Warhost of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  Such measures would yield small delay. Once on the march, s’Brydion war captains were a force inexorable as tide, as Tharrick well knew from experience. A fleet pulled out of dry dock converged to blockade, manned by cautious captains who took care to snug down in safe harbours at night. This was not the fair weather trade season, when passage to Scimlade Tip might be made without thought in a fortnight. Through the uneasy winds before each winter’s solstice, no galleyman worth his salt dared the storms that could sweep in without warning. Years beyond counting, ships had been thrashed to wreckage as they hove into sight of sheltered waters. The passage between Ishlir and Elssine afforded small protection, where the grass flats spread inland and mighty winds roared off the Cildein Ocean. Even Selkwood’s tall pines could gain no foothold to root. What oaks could survive grew stunted by breakage, skeletal and hunched as old men.

  Bound in its tranquil spell of ignorance, unwarned by the cracking pace of Arithon’s work shifts, the folk of Merior walked their quiet lanes, while their rows of whitewashed cottages shed the rains in a mesmerized, whispered fall of droplets. For a rootless, directionless man accustomed to armed drills and activity, the fascination with the herons that fished the shallows of Garth’s pond paled through one solitary hour. Tharrick startled the birds into ungainly flight on an oath spat out like flung stone. Like Jinesse’s twins with their penchant for scrapes, he felt himself drawn beyond reason to wander up the spit toward the racketing industry of the shipyard.

  There, under firm-handed discipline, the craftsmen his fires had caught slacking laboured to rectify their lapse. He strolled among them. Brazen as nails, even daring retaliation for their master’s hand in his recovery, Tharrick meandered through the steam fanned from the boiler-shack chimney. The crunch of shavings beneath his boot soles and his conspicuous, clean linen shirt drew the eyes of the men, stripped to the waist, sweaty skins dusted by chaff from the sawpits as they cut and shaped smooth reworked planks. His trespass was noted by unembarrassed glances, then just as swiftly forgotten.

  Even the master joiner, who had ordered his beatings and tried unspeakable means to force his silence, showed no rancour at his presence. Arithon’s will had made itself felt. Enemy though he was, none dared to raise word or hand against him. All were ruled by their master’s ruthless tongue and his fever-pitched driving purpose. The salvage effort on the damaged brigantine already showed a near-complete patch at her bow; the one still in frames on her bedlogs lay changed, half-cannibalized for her wood, then lessened in length and faired ready for planking. A less-ambitious vessel with a shorter sheerline took shape, fitted here and there between the yellow of new spruce with the odd checked timber fished together from the derelict lugger.

  In three weeks of mulish, unswerving effort, Arithon s’Ffalenn had rechannelled his loss into what skirted the edge of a miracle.

  Struck by a stabbing, unhappy urge to weep, Tharrick held his chin in stiff pride. He would not bend before awe, would not spin and run to the widow’s cottage to hide his face in shame. The man who had forgiven his malice in mercy would be shown the qualities which had earned his past captaincy in Alestron. In hesitant steps on the fringes, Tharrick began to lend his help. If his mending ribs would not let him wheel a handcart, or his palms were too tender to wield a pod auger to drill holes for treenails in hardened oak, he could steady a plank for the plane on the trestles, or run errands, or turn dowels to pin timbers and ribs. He could stoke the fire in the boiler shed, and maybe, for his conscience, regain a small measure of the self-respect he had lost to disgrace and harsh exile.

  On the third day, when he returned to the widow’s with his shirt and hair flecked with shavings, he found silver on the table, left in his name by the Shadow Master.

  Tharrick’s unshaven face darkened in a ruddy burst of temper.

  Drawn by the bang as he hurled open the casement, Jinesse caught his wrist and stopped his attempt to fling the coins into the fallow tangle of her garden. ‘Tharrick, no. What are you thinking? Arithon doesn’t run a slave yard. Neither does he give grown men charity. He said if you can’t be bothered to collect your pay with the others, this was the last time he’d cover for your mistakes.’

