by David Weber
“See that orange buoy?” Kenhodan nodded as Bahzell pointed to the bell-crowned buoy. “Once we’ve cleared that, it’s into the Fradonian Channel we’ll be. We’ll follow that south to Cape Storm, then bear well away to the west for a day or two before we make our southing.”
“Why?”
“Because this whole coast’s after being fanged with reefs. North to south, the Fradonian Banks stretch nearly a hundred leagues, and every mortal league of them dotted with ships’ bones. Korthrala’s Teeth, folk call them.”
“So.” Kenhodan felt the grain of the rail with an index finger. “And when do we reach Cape Storm?”
“It’s over a hundred leagues, but—” Bahzell squinted at the yards “—Wave Mistress’s after being almost as fast as Brandark boasts, and the wind’s after being fair…Late this time tomorrow, if Korthrala heeds our prayers. Which, like as not, he won’t.”
“And from there to Korun?”
“Now that’s after being harder to say. The winds are fluky in the spring, and the trade season’s just starting, so it’s likely enough as the corsairs will be out after a hungry winter. It might be as they’re even hungry enough to be tackling Wave Mistress.”
Bahzell sniffed the salt appreciatively and tapped his sword belt with a cheerful smile.
“Call it fifteen days to the White Water and you’ll not be too far out,” he said finally. “And maybe two more days upriver to Korun, with the spring flood in our teeth. Then best add in a day or two for calms and the like. Say twenty days.”
“I’ll be sorry to see it end,” Kenhodan said wistfully.
“Hah! It’s kind the sea’s been to you so far, my lad! Best be taking my word for it—a seaman’s lot is hard when Korthrala’s after growing absent-minded and lets the storms loose! I’ve seen ships this size stand on their heads and curtsy while they waved their backsides at the clouds. You won’t be finding that so pleasant!”
“I suppose not. But for now…”
They watched a white hurricane of gulls dive at the wake, their voices a shrill threnody across the wind, their wings a ruffle of thunder. The sky gleamed, swept and polished by the night’s storm, and the crisp wind flowed chill from the north, stinging their cheeks as the Western Sea breathed and Wave Mistress pitched beneath them. The figurehead of Myrea, Korthrala’s mortal mistress, moved with the ship, light flickering from the gilded trident she’d “borrowed” from her lover, and Kenhodan’s heart rose despite the nagging loss of his past as his lungs ached with the savor of salt.
“Aye.” Bahzell sounded thoughtful. “My folk live inland, and other folk aren’t so wrong as I’d like to think when they’re after calling us barbarians. Mind, times change, and it’s not so barbarian we are these days, thanks to my Da and Leeana’s. Yet there it is. It’s not so easy to forget twelve hundred years and more of history, and I’m thinking—sometimes, any road—that we were after losing all those years because we lived away from the sea.” He smiled sadly. “The salt’s in our blood, Kenhodan, and we’ve the hearts and thews to fight old Wave Beard himself tooth and nail, and we never even guessed it. Instead, we were after wasting our blood and bone against folk we might’ve lived in peace with when we should have been measuring ourselves against this.”
He waved at the sea and fell silent, his mobile ears half-flattened. Kenhodan could just catch the thread of sailor’s chantey he hummed under his breath, and he felt oddly like an intruder. He turned silently to leave, but Bahzell roused and clouted him staggeringly on the shoulder before he’d taken a second step.
“Here, now! That’s no way for a champion of Tomanāk to be talking! Come on. Let’s you and I gather up some of these lubbers and be about teaching them which end of the sword’s after having the pointy bit. Who knows? It might be as they’ll need it soon, eh?”
CHAPTER FIVE
A Bit of Insight
“You and Bahzell really have been friends for a long time, haven’t you, Brandark?”
The hradani laid his book in his lap and looked up, cocking his ears at Kenhodan. The human sat across the table from him in his shirt sleeves, slowly and carefully polishing the fine-grained wood of a small harp in the golden pool of light pouring in through the cabin skylight, and Brandark smiled.
