Of Weft and Weave (Dica Series Book 2)

by Clive S. Johnson

  Together, they checked the boat’s caulking, greased the rowlocks, and emptied and re-stocked its locker with the coming trip’s essentials. It was only when Sconner started preparing a couple of blocks that Phaylan noticed the spar from which they hung. It ran the full length of the boat but well above it, close to the roof joists, and vanished into the darkness beyond the boat’s stern.

  From each block Sconner hung ropes down to holes bored through the boat’s raised keel-line. When each had been strung, the pilot pulled at the ropes until the boat slowly began to lift free of its keel-rest. With it suspended a foot or so from the ground, and the ropes securely tied-off, the Pilot rubbed his hands together. “There she be done. Time still afore change o’ tide, time to get everyone readied, and more important like, to find out where we be bound.”

  Back in the room, meanwhile, Nephril had been appraising Que’Devit and Lambsplitter, in part at least, of his journey north. He’d left it at no more than a search for rare metals, with which to attempt a repair of Leiyatel’s failing function, but Lady Lambsplitter’s keen mind suspected more. She knew Lord Nephril well enough for his manner, if not his words, to rouse some suspicion, but kept it very much to herself.

  Que’Devit, on the other hand, seemed to accept it all at face value. Even when they’d learnt that Nephril’s fellow travellers were principally Galgaverran, there’d been no difficult questions raised. The hard part had been hiding their destination, for otherwise Nephril would have had to explain how the Gray Mountains had once again been made passable.

  “The Guardian has assured me that what is needed can be found in the mountains,” Nephril had begun to dissemble. “That if enough be found then we have a good chance of strengthening the Certain Power, and so returning some order to the realm.”

  Lady Lambsplitter was becoming more suspicious. “Strikes me it’s all a bit late for that now. Countess Ragskin may have believed that…” Bringing the Countess back to mind brought home to her the stark reality of their fate. Each of them remembered her bloodcurdling scream and the dull thudding that had followed, remembered… But no, it was too hard to think of that now, and so they looked elsewhere, anywhere but there.

  The first to find safer thoughts was Lady Lambsplitter. “If your party of travellers are going into the mountains then I take it you’ll be treading along the Lost Northern Way?” Like a piece of flotsam to shipwrecked sailors, they all soon grasped at her question.

  “Aye,” Nephril had quickly answered. “Along as much of it as still be open. Through the forest and onto the Strawbac Hills if possible.”

  “And if not?” Que’Devit innocently asked.

  ‘If not?” Nephril quietly asked himself, and as earnestly thought, ‘If not, then I will need to labour over mine own remembering, will need to dredge decipherment of symbols from long forgotten knowing.’ Openly, he lied, “I have been afore, long ago I admit, but still it be fresh enough in mine own mind to find the way.”

  It was Que’Devit who cut straight to the quick. “So, without your good self, my Lord Nephril, the cause will almost certainly be lost?”

  ‘More certain than almost,’ Nephril thought but said nothing. His silence was revealing enough, though, never mind his evident discomfort.

  Lady Lambsplitter became quite animated and sat straight in her chair. “In which case we’d better get you to them, and without delay, eh, Lord Nephril? Would that not be wise counsel?”

  Nephril found her knowing look disquieting, the more so when he found it impossible to guess why, but it seemed to have gone unnoticed by Que’Devit, who asked, “Where and when were you intending meeting them?”

  Nephril explained that the Guardian and her party would be spending the night at the old sconce, the one up against Eastern Gate. “I intended arriving at Layther Manse, atop Scout Hill, sometime this afternoon, to watch for their arrival, but, well…” He looked crestfallen.

  “You’ll never make it now, Lord Nephril,” Lambsplitter said. “What do you reckon they’ll do when you don’t turn up?”

  He was glad he’d felt that strange unease back there in Galgaverre, for it had made him instruct Penolith to carry on without him if he wasn’t there to meet them. He’d assured her he would easily overtake their burdened party well before they could get lost, but he was now beginning to have serious doubts.