  ‘Mistakes?’ Poised with one brawny wrist imprisoned in her butterfly clasp, Tharrick shook off a stab of temper. The widow’s tipped-up features implored him. Her hair wisped at her temples like new floss, and her wide, worried eyes were a delicate, dawn-painted blue. He swallowed. His grip on the coins relaxed from its white-knuckled tension.

  ‘Mistakes,’ he repeated. This time the word rang bitter. He slanted his cheek against the window frame, eyes shut in racking distaste. ‘By Daelion Fatemaster, yon one’s a demon for forcing a man to think.’

  ‘More than just men.’ Jinesse gave a nervous, soft laugh and let him go.

  His lids still squeezed closed, Tharrick asked her, ‘What did he do for you, then?’

  She stepped back, swung the basket of carrots brought up from the market onto the table, and rummaged through a drawer for a knife. ‘He once took me sailing to Innish.’ In a confidence shared with nobody else, she told what that passage had meant.

  Evening stole in. The kitchen lay purpled in shadow, cut by fiery, glancing sparkles from the bowl of Falgaire crystal which sat, unused, in the dish cupboard. Tharrick progressed from helping to peel vegetables to holding Jinesse’s cool hands as she finished her careful account. They sat together without speaking, until the twins clambered through the outside doorway and startled the pair of them apart.

  The storm struck before dawn to a mean snarl of wind that flattened the sea oats and hurled breakers like bulwarks against the strand. Men rushed with lanterns through the rain-torn dark to drag exposed dories into shelter behind the dunes, and supplement moorings with anchor and cable. The brunt of the gale howled in from the north, more trouble to shipping upcoast, the widow insisted, clad in a loose cotton robe as she set the pot on the hob to make soup.

  If she rejoiced in the delay of the war galleys or the army, she had the restraint not to gloat.

  The shutters creaked and slammed against their fastenings, and their sharp, random bangs as the gusts changed direction caused Tharrick to flinch from edged nerves. ‘What of Arithon’s shipyard?’

  The widow sighed and pushed back the hair that unreeled down her shoulders like limp flax. ‘There could be damage if the wind veers. A storm surge could ride the high tide. Should the gale blow through first, the beached hulls will be safe. The luggers may run aground off the Scimlade, where sandbars have shifted from their beds, but the hook in the coastline here usually shelters us. Just pray the wind stays northeast.’

  Morning broke yellow-grey as an old bruise above the eastern horizon. Cold light revealed a cove racked and littered with palm fronds and the flaccid, corpse fingers of stranded kelp. Two cottages had lost their thatched roofs. Against the whining gusts, the ragged beat of hammers resumed.

  Yet when Tharrick picked his way around puddles and downed sticks to the yard on its wind-racked spit, he found no joiners at work on the framing. He was told all three shifts had been sent to make repairs in the village.

  Arithon was immersed in sweating industry, restoking the stove beneath the boiler.

  Quiet to one side, his hair newly trimmed and yesterday’s stubble shaven clean, Tharrick ventured the first comment he had dared since making his own way at the shipyard. ‘It’s likely your generosity has doomed the last hull.’

  Arithon crammed another billet into the stove, then yanked back his hand as the sparks flew. ‘If so, that was my choice to make.’

  ‘I’m not a green fool.’ Tharrick envied the neat, practised speed that hurled each split piece of kindling over the heat-rippled bed of hot ash. ‘I’ve led men. Your example makes them work until their hearts burst to meet an impossible standard.’

  A slick, cold laugh wrung from the Shadow Master’s throat as he clashed the fire door closed. ‘You’re mistaken.’ He straightened, reduced to l
ean contours sketched out in a silverpoint gleam of wet skin. His eyes were derisive and heavy with fatigue as he regarded the former guardsman who offered his tentative respect. ‘I happen to have employed every wood-sawyer and carpenter inside of thirty leagues. Had I not sent the joiners, we’d have gotten every fishwife and her man’s favourite marlinespike fouling the works here by noon. In case you hadn’t noticed, the framing’s all done. It’s the caulkers I can’t spare, and I needed some excuse to keep the fasteners overtime with the planking.’

  Unapologetic, ill-tempered, Arithon sidestepped and slipped past. Abandoned to an eddied whirl of air, Tharrick swallowed back humiliation. The widow’s observation was borne out with sharp vengeance, that if the Shadow Master’s generosity could be held beyond reproach, it was not to be mistaken for his friendship.

