The Flint Lord

by Richard Herley

  Anxiety gripped Hewzane’s heart. He and Speich went to meet the approaching man.

  “I make no excuses,” the unit leader said, when he had finished his story.

  “Are you wounded?” Speich said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then go back and help your men.”

  Fifty Vuchten had been sent to capture Gehan, and they had failed. Forty-three, including their commander, had been killed or incapacitated in the battle with Gehan’s bodyguards, who, together with a unit of Brennis soldiers, had allowed Gehan to make good his escape. All the bodyguards and soldiers had now been killed, but the damage had been done.

  Gehan had been seen running for the road to Apuldram, something which Hewzane should have provided against: besides loyal Brennis men at the worksheds, there were two ships in the creek, both seaworthy, and now, at mid afternoon, the tide was high.

  Five of the Vuchten had already gone in pursuit. They would not be enough.

  “Speich,” Hewzane said. “Take your Grey Unit. Bring him back.”

  “Depend on it,” Speich said, and, scarcely pausing, he added, “My lord.”

  * * *

  Plastered with snow on its windward side, the figurehead of the Kormoran nodded and rolled with the glossy black waves which, spumed and threaded with white, were being driven by the blizzard to break about the waterline and send spray over the deck and the icicle-hung rigging. The ship had turned into the wind: snow-blind, the jet and ivory head of the cormorant, fantastically styled with arched neck and hooked bill, had come to face the rough width of the Apuldram Channel and the wintry saltmarshes beyond.

  At the next mooring, riding its cable with the same measure but to a different time, a larger, less elegant vessel, the Empire, kept parallel company. Thirty yards of cold water separated them from the landing stages, where a big upturned coracle waited to be launched.

  A wisp of smoke showed from the roof-hole in the main workshed. Everything seemed to be normal. Gehan hesitated no longer. He went to the door and threw it open.

  Two men were inside, cross-legged on the floor, engrossed in some gambling game played with bone counters. They struggled to their feet and saluted him.

  “Where is the harbour Trundleman?”

  “Asleep, my lord. Our work is finished for today. We —”

  “Get him at once.”

  The older man hurried outside. Gehan followed him to the door and yet again scanned the road from the fort. It emerged from the trees two or three hundred yards away and to the left, and in a curve arrived at the precinct of the worksheds. The main shed was nearest the water, with removable panels along one wall to give access to the repair shop and storage loft. Next to it were a general storehouse, a seasoning shed, and a boat-building shed. At the edge of the little group of buildings stood the sail tannery, which smelled of rotting fish and urine and gave Apuldram its own peculiar odour.

  The road was empty.

  “You,” Gehan said to the other man. “Come here. If you see anyone on the road, tell me immediately.”

  Gehan wiped his brow, took off his cape and, though he wanted nothing more than to sit down and rest, went to a trestle table where the two men’s afternoon meal was half finished. He ate without knowing what he was pushing into his mouth, bread, salt fish, cheese, honeycake, indiscriminately mixed with beer drunk straight from a wooden jug.

  His heart was still hammering: he had run and slithered more than three miles without a break, not knowing how close pursuit might be, not even knowing if Apuldram would be safe. He was not used to heavy exertion. He found his hands refusing to respond properly; it felt as if a broad strap were being tightened about his chest.

  “Lord Brennis!”

  As Gehan turned he clumsily knocked over the jug: beer flooded the table and dripped to the floor.

  The harbour Trundleman, Tain, moved through the bluish rectangle of the doorway, a man of forty, bald and grizzled, wearing a fur and sealskin jacket with sheepskin lining and leggings.

  Like the men who worked under him, building, repairing, and often sailing the Valdoe ships and boats, Tain was of a breed drawn from those coastal villages which fished as well as farmed. He had lived with the sea all his life; he knew every yard of coast for a hundred miles to east and west. At a glance he took in Gehan’s appearance, the abandoned gambling-game, the beer dripping to the floor.

  “Is the Kormoran ready for sea?” Gehan said.