“You might say that,” he acknowledged. “Mind you, I didn’t expect our friendship to last this long when we first met. Mostly because I didn’t expect Bahzell to last very long! I know you haven’t known him as long as I have, but I’m pretty sure you can already see why he didn’t make exactly the most…circumspectly behaved diplomatic hostage in history.”
“Diplomatic hostage?” Kenhodan’s moving hands paused. “Bahzell was a diplomatic hostage?”
“Of course he was.”
Brandark seemed a bit taken aback by Kenhodan’s surprise, and Kenhodan set down his polishing cloth, sat back in his chair, and placed both hands on the table, rather like a man bracing himself.
In some ways, he and Brandark had become even closer than he’d come to Bahzell or Wencit. Even though he couldn’t imagine what the reason was, he’d been forced to accept that there truly was a reason Wencit couldn’t fill the yawning void where his memory should have been. He didn’t like it, he couldn’t truly accept it, yet he’d come to the conclusion that he had no choice but to endure it…and to console himself with the belief that sooner or later, if they both survived, Wencit truly would tell him what he needed to know. In the meantime, however, the wizard’s silence was there between them, a hidden core of tension at the heart of their relationship.
Bahzell didn’t know any more about Kenhodan’s past than Kenhodan himself, and he regarded Kenhodan’s amnesia the same way he regarded the red-haired man’s physical scars. It was simply part of who Kenhodan was, a wound to be accepted with sympathy and compassion, but not some dread secret he had to juggle against other, awesome responsibilities. He’d become a trusted companion, a friend, and a source of strength, yet there was something, some constraint, in his relationship with Kenhodan, as well. It had nothing at all to do with the human’s amnesia; Kenhodan was certain of that. But at the same time, without knowing why, he was positive Bahzell had his own reasons—quite possibly reasons related to his champion’s duty to Tomanāk—that made him occasionally watch his words very, very carefully. There was no way in the universe Bahzell Bahnakson would ever lie to him; Kenhodan was certain of that, as well. But not lying wasn’t remotely the same thing as telling the whole truth. Kenhodan often wondered if his hypersensitivity to his amnesia was causing him to imagine that faint edge of constraint in Bahzell, yet each time he considered it, he came back to the conclusion that it wasn’t.
But Brandark was no champion of Tomanāk, and he certainly wasn’t a wizard. Like Bahzell, he knew no more about Kenhodan’s past than Kenhodan himself did, yet he had no secrets to protect and no divine instruction to treat Kenhodan as anything other than one of his closest friends’ comrade and sword companion. And, also like Bahzell, he accepted Kenhodan’s amnesia the way he would have accepted any other wound, and he’d extended his welcome to Kenhodan the same way he would have welcomed any of Bahzell’s other friends.
That was important. Kenhodan very much doubted Brandark even began to fully realize how important it was. To have anyone treat him the same way they would have treated anyone else would have been more than enough to make him prayerfully grateful for Brandark, but Brandark wasn’t just “anyone.”
Kenhodan had quickly discovered that Wave Mistress’ captain was even more of a challenge to the hradani stereotype than he’d first thought. He’d recognized at their first meeting that Brandark had a remarkably acute brain, but after an evening listening to the hradani and Wencit arguing philosophy and ancient history, he’d realized Brandark was also a serious scholar, sufficiently informed, polished, literate, and widely read to debate Wencit of Rūm head-to-head…and win. That was scarcely part of the traditional hradani image!
As if that wasn’t enough, Brandark was al
so an astonishingly accomplished musician. Kenhodan had noticed three instrument cases that first morning; since then, Brandark had pulled out another half-dozen, and Kenhodan suspected there might be still more tucked away and overlooked in a corner somewhere. And that was another reason for his comfort with Brandark, for he’d discovered that he, too, was a musician.
It was like his sword skill, something he had no memory of acquiring…and that he’d never suspected he possessed until he saw the harp. Brandark had brought it out on their second night aboard, and something like an icicle of lightning had gone through Kenhodan when he saw it. He’d reached out without asking permission—without even thinking—and taken the harp from Brandark’s surprised hands. The hradani had started to ask a question, undoubtedly for an explanation, but then Kenhodan’s hands had swept across the harp strings and Brandark had sat back in his chair, his eyes wide and his ears half-flattened in pleasure, as the music poured across him.
