Doom's Break

by Christopher Rowley

  Suddenly there came a commotion in the outer yard. Mots had come up from the tavern. There were visitors. A voice fueled by a little too much beer called out, " 'Tis Aeswiren himself, as I live and breathe."

  The dance was forgotten. Everyone crowded to the door.

  Two figures stood by the gate. Thru felt a sudden shiver, as if some chill wind had blown out the candles on the cake. There stood General Toshak in a grey cape and Mentu, Aeswiren's brother.

  Thru clasped hands with each of them and welcomed them in, though the sight of General Toshak here in Warkeen village filled him at once with foreboding. Thru had been Toshak's emissary the previous year and had logged thousands of miles, many of them aboard the Sea Wasp, in his service. Thru knew how busy Toshak was, all the time.

  "This is the night of our engagement," said Nuza as she hugged Toshak.

  "Then my mission is especially blessed," said Toshak. "For I can wish you both the best of fortune in your lives together."

  Thru hugged Mentu after explaining to the folk that the man was not the Great King of Shasht but his brother.

  "The ship?" asked Thru.

  "Anchored off the point," replied Mentu. "Juf is aboard, keeping an eye out."

  Mugs of ale were pressed on them, and they joined the company. The presence of a man at the party drew mots into Ware's yard from all over the village. Despite the peace and general goodwill, some angry shouts among the crowd were heard.

  At first the rumor had been that it was Aeswiren the Emperor, come himself. Then it was learned that it was his brother, the one who had befriended Thru Gillo on his epic travels and sailed home with him from the evil land of men. Still, everyone wanted to see this marvel, a man who had befriended their Thru Gillo.

  For Thru, Toshak's presence was the more worrisome. Thru knew that Toshak would have come only if he wanted something very badly.

  After a round of dancing, when Toshak and Nuza looked particularly fine on the floor, came another set of toasts. Ware was unstinting with the barrel, and more songs were proposed. Soon the company was lost in "The Fields of Home" with its many verses.

  Toshak took the opportunity to draw Thru aside. Mentu followed them to the old parlor, near the kitchen in the rambling Gillo house.

  Toshak got to the point. "My friend, I grieve that I must come to you at such a time with my news. But I know that you will understand at once the gravity of the situation."

  Thru felt his eyes harden. He knew. "They have come again?"

  "Yes. There is a second fleet. We learned just a few weeks ago. A small ship, like the Sea Wasp, appeared at Mauste. It got out of Shasht harbor just ahead of the new fleet. The men who sailed it here are brave, true-hearted servants of Aeswiren. We know we have less than a month now to prepare ourselves for the onslaught."

  Thru felt the tender shoots of hope wither in his heart. He had half expected this renewal of the darkness, but during the wondrous year he had put it out of his mind at last.

  "Foolish me," he murmured sadly.

  Toshak glanced at him, his eyes beady in the gloom of the parlor.

  "Well"—Thru shrugged—"the Assenzi warned me that something like this could happen."

  "The Assenzi know our enemy well."

  "I always feared that this would come."

  "So did we all."

  Thru nodded. There was a long moment of silence.

  "What do you want from me?"

  "I need you back as my emissary. From your previous work for me you have learned everything such a figure needs to know. You have met all the functionaries and Kings, all the generals and melds. No one else quite fills the bill like you. I want you to come back to the army. In fact, I want you to leave with me right now aboard the Sea Wasp."

  Mentu leaned close and put his hands on Thru's shoulders. "We can leave with the turn of the tide."

  Thru closed his eyes. The glory of the summer, the bounty of the harvest, the delight of being with Nuza—all began to fade away like a dream.

  "Are the reserves being mustered?"

  "It begins tomorrow. By the end of the week, it will have spread to all Dronned, Tamf, Creton, and Relf. I hope to have twelve thousand back in training within a month."

  Again Thru fell silent. With each turn of the gyre of war, the armies got larger.

  "What will the Great King do?"

  Toshak pursed his lips for a moment. "He will prepare to fight. We met with him two weeks ago. He expressed his regret that he was unable to prevent this second round of invasion."

  "We are better prepared this time."

