by David Drake
“I do hope Mistress Kaline won’t still be sick when we’re introduced to Count Lascarg,” Merota said in a carefully polite voice. “She’ll never be able to live down the embarrassment if that happens.”
Ilna looked sharply at her ward, thinking for a moment that she was serious. Then Merota’s angelic expression dissolved in a fit of giggles.
“Yes,” Ilna said, allowing herself to smile minusculely before her face stiffened again into its accustomed sternness. “But if necessary we’ll both help her stand. I’ve found it settles me to hold on to others.”
She didn’t care for Mistress Kaline as a person; but then, she didn’t care for very many people. Ilna had continued to employ Mistress Kaline after Merota became her ward, in part because the stern old snob did in her way truly love the child, but also because Ilna was more afraid of her own power than she was of anything else in this world or beyond it. It would be easy to dismiss the governess who’d sneered at Ilna as an orphan with no culture and no forebears... but for Ilna, it would have been equally easy to weave a pattern that would rip Mistress Kaline’s soul straight to Hell.
That way lay damnation. It was a path Ilna had once travelled, and from which she would never fully be able to return.
“You’re really all right, Ilna?” Merota asked softly.
Ilna reached down with her right hand and squeezed the girl’s. Sometimes Merota acted younger than her nine years, but at others it seemed that she was taking care of Ilna instead of the other way around.
“Yes, child,” Ilna said, deliberately resuming the pattern she’d been knotting from the hank of short cords she kept in her sleeve. “I’ve made some bad decisions in the course of my life, and I’ll probably make more mistakes as I get older. But in the main, the pattern’s not one anyone has a right to object to.”
Ilna glanced at the fabric her fingers were knotting while her mind considered other, less pleasant, things. Her pattern in coarse twine would calm those who looked at it, raise their spirits or cool their anger. Ilna didn’t weave charms any more than the sun was a charm because it warmed those on whom its rays fell. What Ilna wove had the same natural certainty as the wind and the rain, as daylight and death.
She put the finished fabric in her right sleeve, then took a fresh hank of cords out of her left and began again. The patterns were just a way of occupying her fingers; the work didn’t calm her, exactly, but her irritation was more likely to come to the surface if she wasn’t doing something.
A trumpeter signaled from the flagship, the five-banked monster to the right of Garric’s. Captain Rhamis looked as startled as a mouse surprised in the pantry. “What’s that?” he cried on a rising note. “What’re we to do, Plotnin?”
Before the sailing master could answer, Chalcus laid a hand on the nobleman’s shoulder and spoke reassuringly. A trireme pulled ahead, but nothing else about the fleet’s stately progression changed. Rhamis bobbed his head, rubbing his hands nervously together.
Ilna smiled at an idle thought. She gave her completed patterns to oarsmen and soldiers, common people. She’d been around the rich and powerful enough in recent days to know that they had problems also, but somebody else could worry about them. Ilna would take care of her own first.
She’d always had a talent for fabrics. As a young girl she’d woven so skillfully that the other women in the borough surrounding Barca’s Hamlet brought Ilna the thread they’d spun and instead of weaving themselves took a share of the profits from the cloth she finished. That as much as her brother’s early strength explained how two orphans had survived in a community which, while not unkind and fairly prosperous as peasant villages went, had no surplus for useless mouths in a hard winter.
Ilna’s talent was natural or at least passed for it, but when Ilna left Barca’s Hamlet she’d taken a wrong turning that had led her to Hell. She’d met what looked like a tree there. The skills the tree had taught her gave Ilna the power to let or hinder souls, to change a heart or steal a life. She’d used her new abilities for what she thought at the time were her own ends but which she knew now were the purposes of Evil alone.
While Evil ruled her, Ilna had done things that she couldn’t forgive and which couldn’t be put right. She knew that she’d never be able to make amends for the evil she’d done casually, callously, if she spent the remainder of her life trying.