  Whilst he tried to judge how far ahead they’d likely get, Lady Lambsplitter began explaining, “It seemed perfectly plain to me that we’d be trapped here, on Grayden’s Head, if we only had the option of going by land. Without going well inland, and therefore wasting much time, we couldn’t get past Utter Shevling without falling into threatening hands. No, if Lord Nephril’s to join his party, and we’re to get to our homes, then the only way’s the sea.”

  Phaylan’s heart leapt as he came through the doorway and heard those words. He couldn’t wait to be a part of the sea’s grey, heaving mass, to be tossed upon its waves, to feel its irresistible power carry him along. He’d felt all that simply from seeing it spread out before him. How much more thrilling then would the reality be? He couldn’t wait.

  As Nephril began to feel green at the thought, Lady Lambsplitter pressed Sconner, even as he came in through the doorway. “Steermaster? Can you get us all across the estuary and ashore somewhere near the Lost Northern Way?”

  His answer was a low whistle and a sucking sound, made through his teeth. He turned and looked out through the doorway, closely studied the water, judged it to look oily or not, and if so where and whether it was clear or turgid. He then devoted the same close scrutiny to the sky.

  He said nothing, only strode out onto the terrace and sniffed the air. He searched for the gulls and noted their flight, watched for the spume and where the wind took it and how, what colour it held and when, and then closed his eyes to feel the wind. He spent quite some time building a close knowing. Slowly, his blood felt the sea, felt its coursing ebb and flow, whilst the hairs on his arms rippled in the wind, as at the nape of his neck and about his bare shins.

  When he could feel the estuary, its coastline, its depths and shallows and sandbanks, its tows, eddies and rips, when he felt them fill his form until he knew not where he or they ended, then and only then did he speak. “Aah, ah reckon so, but won’t be easy, not be a long cast. We’ll be afloat awhile. Though it be not much more than a couple of miles as them gulls glide, for us and fish it’ll be more than a night agin river an’ tide.”

  “A night!” Que’Devit bemoaned, but Lambsplitter settled it.

  “Can’t be helped. It’ll have to take what it takes for we’ve no other choice.”

  Nephril soon felt even greener at the gills, but Sconner made it yet worse. “We can only make it if we embark now, though. It’ll be a close thing, there’s no denying, but a lost cause if we delay much longer.”

  Before long they were helping him, quite unnecessarily, push the boat and its wheeled carrying frame from the boathouse and along the terrace towards the sea. When the prow jutted out over the edge, Sconner chocked the frame’s wheels and secured it to large hooks in the floor. He lifted side-beams into place, pinning them at the top of the frame, and soon started cranking a large handle.

  A ratcheting sound accompanied the slow, jerking rise of the boat and its cantilevered carrying-spar, it and the side-beams becoming ever more obtuse as the boat steadily swung out over the edge. Once the beams were vertical, and the boat completely above the water’s swell, Sconner stopped and grinned before leaping into the boat. He untied the ropes and carefully lowered the boat, until its stern rested at the very edge of the terrace. Once more secured, he turned and bowed low before inviting everyone aboard.

  It wasn’t easy, with the boat’s swaying and the water’s disorienting swell, but eventually they all safely went aboard. Phaylan was beside himself with excitement and so failed to catch Nephril’s long and deep sigh, or the stoic look in his eyes.

  “Hold tight!” Sconner called before finally lowering the craft
to the water, with a rather disconcerting smack as the swell came up to meet it. All of a sudden they were afloat.

  Nephril sat rigidly next to Lady Lambsplitter on the bow-seat whilst Phaylan enthused next to Que’Devit on the stern-board. The mid-bench quickly took Sconner’s solid bulk before he expertly swung the oars to their locks, their tips soon strongly biting at the water. With a mighty heave, but little disturbance of the water, the pilot pulled the boat against its oars and away from the rise and fall of the terrace.

  Nephril felt his stomach churn almost immediately, a hint of bile staining his throat, but when Sconner advised him only to watch the rocks, his nausea magically dissolved. “When they can no longer spy the shore,” Sconner added, “then hold to horizon. Fix they eyes there and nowhere else and they’ll be fine.”