  "Our enemy knows that, and much more. Neither side will begin in such a state of ignorance as we did following the raids on Creton."

  Toshak studied him with those piercing dark eyes. Mentu brooded in the doorway.

  "Well, of course I accept. My duty is clear. Though I am saddened by the loss of my dream."

  "Yes," said Toshak after a moment. "We are all saddened. But we both suspected this day might come."

  It was true.

  "I must also speak with Nuza," said Toshak. "We have need for her as well."

  Thru protested, "Surely she has given enough!"

  They all glanced outside where Nuza could be glimpsed dancing now with her mother and Ware Gillo on the edge of the throng.

  "We are building a hospital. I think she should administer it, at least in the first couple of years. Nuza has more energy than three ordinary people."

  Thru had to agree with that.

  "The hospital will be in New Tamf. The great Filek Biswas, the father of Simona, is coming to advise us on the construction and to begin training our new cadre of doctors."

  Thru's eyebrows bobbed up and down when he heard this. "That is good news. We can use such skill in the Land."

  "There is more than skill. When I visited Aeswiren on Mauste, he showed me some of the things that the great Filek has made."

  Thru nodded vigorously. "Yes, the micro-scope." Simona had spoken often of Filek's projects.

  "Then it will be a worthy cause for Nuza. She will make it work."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Sea Wasp rode northward on a thin wind out of the west. There was a light chop on the sea and a handful of small clouds scudding east toward the Land. The sun was past the zenith, but Mentupah felt confident that they would make Dronned before nightfall. The Lower Alberr rocks, a long stretch of shoals, lay just ahead.

  The ship's permanent crew—Juf, Janbur, and Mentu—were all aboard, and with them once more was Thru Gillo, carrying messages again for General Toshak.

  Juf and Janbur had both tried to make new lives for themselves ashore, but both had retreated to the barque. Juf's family and village had been destroyed in the war. He'd become a lost soul, drinking himself to oblivion in Sulmo City when Thru had found him and persuaded him to come back to the Sea Wasp. He'd settled in to the life of an itinerant sailor.

  Janbur was another story. He'd gone to Mauste with Simona and hopes of a bright future. But somehow he didn't fit in with the men from the army. He was an aristocrat, from a higher level of society than any of them, and they knew it and resented him. At the same time, the rough-hewn life in the sheds at Mauste wore on him. He had risked everything for his principles, and he had lost. He would never see the ancestral home again, never be Janbur of the Gsekk in that world where it meant so much to be wellborn. The hay pallet and ill-cooked food of the sheds was a poor reward for what he'd given up.

  Then his courtship of Simona Biswas had been rebuffed. She had dedicated her life to her work for the Emperor. She was the Emperor's courtesan in all but name. When he was ordered to return to the Sea Wasp as the Emperor's personal representative, he was glad to obey. He had never realized that Simona had seen his desperation and pressed the Emperor to act.

  Mentu had welcomed them both back. He'd had crews of sailors from Heuze's fleet and even a couple of fishermots—the Bellekay brothers from Dronned, who'd come to know Mentupah on his visits to the Old
Harbor tavern in Dronned—but none could stay for long. With his old shipmates back, the barque felt complete once again.

  Mentupah, too, had struggled with feelings of loss and alienation. After spending twenty years locked up in the tower he had been freed, in a sense, by Thru Gillo. Abandoning his own land, he had set out across the oceans to an uncertain future because he could not join the Shasht colony. His brother, Emperor Aeswiren, had originally imprisoned him, and Mentu did not trust him not to do it again if allowed the opportunity. At times, Mentu felt truly alone in the world. Fortunately, he had the Sea Wasp. When Simona stepped ashore in Mauste, Simona had made him a gift of the little ship.

  When Mentu had returned to Dronned, he found the mighty General Toshak waiting to interview him. Toshak needed a swift vessel to carry messages around the land, and the Sea Wasp was so much faster than the little cogs and fishing boats of the mots that it was a natural choice. Toshak also surmised that Mentu needed something to do.