So be it. Ilna would try anyway, in small ways, in all the ways that she could. Eventually she’d die with her job undone. She assumed death would end her responsibilities. If it didn’t, well, she’d deal with what came then.
Chalcus sauntered back from where he’d been talking to the captain. His stride anticipated the deck’s motion with the same unconscious ease that Ilna’s fingers demonstrated when weaving. The Flying Fish was short, narrow, and relatively high. She carried fifteen oarsmen in the upper tier on either side with ten more below them in the center where the hull was wide enough—barely—for them to work. Chalcus said the design made the patrol vessel nimble and fairly fast, but she wobbled like a slowing top.
“There’s a shipload of Blood Eagles gone ahead to make sure things are safe for Master Garric,” Chalcus said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the trireme which was already driving through the harbor entrance. “Not that the lad showed much need to be protected the times I’ve seen him with a sword in his hand.”
Ilna wasn’t a seaman, but she could judge patterns like few other people: the men on the trireme’s flashing oars were strong and willing, but their timing wasn’t as smooth as that of other vessels in the fleet. The bodyguards were picked men, but they weren’t picked oarsmen.
She smiled again, recognizing a familiar truth. Every task has its special skills, rowing and weaving no less than the sweep of words that poets use, or that wizards speak for other purposes.
Merota took Chalcus’ left hand in hers and began to sing a her clear soprano, “Lord Lovel he stood by his ship so fine, a-rigging her snow-white sails....”
The sailor himself had taught Merota the ballad along with many others. For a wonder this one wasn’t as bawdy as those the child usually chose to sing in public. Perhaps she didn’t think any of the folk aboard the Flying Fish would care; except for Mistress Kaline, perhaps, but as sick as the governess looked, probably not even her.
At another time Chalcus would have joined in with the child, singing about the nobleman who came back from a long voyage just in time for his true love’s funeral, but the admiral’s trumpeter sounded another signal. “Chalcus!” Lord Rhamis called, trotting up the deck toward them. “What do they want us to do?”
Chalcus slipped his hand from Merota’s, tousled her hair, and gave Ilna a quick nod of regret before turning back to the dithering captain. Chalcus was determined that the ship he’d brought Ilna and Merota aboard should proceed smoothly, or at any rate without needless embarrassment. It was a responsibility he’d accepted without having sought it, much as Garric was ruling a kingdom though Ilna was sure that he’d have been happier helping his father run a village inn and reading the verses of Old Kingdom poets in his free time.
Garric’s big ship began to draw ahead of the other vessels. Prince Garric of Haft would enter the harbor in solitary state, with the rest of his mighty fleet following at a respectful distance.
Ilna’s fingers wove twine. She knew that Merota was speaking, but for the moment she didn’t have attention to spare for the child.
Being a prince was a great burden, she was sure. Ilna didn’t care about ‘the Isles’ as a thing in itself; but she cared about people because it was her duty to care about people, and she knew that the people of the Isles were far better off with Garric ruling the kingdom than if he hadn’t been.
A prince deserved a wife worthy of him; a well-born, well-educated, beautiful woman like Liane bos-Benliman. It was far better for everyone that Garric should marry Liane than that he throw himself away on a peasant girl who couldn’t write her own name; even if the peasant happ
ened to have a talent for weaving.
“Ilna?” called a child’s voice from far away. “Please Ilna, what’s wrong?”
And Ilna’s fingers knotted a pattern that would bring warmth and calm to the man she offered it to.
***
“It’s more like standing on the seawall at Barca’s Hamlet than it’s like being in a boat,” Sharina said, looking down at the sea almost a dozen feet below the level of the deck on which she stood to the left of Cashel and Tenoctris. Foam boiled back as the Shepherd’s bronze ram dipped and rose minusculely at the thrust of the oars. The water was gray today; all Sharina could see in it was an occasional bit of weed churned up as the quinquereme’s huge weight slid past.
“We’re moving,” said Cashel simply. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that. I don’t mind, but it’s not like being on solid ground.”