  A look of alarm crossed Tain’s face. “Not in this wind. It would not be safe.”

  “But is she ready?”

  “She can be made so in a few minutes.”

  “Then do it. Quickly. And I want you to scuttle the Empire.”

  Now the Trundleman was openly astonished.

  “Sink her. Do it now.”

  The rest of the harbour men, half a dozen in all, had gathered meanwhile outside the door. Most were middle-aged or old like Tain, with sheepskin or doeskin jackets and capes. One had lost a hand, another walked with a limp, but all were skilled men. Tain sent them to their work.

  “Do you keep snowshoes here?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “I want a man to go to Harting fort with a message for Commander Awach.” Again Gehan looked out of the doorway towards the empty road. “The message is this. There has been a mutiny at the Trundle. The Vuchten have attacked my men. Awach must signal all the western forts, including Bow Hill. On no account are any instructions from the Trundle to be heeded. The secondary forts are to be kept sealed until my orders come. These orders will be coded with the word … cormorant. Is that clear?”

  The Trundleman repeated the message without fault. “I have just the man to send, my lord.”

  “The rest of you will come with me. We’ll sail east and beach below Cissbury fort.”

  Outside, in the creek, axes were sounding in the hull of the Empire. The coracle’s painter had been tied to the sternpost; the men had already freed the Kormoran, which was being drawn on a long cable towards the shore.

  Plaited rush fenders crushed and squeaked against the frozen timbers of the landing stage, and the hawsers were looped and knotted round two oak bollards.

  The youngest and fittest of the harbour men, given a stormcoat, backpack, and snowshoes, set out for Harting and Commander Awach. For the first half mile he was to follow the edge of the creek, leaving no tracks.

  The Empire started to list. Two men appeared on deck, clambering free of the fountains of dark water gushing in from below. They let themselves down into the coracle, cast off, and paddled back to help their comrades carry sails and essential gear from the sheds to the Kormoran.

  In his haste to be gone, Gehan joined in the work, helping to rig the mainsail and raise the boom. He scarcely looked at the Empire as she upended and, in a boiling rush of bubbles, sank into the mud at the bottom of the creek.

  “My lord! Look! The road!”

  Five men with spears, a team of soldiers, Vuchten, had appeared between the trees, and were running towards the worksheds. A team of Vuchten against five old men: Gehan would stand no chance.

  “Get aboard!” he shouted to the three who were still by the sheds. They dropped their bundles and ran to the ship. With the Vuchten less than two hundred yards away, they freed the hawsers and scrambled up the gangplank, while the others, Gehan included, found poles and tried to push the Kormoran into the current, against the full force of the blizzard.

  But the wind was in the north-east, blowing onshore. Like a sentient, malevolent being, it was keeping the ship pinned to the landing stage. A strip of water appeared below Gehan’s pole, narrowed, widened, narrowed; he looked up and saw the Vuchten almost at the main shed.

  As they reached its precinct, Gehan heard a violent commotion above and behind him: the sound of tearing ropes, a sudden cascade of opening leather. There was a bang, a squeal of sheets running in their blocks, and with a jolt that shook the whole fabric of the ship the boom swept the afterdeck and was checked. The m
ainsail had carried away.

  Instantaneously the wind surged against the expanse of russet leather; the Kormoran heeled over against the landing stage, water flooding over the gunwale and rising up the deck. Gehan clawed at the shrouds to stop himself from falling. There was a screaming below him, to his left. The Trundleman had been hit by the boom and knocked overboard, trapped between the hull and a pile of the landing stage.

  Despite its list, the Kormoran was moving forward, timber grinding on timber. Gehan saw Tain being rolled and crushed into the weeds and barnacles before his body was released and floated into the water with the motion of the ship; and they were beyond the landing stage, out of control, veering with the wind and running diagonally across the yards that separated them from the shoals at the creek’s edge.

  The Kormoran ran aground at speed. The shrouds sliced into Gehan’s fingers: he lost his grip and was flung forward, his feet fouling something on the deck.