  Mentu gladly accepted. And soon enough Toshak had roped Thru Gillo back into service. Having done the job before, Thru already knew the Kings, the Melds, and the Gryses of the Southern kingdoms. He had taken messages to all of them. Merchants in Creton and Ajutan gave him purses of gold coin to be taken to Toshak for the army. At that very moment, he carried a reply from Aeswiren to Toshak concerning their joint plan of action in the event that one of them was assaulted by the Old One's fleet, which they knew could not be far off.

  The Sea Wasp had come up to the edge of the Lower Alberr rocks, where odd currents helped to generate irregular waves. The barque slapped and bellied through these waves.

  Thru woke up and rolled out of his bunk. The deck beneath his feet was moving in a difficult, corkscrew motion. He went up on deck.

  Old Juf was leaning on the rail, studying the waves. "The boat never likes this patch of water. We come through here time and again, and she always bucks and pitches."

  "Hood rocks are over there." Thru pointed toward the shore, where waves were breaking.

  "Rough water, but Mentu says we'll be in Dronned by dusk."

  "Well, I'm sure he's right. He nearly always is."

  Just then, Janbur, up in the crow's nest, cried out, "Sail ho, windward."

  Thru and Juf raced up the yards to join him.

  "More than one sail," said Janbur, putting down the spyglass.

  "Man ship," breathed Juf.

  Thru studied the white dot on the horizon. Even his keen vision could not resolve it into a sail, but with the spyglass he saw at once that it was the tops of two masts. Then a third hove into view. The tops of three masts, all bearing sails.

  "Three-master, and coming this way."

  Mentu had come up at the first cry. He studied the three topmasts and then considered their course past the Lower Alberr rocks and into the long Dronned reach.

  They had reduced sail while they negotiated the rocky shoals of the Lower Alberrs. Now they increased it once again. Mentu studied the shoal water on their lee. The Sea Wasp was a tight sailer with little tendency to drift leeward even in a much stronger wind, but those shoals spoke of rocks ready to rip out a boat's bottom.

  "She's spotted us," said Mentu calmly.

  "It's a frigate," said Thru.

  "And a swift one; I can see the mainsail now, and it's gaining."

  There began a period of slow-rising tension. The Sea Wasp negotiated the channel through the shoals and then turned shoreward. The frigate was hull up over the horizon by then, and they could even see occasional white breaking from her bows.

  On the open water, with more regular waves, the Sea Wasp's motion became calmer even as she increased pace. Now the frigate saw the shoals ahead and changed course.

  "She's trying to go around the Alberrs and then come back in."

  "They don't know about the Widow's Rocks?"

  "I expect they do," said Mentu. "They'd have been charted by the fleet surveyors years ago. The ship's going to try and cut in close around the rocks. It's a risk."

  "But it shows how badly she wants to catch us."

  "The Sea Wasp will stay the pace. With this kind of wind, we can match her."

  And so it proved. The frigate fell back below the horizon as it turned north to pass around the Widow's Rocks. The Sea Wasp sped straight across the bight in the direction of the headlands of Dronned. It began to look as if they would beat the frigate handily to the harbor.

  But the wind died away to a very slight breeze and began backing around to the northwest. Their progress slowed, and to the north they saw clouds massing.

  Mentu studied the approaching weather with a careful eye. "Looks like our days of free sailing are just about over, shipmates."

  "Still think we'll be in Dronned by dusk?" asked Juf with a grin.

  Mentu chewed his lip. "No. The wind is backing into the north."

  They held up fingers to the breeze. The approaching dark mass of clouds signified a sudden northern squall, a common hazard at this time of year. The Sea Wasp was a fine ship, capable of sailing close into the wind, but a northern squall would certainly slow things up.

  They were all still chewing over that, when Janbur called from the crosstrees. "Sail ho, ahead."

  They saw the Old Skate, a fishing cog out of Dronned, putting back into the harbor after a day of fishing on the outer Alberr Banks. The Sea Wasp swiftly caught up to the fishing cog and relayed her news. An enemy ship had been spotted out by Widow's Rocks.

  The response was immediate. The Old Skate put up her topsail and three jibs. But, with unfavorable winds, it made little difference. The cog was easy prey for the frigate if it should spot her.