  The day wore away in grey drizzle and a murderous round of hard work. The ragged thunder of the caulkers’ mallets as hot oakum was forced between the gaps in the brigantine’s decking winnowed the stink of melting tar on winds left tainted with storm wrack. At nighfall, the pace did not relent. Planks were run out of the steam box and forced tight against the ship’s timbers. Still hot, they were fastened with treenails of locust to lie below the waterline, oak above. Torches spilled a hellish, flickering light across the naked shoulders of the labourers, slicked through the dirt where sweat and cold water channelled in runnels off their bodies.

  The joiners returned in grumbling small groups. Their senior craftsman sought Arithon to call him aside. Pressed by his mulish, exhausted reluctance, the stout-bellied journeyman who checked the yard’s measuring gave in to necessity and shouldered the end of the plank the Shadow Master had been carrying.

  ‘It’s only a ship,’ the master joiner exhorted to the spare, tired figure that confronted him. ‘Does losing her matter so much that you ruin yourself and break the very hearts of the men?’

  Scathing in anger, Arithon said, ‘You brought me away just for that?’

  ‘No.’ The master joiner braced rangy shoulders against the urgency of those green eyes upon him. ‘You’re losing your sense of propriety. This morning Tharrick admired your judgment and you threw back his words in his face.’

  Arithon’s lips thinned into instant contempt. ‘In case you’d failed to notice, Tharrick’s all too quick to carve life up into absolutes. I can do very well without his worshipful admiration. Not when the reckoning is likely as not to get him killed by the hand of his own duke!’

  ‘Very well.’ The master joiner shrugged. ‘If you’re Sithaer bent on wearing yourself out with work, I’ll not stand and watch with only my good sense for company.’ An easy-natured spirit when his handiwork was not being kindled by vengeance-bent arsonists, he stripped off his shirt and ordered his journeyman to hand him his heaviest mallet.

  A question rang back through the darkness. The master joiner returned his most irritable bellow. ‘Bedamned to my supper! I asked for a tool to shoulder a shift with the fasteners.’

  The next day brought news, called across choppy water to a fishing lugger from a Telzen trader blown off her course by the storm. A troop of mercenaries north of the city had come to grief when the plank span of the river bridge in Selkwood had collapsed beneath their marching weight.

  ‘Barbarian work,’ the fisherman related. ‘No lives were lost, but the delay caused an uproar. The duke’s captains were short-tempered when they reached the city markets to resupply.’

  If Merior’s villagers never guessed the identity of the man Alestron’s army joined forces with Prince Lysaer to eradicate, Arithon continued his pursuits in brazen defiance of the odds. Undaunted by logic, that his enemies would board galleys to cross Sickle Bay to shorten the long march through Southshire, he faced this fresh setback without flinching.

  The fleet he had burned in Werpoint harbour to buy respite had won him precious little leeway. Alestron’s troops would be hounding his heels well ahead of the advent of spring.

  Clad in a shirt for the first time in weeks, the light in his hair like spilled ink, Arithon stood to one side of the hull of his sole salvaged brigantine. Her new decking caulked and made watertight only that morning, she wore the strong reek of oakum and tar, and a linseed aroma of new paint. In sheer, smooth lines, an axe forged to cleave through deep waters, she seemed to strain toward the surface of the bay. The yard workers who crowded in excitement by the strand could not help but feel proud of their accomplishment. If any of them knew of the warhost days away, none broached the subject to Tharrick.

  The man who replaced the master shipwright and another one chosen for fast reflexes knelt beneath a keel sheathed in gleaming copper. They pounded now to split out the blocks that braced the craft on her ways. The high cries of gulls, and the clangour of steel mauls marked the moment as the hull shifted, her birth pang a creak like the stretched joints of a wrestler.

  Fiark’s shout rang down from his perch on the bowsprit. Content to hang in Arithon’s shadow, Feylind flung both arms around his waist in a hug of elfin delight.