  They were wise words, and ones Que’Devit quietly took profit from, but it was Phaylan who’d no need of such palliatives. He was almost literally in his element; face flushed with excitement, joyfully relishing every fall and rise, unconcerned by losing sight of any rocky anchor in the troughs, too elated to notice at the crests.

  Pilot Sconner wryly smiled as he watched the lad’s enthusiasm, saw how he took so naturally to the sea, but a dark cloud soon threatened that simple and pure thought. If only he’d had a son such as him, one who could have carried the mantle of pilot when he himself succumbed to the ravages of time.

  Meeting, courting and wedding sat so uncomfortably with the life of a Grayden pilot, removed as he had to be for much of the time. But then, well, maybe there was a chance. Yes, maybe with the changes now being wrought he could risk a greater hope. Maybe the wall that had always separated the highborn from the lowly could soon come tumbling down, could let him approach her and then…

  He shook his head and sighed somewhat dejectedly, but then rallied. His heart leapt and became lighter as Pilot’s Point fell away to their stern and Grayden harbour came into sight. Above it, though, a newly lofting plume of jet-black smoke rose into the sky.

  A portent if ever there was one of the old making way for the new, delivering opportunities, levelling inequalities and giving real hope of requital. When the smoke had drawn all their eyes in horror, the pilot’s own had only drifted longingly to Lady Lambsplitter.

  26 Time and Tide

  Quite naturally, the sky starting to fill with dense black smoke did draw their attention somewhat from what would otherwise have been a spectacular view. As Sconner pulled the boat away from Pilot’s Point, out into the faster flow of the estuary, the wall-topped cliffs around the bay soon came into view, the solitary rise of the Kings’ Mausoleum looming high above them.

  Although the Great Wall was only fifty feet tall here, its march along the high cliff tops quite dominated the view. Below, the sea’s swell was enough to hide the harbour repeatedly behind its heaving crests. That and the distracting smoke meant that most of them missed the fast approaching gigs until Phaylan happened to look their way.

  Sconner had certainly seen them although he said nothing, for when Phaylan raised the alarm he simply kept to his rhythm, pulling no harder. Even his immense strength could in no way better the gigs’ much sleeker lines, nor their greater number of oars. They were plainly gaining and at quite a rate, and nothing Sconner could do was going to alter that.

  When the plume of smoke steadily moved starboard, the estuary’s mouth abaft, it made Lady Lambsplitter suspect that Sconner was up to something. He’d kept his stroke steady but was slowly nosing their boat towards the bay’s eastern point, on a coarse for its jagged, black rocks. Not once did he look that way, which sorely tried her trust in him, for the rocks grew menacingly ahead. He’d eyes only for the overtaking gigs, it was true, but his nose still sniffed the air whilst his arms felt for changes in the tow and rip at the oars.

  It was Nephril who first noticed the deeper swell, the reassuring sight of land repeatedly being lost. The gigs themselves were beginning to draw abeam, Sconner’s more sluggish boat wallowing amidst the crests and troughs, its bow and stern often clear of the water. The men of Grayden, and no doubt some of Utter Shevling, had begun hailing, but their sentences came as broken as were the waters.

  The pilot must have heard something, for as they crested the next swell, he called back. “Return they ashore!” They were then alone once more in their own basin of oily water. He called again, though, as they lofted the next crest. “They be outta they’s depth, us boys!”

  Phaylan was sure he’d heard their returned call, sure he’d felt anger in it. It had sounded something like ‘Turn yems o’er, Pilot!’ but he couldn’t be sure.

  Without warning, he was jolted from his seat and thrown, stunned and disoriented, into the boat’s wet bilge. Lying there, somewhat groggily, he saw fingers wrap themselves over the saxboard, knuckles straining white as they pulled hard at the boat.

  Indecision froze him. Was it one of their own clambering back or a boarder? He then noticed, in that strange way such things sometimes impinge, that each finger displayed a tattooed letter. As he began to read their proclaimed name, his own hand happened upon something heavy and solid. Before he knew it, he’d struck out at Mary’s betrothed, the grappling hook’s point snagging past the gold ring just below the letter ‘R’ and jarring against bone.