Kenhodan didn’t really remember much from that night. The notes and the melody had flowed through him, playing him as if he’d been the harp, sweeping him out of Wave Mistress’ great cabin and into a place where, for at least those few moments, his maimed past meant nothing. A place where he was simultaneously only a single ripple of notes lost in the greater melody flooding from the harp and yet simultaneously whole—complete and at peace as he’d never been since the moment Leeana first asked him about the scars he hadn’t known he had.
That love for music was a link, a bond, between him and Brandark that went straight to the soul, and its discovery was a gift beyond price. When Kenhodan had finally floated once more to the surface of the music, opened his eyes upon the cabin once again, he’d seen the others—even Wencit—gazing at him with the rapt expressions of men who’d been transported beyond themselves on the wings of Chesmirsa herself. He’d looked back at them, wondering what had happened, his mind still hazed by a glissando of harp notes, and realized—finally—that he’d somehow ended up with Brandark’s harp in his hands. He’d flushed in embarrassment and held it out quickly, but Brandark had only sighed and shaken his head.
“No,” he’d said softly, his eyes darkly serious yet somehow brilliant. “That harp’s exactly where it ought to be. A man who can play like that needs an instrument worthy of him. Do me the honor of allowing me to give him one.”
It was only later, from Wencit, that Kenhodan learned the harp Brandark had given him had been crafted in Saramantha over six centuries before by the legendary elven harpist Wenfranos.
The memory of that moment of discovery, and of Brandark’s flat refusal to allow him to return an instrument which was literally priceless, flowed through him as he looked back across the table top and the harp at the captain, yet it wasn’t enough to damp his surprise at what Brandark had just told him.
“I wasn’t aware the Order of Tomanāk ever gave ‘diplomatic hostages,’” he said.
“Oh, it wasn’t the Order.” Brandark sat back in his own chair and shook his head. “It was his father.”
“His father?” Kenhodan blinked. Bahzell had mentioned his “Da” a time or two in passing, and it was obvious he’d respected his father a great deal, but what sort of—?
“His father,” Brandark repeated. “Prince Bahnak.”
“Prince Bahnak? You mean Bahzell is the son of a prince?”
“I mean Bahzell’s a prince in his own right, as well as a champion of Tomanāk. You didn’t know?”
“No,” Kenhodan said with commendable restraint. “Somehow he and Wencit—and Leeana, now that I think about it—failed to share that particular little tidbit with me.”
“Um. Should I, ah, assume then that they also ‘failed to share’ the fact that Leeana was born Leeana Bowmaster, the only daughter of Tellian Bowmaster, Baron of Balthar and Lord Warden of the West Riding?”
Kenhodan’s nostrils flared as he inhaled deeply. The title of “baron” meant different things in different realms; among the Sothōii, it just happened to be the highest and most noble title short of the king himself. The Kingdom of the Sothōii took in the entire Wind Plain, and quite a few thousand square leagues around the base of that mighty plateau, and there were only four Sothōii ridings.
Which meant Leeana’s father’s demesne had been about the size of the complete Kingdom of Angthyr.
“Yes, I believe you should assume it somehow slipped their mind to mention that to me, either,” he said after a moment. “How in the names of all the gods did she and Bahzell end up married? For that matter how did the daughter of a Sothōii baron end up a war maid? And how did a war maid end up marrying anyone?”
“Forgive me, Kenhodan,” Brandark said after a moment, his tone oddly gentle, “but there appear to be even larger…gaps in your memory than I’d realized. You truly don’t know who Bahzell and Leeana are, do you?”
“Beyond being two people who gave shelter and protection to Wencit and a man who has no idea who he used to be, no. I don’t know who they are—what they are. But it’s just become evident to me that I know even less about them than I’d thought I did.”
“You’ve never heard why Bahzell’s called ‘Bloody Hand,’ then?”
For some reason, Kenhodan’s headshake seemed to take Brandark aback for just a moment, but then the hradani shook it off and grinned.