  Rankly sweating in a tunic too hot for the tropics, Dakar observed the proceedings in glowering sobriety. ‘Their faith is vast,’ he said, and sniffed down his nose, as the eighty-foot vessel shifted and squealed on her ways. Her quivering hesitancy marked the start of her plunge toward her first kiss of salt waters. ‘I wouldn’t be caught under that thing. Not drunken, insane, nor for the gold to founder a trade galley.’

  From his place in deep shadow, arrested between mallet strokes, the shipwright cracked a dry laugh. ‘And well might you worry, at that! A fat sot like you, down here? First off, if you’d fit, the Fatemaster would as likely snatch at his chance to turn your lazy bones beneath the Wheel.’

  Dakar’s outraged epithet became lost as the hull gave way into motion with a slide of wood on wood. She splashed onto the aquamarine breast of the shallows, adrift, to the twins’ paired shrieks of exuberance.

  While sailhands recruited from the south shore taverns waded after, to catch lines and launch longboats to warp the floated hull to a mooring, Tharrick was among the first to approach and offer his congratulations. Arithon returned a quick, brilliant smile that faded as the former guardsman’s gaze shifted to encompass the smaller hull still poised forlorn on her ways.

  Understanding flashed wordless between them. Of ten ships planned at the outset, one brigantine in the water might be all that Arithon’s best effort could garner. As fishermen said, his luck neared the shoals; the hour was too late to save the second.

  Whatever awaited in the uncertain future, the workers were spared trepidation. A beer cask was rolled out and broached in the yard to celebrate the launching of Khetienn, named in the old tongue for the black-and-gold leopard renowned as the s’Ffalenn royal arms. While the mean schedule slackened and men made merry to the pipe of a sailor’s tin whistle, Arithon, and most notably, Dakar, were conspicuous for their early absence. If the new vessel’s master pleaded weariness, the Mad Prophet was parted from the beer cask in vociferous, howling disagreement. Too careful to drink in the company of men his earlier rancour had injured, Tharrick slipped away the moment he drained his first tankard.

  The boom of winter breakers rolled like thunder down the sleepy village lanes. Slanted in afternoon shadows through the storm-stripped palms, he strode past the fishnets hung out to dry and entered the widow’s cottage. The day’s homey smell of fish stew and bacon was cut by a disquieting murmur of voices.

  The twins were not in their place by the hob, shelling peas and squalling in argument. In a quiet unnatural for their absence, a meeting was in progress around the trestle in Jinesse’s kitchen.

  ‘Tonight,’ Arithon was saying, his tone subdued to regret, ‘I’ll slip Talliarthe’s mooring on the ebb tide and sail her straight offshore. No trace will be left to follow. The workers are paid through the next fortnight. Ones loyal to me will ship out one by one, the last out to scuttle the little hull. When the Prince of the West arrives with his galleys, he’ll find no s
ign of my presence, and no cause to engage bloody war.’

  ‘What of the Khetienn?’ the widow protested. ‘You can’t just abandon her. Not when she’s cost all you own to get launched.’

  Arithon flipped her a sweet, patient smile. ‘We’ve made disposition.’ Across a glower of palpable venom from the Mad Prophet, he added, ‘Dakar held a dicing debt over a trader captain out of Innish. His galley lies off Shaddorn to slip in by night and take my new vessel under tow. Her sails, her mastcaps and chain are crated and packed in her hold along with the best of the yard’s tools. The riggers at Southshire will complete her on credit against a share of her first run’s cargo. With luck, I’ll stay free to redeem her.’

  A board creaked to Tharrick’s shifted weight. Arithon started erect, noted whose presence blocked the doorway, then settled back in maddening complacence.

  ‘You dare much to trust me,’ said the exiled captain. ‘Should you not show alarm? It’s my own duke’s army inbound toward this village. A word from me and that hull could be impounded at Southshire.’

  ‘Will you speak, then?’ challenged Arithon. Coiled and still as the leopard his brigantine honoured, the calm he maintained as he waited for answer built to a frightening presence. In the widow’s cosy kitchen, the quiet felt isolate, a bubble blown out of glass. The sounds outside the window, of surf and crying gulls and the distant shouts of fishermen snatched by the wind from the decks of a lugger, assumed the unreality of a daydream.