  Once more they were below the crests but now with a gig alongside, swear words fast swamping their own sturdy craft. Phaylan’s shocked eyes were fixed by his victim’s, whilst blood slowly trickled down the haft he held between them. Mary should have been happy this day, happy her husband realised his plight and so sensibly went mute, and looked imploringly into Phaylan’s eyes.

  When Phaylan let the haft slowly slide through his grip, as the boats slowly drifted apart, everyone aboard both were utterly rapt. They all watched in absolute silence as Phaylan’s hand slid nearer the end and then came free.

  Mary’s husband sank to his knees and grasped at the makeshift weapon, blood seeping between his fingers. The eyes he lifted to Phaylan, though, simply spoke his heartfelt thanks, more so than any words could have done. Nobody moved, even when the two boats once more came together, for Phaylan’s pity seemed to have wicked away all anger.

  The Dican nobles were no longer quarry, displaced as such by the pain their pursuers now shared with Mary’s husband as he carefully withdrew the hook. He held its blood-stained metal before him for a moment before disarmingly offering Phaylan the haft.

  The other gigs had drawn in by now, the angry shouts of the men of Grayden quickly dissolving in the face of such a poignant act. Sconner’s voice, though, soon swelled between them. “There be no gripe wi’ Lord Nephril, not from us, nor wi’ her Ladyship, fer thems’ve ne’er done us or usen’s any harm.”

  He’d been standing, stoutly paddling the oars to keep balance and station. “Ah’s be afretted bi they’s own peril, though, the lot o’ they,” he said as he turned to look up at the looming cliffs, drawing their own eyes that way. “They’s all know of us piloting, as how Ah steers better than all theys put together.”

  They realised the truth of his words, but Sconner was going to make sure. “Ah’s steering us self a deft course, a course they’ll not match wi’ they’s shorter knowing and longer gigs. Turn they aback afore it be too late. I want none of they’s blood on us hands, na’er a one o’ they.”

  At that, he sat and pulled hard on one oar, turning his own shorter craft far quicker than they could their gigs, and pulled strongly between them. As he put the looming point astern, and turned across the Eyeswin’s strong ebb, he called out, “Steer at Pilot’s Point, ‘til they’re off Kings’ Folly, then head in. Does they hear?” In case they’d not, he kept repeating it every time they crested the swell until he knew his voice would only fall short.

  Although the northern shore of the estuary was only a couple of miles away, the strong currents made getting there a much longer journey, their diversion to the eastern point not having helped at all. Not only had it delayed them but it had also placed them
in far more treacherous waters, caught by the Eyeswin’s greater vigour at the ebbing tide.

  As soon as they’d cleared the point, and the long, straight stretch of the Great Wall came back into view above them, their small boat was savagely dragged downstream and quickly away from the castle. Sconner had slanted his course across its savage tow, pulling heroically at the oars, aiming for waters beyond, ones he knew would be calmer.

  The tide was always held back somewhat after each turn by the shape of the northern shore and the pressure of the released river. For an hour or so, a long stretch of still water would hug the shoreline there, until the lowest reaches of the river had dropped far enough for the tide to fall after it. The estuary would then quickly turn turbulent and race out to sea. If they got caught in that, they’d have little prospect but open water.

  Even had they not been challenged by the gigs, and kept close to Sconner’s original course, they’d have been lucky to have gained landfall on the northern side before sunset. Now, though, they’d no chance. There was even some doubt they’d gain the island to which Sconner had been heading before darkness would finally swamp them.

  By the time they’d come to those stiller waters the pilot was near exhausted, could only weakly pull them to its most placid reaches and there gain some reprieve. Now though, their boat was well out towards the mouth of the estuary, flirting with the sea’s embrace.

  Que’Devit looked worried. “Are you alright, Sconner? You look fair done in.”

  The pilot tried to be dismissive until Phaylan asked, “Is there still far to go, Master Pilot?” Sconner’s slumped frame made Phaylan insist, “You rest awhile, Steermaster Sconner. I’ll do the rowing, if you’ll guide me.” Sconner looked up and saw the innocence of youth in the lad’s eyes, but also its inexhaustible confidence.