  Mentu spread his hands, then signaled the others for the Sea Wasp to change course. They headed back out to sea, while still heading north. Within twenty minutes they could see the tops of the enemy frigate's sails again.

  Mentu turned the Sea Wasp to the west and, riding the wind on her beam, made good progress. The frigate was all too happy to clap on sail and follow. Behind them, the Old Skate struggled on toward the harbor with the vital news of an enemy vessel haunting their shores once again.

  When they were well out to sea, the Sea Wasp drew the frigate on. The larger ship, designed for speed, gradually began to gain. The Sea Wasp turned north again and shifted the contest to one of sailing into the wind, tacking sharply back and forth while the headlands of Dronned receded, and they coursed out into the upper part of Dronned Bay.

  The clouds were soon overhead and, with nightfall, came a sudden onset of heavy rain. The frigate kept up the pursuit, gaining slowly but steadily through the waning light. Then the squall broke out of the north and swept over them. In minutes, the seas rose, and soon there was spray sheeting across the bow. They quickly lost sight of their pursuer in the general murk.

  Soon the darkness became absolute, and they were reduced to steering by guesswork. Mentu turned westward, out into the broader sea, determined at the very least not to end up on a leeshore with the cliffs of Dronned awaiting them. The winds continued to gust fiercely, and after midnight they backed farther into the east. By dawn, the storm was behind them, and the wind was coming from the south and east, much less forcefully.

  The Sea Wasp had come through the night unscathed, with her sails close-hauled. They saw no sign of the frigate. Mentu turned them back toward land. He hoped to pick out the Dronned headlands shortly.

  Instead he caught sight of Cormorant Rock, the headland on the northern end of Dristen Bay. They had been blown farther north than he'd expected. Blue Hill and Bear Hill rose up ahead, with cliffs curving in and out around their bases. Beyond Bear Hill the Dristen estuary opened into the sea.

  After adjusting course, they began to sail close to the wind, working their way southward. Suddenly Thru felt his heart freeze in his chest.

  Inland, a thick pillar of black smoke was rising into the sky.

  "Sail ho, to the south, three ships," called Juf from the upper crosstrees.

  Mentu hurr
ied up to study the situation. Thru, manning the tiller, kept his eyes pinned on the smoke, which was still rising from the far side of Bear Hill. Alas, only Warkeen village lay in that direction.

  "It doesn't look good," said Mentu after climbing down from the crosstrees. "There's a big four-master and two three-masters, one of which might be the frigate that chased us yesterday."

  The Sea Wasp changed course, running in toward the shore but just out of sight of the big ships anchored in the Dristen estuary.

  Thru was torn. On the one hand, the message he carried was possibly vital and meant for the general himself in Dronned. On the other hand, his family, the village, all lay just over Bear Hill. Finally, he could stand it no longer.

  "Mentu, my friend, take this to General Toshak. Tell him that I'm sorry, but I had to go ashore and see if I could help."

  "I will go with you," said Janbur. "Our people do evil here, and I must help you stop them."

  "Evil indeed, my friend, for I have seen the results of a raid like this. I can only pray that the villagers kept up the watch during the storm last night. But I will go alone. Mentu needs both of you to run the Sea Wasp, and there's no point in two of us being taken captive or killed."

  Mentu and then Juf tried to change his mind. The risk was great. What could he hope to achieve? But they knew they were arguing in vain: Thru would not be kept from seeing what had happened at his village. So they set him ashore on the beach at the northern side of Bear Hill and watched him climb the back path that led inland along Lupin Stream. Janbur wondered aloud if they would ever see their friend Thru Gillo again. Then they turned the Sea Wasp back out to sea and set sail for Dronned.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Admiral Heuze hadn't been on land in months, preferring his own realm aboard the Anvil to the recognized empire in exile of Aeswiren ashore. The hulking grey sheds, the untidy sprawl of shacks and shops on the muddy streets, everything was so flimsy and careless that it upset him. The bustle in the streets was too untidy for his sailor's eye, used to a tightly run ship. And, strangest of all, was the sight of a few of the monkey folk moving freely among the people. The world had turned upside down.