“Actually,” he said, “there’s an entire lengthy ballad about him. Quite flattering, as a matter of fact, and I personally think it was quite well written. You might almost say brilliantly written, now that I think about it. If you’d like, I’ll play it for you later tonight. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to get a couple of the lads in to sing the words, though—Garuth and Yairdain, perhaps. My playing’s better than my singing voice, and I’m sure Bahzell would like you to hear it for the first time properly presented.”
“I’m sure he would,” Kenhodan replied just a bit warily, and Brandark chuckled. Then the hradani’s expression sobered and he crossed his legs, resting one mirror-bright boot on the opposite knee, propped his elbows on the arms of his chair, and steepled his fingers under his chin.
“All right,” he said after a moment. “I’ll tell you about Bahzell, how we met, and who he is. But if I do, you have to promise not to keep interrupting with admiring exclamations like ‘You don’t say!’ or ‘I never would’ve guessed that!’ Trust me, if you don’t, this could take all afternoon, and we won’t have that long before Bahzell gets done swapping stories with Captain Forstan. Besides, if he gets back while we’re talking about it, he’ll insist on inserting all sorts of minor, pointless clarifications that’ll just slow down the narrative and confuse you. I love him like a brother, but he has absolutely no sense of the storyteller’s art. Understood?”
“Understood,” Kenhodan replied, settling back in his chair.
“All right,” Brandark said again. “First, I’m a Bloody Sword and Bahzell’s a Horse Stealer. Do you remember what that means?”
Kenhodan nodded…and sternly reminded himself of his promise not to interrupt. It was hard to keep it in the face of that simple statement. Although he more than suspected there’d be plenty of other surprises along the way, this one was quite enough to be starting with. The towering hatred, competition, and blood feuds between the Bloody Sword hradani clans and their Horse Stealer rivals were fierce enough to be the stuff of legends far beyond the limits of their northern homelands.
“Since you don’t know the deep, dark secrets of Bahzell’s past, however,” Brandark continued, “I’m assuming you don’t have any specific memories of recent political events among the northern hradani, though. Am I correct?”
Kenhodan thought for a moment, then nodded again as he realized he genuinely didn’t.
“Well, some decades back, Bahzell’s father, Prince Bahnak, decided to put an end to all the nonsense our clans had been inflicting on one another for the odd eight or nine hundred years. Unfortunately, hradani being hradani, the only way to do that was for one of us to finally conquer the other
one once and for all, and for some strange reason he wasn’t especially interested in being the one who got conquered. That meant conquering the Bloody Swords, instead, to which—for some equally strange reason—the Bloody Swords objected. There was a war. In fact, there were two or three of them, and after one of them—one Bahnak won handily, as a matter of fact—Prince Churnazh of Navahk—who was not a nice person, even if he was a Bloody Sword—was forced to accept Bahnak’s terms. Unfortunately, his defeat hadn’t been sufficiently severe, and he had too many allies, for Bahnak to demand his outright capitulation. Everyone knew there’d be another war, but both sides had reason to postpone it while they tried to build up their strength, so there was a treaty and an exchange of hostages, and as Bahnak’s youngest son, Bahzell was sent to Hurgrum. Clear so far?”
“So far.”
“Good, because this is where it gets interesting, since this is the point at which I enter the picture.” Brandark lifted his nose, flicked his ears, and grinned. “You see, much as it pains me to admit it, Churnazh was a member of my own Bloody Sword clan, the Raven Talons, and my father, another Brandark, was a powerful Raven Talon chieftain. Powerful enough Churnazh didn’t quite dare to try crushing him the way he had his other Bloody Sword rivals despite the fact that I’m afraid I’d made myself just a tiny bit unpopular with Churnazh. I was young and impulsive in those days, not the staid and sober fellow you know today, and, as I said, he wasn’t a nice person. He was also remarkably lacking in culture, even for an old-style hradani warlord, and he had no appreciation at all for original musical compositions.”
Kenhodan winced. He’d been aboard Wave Mistress for less than a week, yet he’d come to know Brandark well enough to have an unfortunately shrewd notion of the sorts of “original musical compositions” he must have produced about the “old-style hradani warlord” he’d just described.