Sharina laughed. “Cashel,” she said, “so long as you’re around, everything seems solid.”
She hugged herself to him, a great, warm boulder. He didn’t respond—they were in public, after all—but he smiled as he continued to watch the approaching shore. The great stone moles which extended Carcosa’s fine natural harbor had survived the thousand years of neglect following the collapse of the Old Kingdom. One of the lighthouses which originally framed the entrance remained also, streaming a long red-on-white pennon to welcome the fleet, but the other had fallen into a pile of rubble.
The lighthouses had been built in the form of hollow statues: one of the Lady wearing the crescent tiara of the moon, the other of the Shepherd holding the sun disk. Celondre had written a poem when the lighthouses were dedicated, likening them to the children of King Carlon, the hope of the Kingdom’s future.
Sharina’s arm was still around Cashel’s waist. She felt it tighten involuntarily, drawing her to Cashel’s solidity in an inconstant world. She’d first read Celondre’s verse as a child in Barca’s Hamlet where she and Garric were tutored by their father Reise. The twin statues, decorated with gold-washed bronze, had seemed the most wondrous objects in the world, and the kingdom when Celondre lived and wrote was the next thing to paradise. She’d never dreamed that some day she’d see the statues herself.
But these weren’t the shining triumphs of a child’s imagination. One had fallen and time had so worn the other that Sharina couldn’t be sure which deity it was meant to represent. The twin children Celondre praised in the same lyric had both died within a year: the boy had drowned on a sea voyage, while the girl was carried off by a fever. Carlon had died old and bitter, withdrawn from the world and his duties to the kingdom; and a generation later, when the forces which turned the cosmos rose to their thousand-year peak, the Golden Age had fallen in mud and slaughter.
And those forces were rising again....
“Is anything wrong, Sharina?” Cashel asked. He’d felt her tremble, so he shifted his quarterstaff to his right hand in order to put his left around her. His strength was more reassuring than stone walls or a sheet of iron.
“No, nothing that we can’t take care of,” she said, sorry to have caused the big man to worry. “I was just thinking about a poem Celondre wrote a thousand years ago.”
Cashel nodded. Sharina knew that he wouldn’t understand what she meant, but now he knew that it wasn’t anything he needed to be concerned about. If it was about books, then there were plenty of other people around to take care of it. “Well,” he said, “that’s all right, then.”
In Barca’s Hamlet, few people could read or write well. Reise came from Valles on Ornifal, the royal capital, and had been unusually well-educated even there. He and the children he’d taught were unique exceptions. Cashel and Ilna were almost completely illiterate—able to spell out their own names, and that with difficulty. As best Sharina could judge, Cashel regarded books much as he did the depths of the sea: they were vast, hidden reservoirs of the strange and wonderful.
Tenoctris glanced at Sharina, leaning over the bow railing to see past Cashel’s bulk. The old woman raised an eyebrow in friendly question at the concern she’d heard in Sharina’s voice.
“Celondre wrote a poem about the lighthouses,” Sharina explained, embarrassed to have brought the matter up. “And now they’re, well....” She waved her hand at the timeworn figures.
Tenoctris nodded, seeming to understand more than the younger woman had actually said. “I never visited Carcosa in my own day,” she said. “It must have been marvelous. But what I think is important, dear, is the direction of things. A thousand years ago Carcosa and the kingdom were greater than either is now, but they were on the verge of ruin. Today we’re rebuilding. It’ll be a long time before we—”
She gave a quick, flashing grin.
“—before your children’s children will have built a city as great as Carcosa was when Carus reigned, but we’re going in the right direction.”
So far we’ve been going in the right direction, Sharina thought, because that was the whole of her fear. But she didn’t say that aloud, because as soon as the words flashed into her mind she saw how silly she was being. So far was all you could say about anything, ever. Life was temporary; sun and rain and the seasons came and went and returned. Sharina’s task was to help Garric and all the other people on the side of peace and order to succeed for as long as she lived.