  The water hit the side of his face like a slab of granite. Splinters of pain were thrust into his sinuses. Membranes burst with the green tons of water pressing down from above. He was upside-down, his face being driven into the stones, and the green was changing to black, the solid universe black of the hull rolling on top of him, and his legs were caught, tangled with the rigging. His back was breaking.

  Then the Kormoran was free, moving into deep water. Beside him Tain was hauling on a rope, bringing the boom under control. The mainsail filled again and Gehan felt the whole ship grow taut. She leapt forward, running with the wind, plunging joyously into the storm. Pellets of freezing spray stung his face and drenched his clothes. He looked back and already the Vuchten and the Trundle and the scenery of his life were becoming small.

  At the tiller stood the man with one hand, watching the vast skyward sweep of leather. On either shore the snow and scrub were sliding past. They gained Cobnor Point and turned southward, leaving it for ever, carried by the eager tide into the open estuary. Over Pilsey Island which he knew so well, low and flat, he saw a host of tiny shorebirds, flying in a cloud that changed from dark to light as with one will they changed direction and turned to show their breasts. And here, at the prow, his own cormorant, the raven of the sea, was marking his course in jet and ivory and leading him to sanctuary.

  From brown water they moved into grey, into the broad ocean, and now the waves were breaking over the bows and the wind was in his face. The ship was disintegrating, her passage done. He called to his men and felt the wind under his wings and he was being lifted clear. Below him the boards were breaking and the sails shredding with the spindrift and the storm. He saw his men in the sea. Their heads were bobbing, their hands and arms clutching at wreckage. He soared on wide wings and they were drowning below, but he was free. He was no longer a raven: he was an eagle, borne in majesty to the heights where sea and sky were one, out of the blizzard, out of the clouds and into the sun.

  8

  Tagart was not dead. He had been lying here alone for a long time, and he was not dead. Voices had come and gone away again, but now he was not sure that he had not imagined them.

  Twice he had raised his head and dimly seen the snow. The first time, he remembered seeing the Flint Lord. The second time the Flint Lord had not been there, and it had stopped snowing, and the sky was darker, and to keep himself alive he was trying to discover whether the voices had been real and whether they had come before or after the second time. The thread of memory was fragile and difficult to follow, dissolved by pain.

  He had known pain before, but never like this.

  Never like this.

  He seemed to be waking, and there was a voice again. He was confused. Was this one of the voices he had heard before? Or was this imaginary too? But it was a voice he knew, and it was speaking a familiar word, a word from his old life, before his back had been opened.

  “Shode! Shode!”

  It was Fodich’s voice, and he remembered then that he was no longer lying alone on the hillside. Fodich and another man had come for him some time before dusk and carried him to the gorse. They had laid him face down on something soft, massaged his hands and feet and covered him with furs. He had listened to them talking. Rian had been taken by the soldiers and they were worried that she might tell them that Altheme was still in the gorse. After that the furs had been removed. Someone had touched Tagart’s wound and started to clean it and he had lost consciousness.

  There had been some daylight left then; now it was dark.

  “Shode! Shode!”

  Long ago, in his sleep, Tagart had known that Fodich and Altheme and all the others in the gorse were dead, surrounded by the soldiers, burned alive. He had seen the orange flames, the smoke drifting down the hill; but it seemed the smoke had been in sunshine and in this he was mistaken too. He had thought Fodich and the others were dead. He had thought he would have to crawl away from here by himself.

  But it was not so.

  He was here with them, in safety and shelter. They would help him and heal his wound.

  Tagart reached out his hand.

  “We want to lift you now,” Fodich said. “We’re going back to the forest.”

  Tagart stretched his hand further, to confirm the sound of Fodich’s voice, to confirm that Altheme was kneeling beside him and speaking too.

  He felt his fingers move. He touched the hard spikes of gorse. He touched the spears and icicles, the palisade. The fort was under his fingers, black, a few lights twinkling. By his grip he could crush it, crush the Trundle, crush the Flint Lord.

  But when he closed his hand they had already picked him up and were carrying him away.