stacked charts and papers, located the wine flask, and scrounged for cloth to wipe two goblets clean. 'Ath knows, we can't spare the use of that ship.'

  'No,' said Lysaer, his gaze like chipped flint as his closest confidante served him. 'But this is not Avenor. I have no rights of royal requisition here.'

  Deceptively bland, absorbed in the thinking speculation he engaged to solve his knottiest problems of state, the prince spun the warm wine in his glass, the fingers of his left hand laced through the hair at his temple. Dying light from the casement picked glints in the rings entwined through blond locks. His eyes looked bruised and wounded tired, at odds with his reflexively proud bearing as he wrestled with harsh thoughts and conscience.

  In this hour, the flicker of the candleflames lit no prince, but a man, punished by event and embittered by a cruel blow to pride.

  The sight stopped his Lord Commander's tirade. Honoured to humility, Diegan saw his prince had let down his lofty public majesty before him in trust as a friend. He felt his heart twist in response. Anguished by every thoughtless past moment, when he had wished the royal self-esteem to falter, he now felt diminished in shame.

  In the mortifying sting of defeat at Werpoint, he came at last to know that the humanity had been there all along. Beneath the lordly ruler, the bright poise, the unshakeable, inspirational confidence, Lysaer had the same flaws and needs as any other. The sacrifice he made to become an example to his people reduced his Lord Commander to disgrace.

  In a voice choked to gentleness, Diegan said to his liege, 'All too well, we both know, the Master of Shadow knows how to strike to manipulate.'

  Lysaer said nothing, but only tossed off the wine to its dregs. 'The wiles of s'Ffalenn drove my father to mad acts of grief. Given my stance against him, I should be foolish to expect the bastard would not seek to try the same with me. My given gift of light offers strength, but no wisdom. I am no better man, no less prone to frailty than my sire. But to bring justice to the Shadow Master's victims, and for the protection of this land, I must find a way to stand strong. Restraint must be arranged to guide me to act more responsibly.'

  Diegan refilled his prince's goblet and stood mute, the decanter clutched in his hands. He felt like the world's own tormentor to broach the dangerous loose end which remained. 'My prince, you have a deep heart, and a morality this s'Ffalenn sorcerer knows well how to twist into shackles. He has you torn through with pity, exactly as he wished, and I refuse to let you weaken in remorse. You are our strength and inspiration. If you are susceptible to the Shadow Master's subversive handling of events, what of the people on the streets? I am Etarran enough to lend warning. I dread greatly what Sawid's captain might say to undermine the staunch fibre of society.'

  'Let the man go.' Lysaer shook back bright hair and sighed. 'His fellow captains who lost ships will scarcely applaud his choice of loyalty.' Distanced by exhaustion and a wrenching thread of melancholy, Lysaer resumed in dogged force. 'Have you been to the infirmaries, Diegan, where seamen he dying of burns? Or the taverns? At every street corner, there are stranded sailhands left destitute and begging for copper. Werpoint has been dealt a harsh lesson. I wouldn't care to be caught in the quayside taverns alone with opinions in sympathy with Arithon. That could easily get a man killed.'

  So it might, Lord Diegan agreed in silent irony. His prince's deep pain could as well have been his own, for the error in judgement he had suffered. As Lord Commander of Avenor, with a war host at his disposal, he should have set up some support plan to protect the Prince of the West from this insidious attack on his honour. Too much responsibility lay on Lysaer's shoulders. For the future, Diegan resolved that his liege must never again be abandoned to bear the brunt of every happenstance alone.

  When the wine was drained to the lees, and Lysaer finally asked for his valet, he gave his Lord Commander the last, most poignant observation. 'We shall weather this. Never undervalue your part, my Lord Diegan. At Etarra, you'll recall, it was you and your lady sister who reminded me of Arithon's wicked nature. Whether or not the Mistwraith had
a part in any curse, whether or not my ungovernable temper was rooted in an aberrant geas, two facts still cannot be argued. I am the only spirit alive with the gifts to battle Arithon's shadows; and the destructive acts against Jaelot and Alestron remain proof positive of my half-brother's criminal nature. To go on and see him dead will serve justice and restore this land to final peace.'

  After Thoughts

  Far offshore, under starlight on the deeps of the Cildein, Arithon rouses aboard his sloop, Talliarthe, to find his swollen wrists wrapped up in poultices, and his berth watched over by his caithdein; the thought crosses his mind, with no small humiliation, that he will not again risk the s'Valerient line in the course of his feud against Lysaer. Jieret,' he whispers, 'by my royal command, you must marry and get an heir, and look to your clansmen's survival . . .'

  Leagues to the south, in the shipyard at Merior by the Sea, two joiners dicing through a drunken turn of watch are interrupted by the windborne smell of smoke; in belated alarm, they stagger outside, to discover the one finished hull ablaze on her ways, and the ropewalk set alight and well burning . . .

  Entangled in sleep in the Mayor of Werpoint's guest suite, Prince Lysaer cries out in the throes of a night-mare; while outside his chamber doorway, in a loyalty sprung from the heart, Lord Commander Diegan arises, Etarran enough to shoulder for political expedience what his prince is too merciful to condone - the assassination of the ship's captain sympathetic to Arithon, that word of Desh-thiere's curse not become common gossip in the streets . . .

  Glossary

  AL'DUIN - father of Halliron Masterbard.

  pronounced: al-dwin

  root meaning: al - over; duinne - hand

  ALESTRON - city located in Midhalla, Melhalla. Ruled by the Duke Bransian, Teir's'Brydion, and his three brothers. This city did not fall to merchant townsmen in the Third Age uprising that threw down the high kings, but is still ruled by its clanblood heirs.