Wizards like Tenoctris directed onto human affairs the forces which turned the very cosmos and which waxed and waned on a thousand year cycle. Their peaks were neither good nor evil in themselves, but they gave greater scope to wizards who attempted evil—and greater effect to the mistakes of wizards whose pride was greater than their knowledge.
As if responding to Sharina’s thought, Tenoctris smiled wryly and said, “If all we had to worry about were a handful of conscious evildoers, life would be much simpler than it is in the present world of fools, wouldn’t it? Though—” she frowned at her own comment “—I’m being needlessly unkind.”
Tenoctris was the first to admit that she wasn’t a powerful wizard, even now when powers were far greater than they’d been for a millennium. But she didn’t make mistakes; and so far as Sharina was concerned, Tenoctris had every right to condemn the powerful fools whose blundering imperiled the kingdom.
A sailor—a petty officer wearing a broad leather belt over his kilt instead of a rope tie like the common seamen—ran out on the jib, shading his eyes with a hand as he peered into the sea ahead of them. He rode the ship’s dips and risings with the practiced grace of a courtier making gestures in accordance with palace etiquette. He must have seen—or not seen—what he expected, because he turned and bellowed sternward, “Aye, we’re clear, Master Lobon!”
“Such a lot of people,” Cashel said, shaking his head in pleased amazement as his eyes swept the moles. “I never knew there were so many people in all the world.”
The wealthy nobles of Carcosa would be on the quay to greet Prince Garric formally, but the common people had come out also. The nobles’ retainers would keep them away from the quay, but by standing on the long, curving arms which enclosed the harbor they got an earlier view of the visitors. There were thousands of them—many thousands. Even as a shade of its former self, Carcosa remained a great city.
“Waiting to see us,” Cashel marveled aloud. He grinned broadly. “Well, waiting to see Prince Garric. And that’s just as amazing a thing as, well, all the rest.”
He gestured clumsily with the arm that encircled Sharina, indicating the pomp and glitter of the royal fleet: flags and bunting, soldiers in gleaming armor; a hundred bronze rams glinting across the western horizon as the ships approached the harbor, and the sea running in jeweled droplets from the blades of thousands of feathering oars. The commander of the Shepherd’s Blood Eagles was trying to array them, though the deck even of a quinquereme was so narrow that only two could stand abreast. Sailors hopped over the ventilator gratings above the oarsmen, cursing the soldiers but going on about their tasks regardless.
The spectators started to cheer w
hile the fleet was still a quarter mile from the mole. The sound was faint at first, from only a few throats and attenuated by distance; but it built, and soon the whole crowd was cheering. Scarves and sashes waved, improvised flags to greet the prince.
“I wasn’t sure they’d be glad to see us,” Cashel said. “An army coming, after all; an army from Ornifal.”
“They’re cheering for Prince Garric of Haft,” Sharina reminded him. “The people who’ve held power in Carcosa, Count Lascarg and his cronies, may not be happy to see us, but the common people are proud that a man from Haft rules the kingdom for the first time in a thousand years.”
“I guess the count’ll keep his mouth shut if he has a problem,” Cashel said. He spoke with a hint of quiet anticipation. Cashel was for the most part a gentle man; Sharina didn’t remember him ever having started a fight. But he’d never quit one either while there was an opponent left who wanted to keep going.
“Yes,” said Sharina, thrilled to be reminded of the other side of her fiance, the part that was never directed at her. “I think he’ll be very quiet.”
She cleared her throat, then added, “And I think that the people cheering know that even if Garric were a tyrant, they’re better off ruled by a bully who’s in Valles most of the time than they are with the gang right in their midst.”
“Prince Garric...,” called the crowd on the mole. They were shouting in unison now so that Sharina could make out their words. “Prince Garric....”
“Garric’s not a bully,” Cashel said, his voice a soft rumble. His muscles had stiffened, and his thick hickory quarterstaff quivered slightly in his right hand. “And if the people running Carcosa are bullies, well, so much the worse for them now.”