With A Single Spell

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  He was just clambering in when a bearded, black-haired head appeared above the dune where the footprints had led.

  “Hey!” the man called, plainly upset by what he saw.

  The woman’s head appeared beside him.

  Tobas ignored them both, and yanked the oars from their stowage.

  “Hey, that’s our boat!” the man called; he was clambering up the dune now, tugging his sandy tunic into place.

  Tobas got the oars into the oarlocks, splashed their blades into the water, leaned forward, and pulled, refusing to worry about any damage he might do if the oarblades caught on rocks hidden in the sand.

  The boat slewed out into the water, and Tobas pulled harder on one side, turning the bow out to sea. Each stroke moved him visibly further from shore; the bottom dropped off quickly, so that by the third or fourth pull the oars were no longer in danger of striking sand.

  “Come back!” the woman cried, running down the beach toward him. “Come back with our boat!”

  Tobas found himself facing her as the boat swung around, and he smiled at her as she stopped at the water’s edge, already several yards away; she was very young, surely not yet eighteen, perhaps younger than himself, and handsome despite her rumpled brown hair and sandy, disheveled skirt and tunic. “I’m sorry,” he called out, “but it’s an emergency. I’ll bring it back if I can!” A twinge of guilt struck him. Teasing young lovers was a long-standing tradition in Telven, but stealing their boat might have serious consequences. “Listen,” he called, “if you go a mile west, then a league due north, you’ll reach the village of Telven; they’ll help you there! Tell them T...” He stopped, hesitant to give his right name, but then shrugged and went on. “Tell them Tobas the Apprentice Wizard sent you!”

  “But ... our boat!” the woman cried, ankle-deep in the foaming water. The man stood beside her, knuckles on his hips, glaring silently at Tobas’ receding figure.

  “I’m sorry,” Tobas repeated, “but I need it more than you do!” That said, he devoted his entire attention to rowing and paid no more attention to the boat’s rightful owners. He had a ship to catch.

  Chapter Four

  What little wind there was was from the northeast, helping Tobas along and hindering the ship he sought to intercept. He quickly found himself well out at sea, the coastline a vague blur in the distance. He glanced back over his shoulder and caught sight of the sail, far off his starboard bow; the ship was still hull-down on the horizon.

  He looked back at the fading land again, and his nerve failed him. If the wind shifted, or if the ship decided to gain more sea-room by running south, he would have no chance of catching it, and he dared not lose sight of the land completely. He was no navigator; he might be lost at sea. Generally, of course, he could find east and west by the sun, and he knew that the land was to the north, but there might be clouds, or a current might carry him west into the endless western ocean that extended from the south edge of the world to the north uninterrupted by land. He looked at the sail, decided that it was, in fact, coming closer, and pulled the dripping oars inboard. He would wait. Why tire himself out and go further out than was safe or necessary?

  After a moment of sitting quietly, hearing only the faint slapping of the waves against the sides of his boat and the water dripping from the oars into the bottom, he remembered the canvas sack in the stern. This, he decided, would be an ideal time to see what was in it. Moving very carefully — he was out well past the breakers, but the sea was still rolling the boat gently and he did not care to capsize it — he pulled the bag out and opened it.

  A wonderful aroma wafted out at him as he peered inside, and he wasted no time in pulling out its source — half a roasted chicken. It was cold, to be sure, but he was hungry enough he would hardly have hesitated were it raw.

  As he gnawed on the drumstick he explored further, and hauled out a loaf of sweet golden bread, a bottle of cheap red wine, and an assortment of fruits.

  He felt he was with the gods in Heaven as he poured the wine down his throat, close behind a good-sized chunk of chicken.

  He devoured almost the entire meal, obviously intended for two, in short order, despite warning twinges from his stomach. At last he settled back as best he could and let his food settle.

  It didn’t; he had eaten too much too fast after too long without, and his belly ached. The boat’s motion did not help at all. His conscience, too, was uncomfortable. He had stolen the boat and the food from the couple on the beach; he was a thief.

  “Serves them right, losing their dinner,” he said aloud in a feeble attempt to laugh away his guilt. “Imagine bringing red wine with cold chicken!”

  He didn’t laugh at his joke. It had been Indamara who taught him that one should drink white wine with poultry — his father’s cousin, the woman who had largely raised him, and who had thrown him out as soon as Dabran was dead. She had also taught him not to steal, or at any rate had tried to, and he had never before stolen anything more than a few ripe apples from a neighbor’s tree.

  He had once brought up the question of theft when talking with his father. After all, Dabran had made his living stealing.

  “Piracy at sea is a special case,” Dabran had said. “We rob merchants who are fool enough to sail around the peninsula close in. They know we’re here; if they risk sailing our waters anyway, then they deserve what they get. They have plenty of money to begin with, or they’d not be fitting out ships and loading them with cargo, but they try to make more by sailing their goods through dangerous waters; that makes them greedy fools who deserve to be robbed. That’s not the same as taking something from someone weaker than you who was minding his own business, or sneaking about in the night stealing. We do our taking out in the open, and we risk as much as they do. That makes it not so much theft as gambling, and I’ll defend to the death a man’s right to gamble away whatever he’s got — even his life.”

  Tobas had never been sure he accepted this justification entirely, but he agreed that a man had a right to gamble with what was his. Well, Dabran had gambled and lost his life, sure enough, and his son had turned thief as a result, stealing a boat and a picnic dinner from an innocent pair of lovers. Tobas quoted one of his father’s axioms to himself as comfort, “A man has a right to do anything that will keep him alive.”

  He still felt rotten, and wished the Ethsharitic ship would come pick him up so that he could let the boat go. It might yet wash up on shore where the lovers could salvage it, minus the chicken dinner.

  He looked around; the ship was definitely nearer now, its sleek, streamlined hull visible beneath a great panoply of sails, but still a long way off. He settled back, his head on a thwart that dug in uncomfortably, hands clutching his belly, and wished that he could convince himself that everything that had happened since he turned twelve was a bad dream.

  The next thing he knew he was being rudely shaken awake; his exhaustion had caught up with him once he had stopped moving and no longer had his hunger keeping him awake.

  “Who are you?” demanded a deep, oddly-accented voice.

  “Tobas,” he said. “Tobas of ... of Harbek.”

  “Harbek?”

  “In the Small Kingdoms.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Tobas could think of no answer to that, since he had made the name up on the spur of the moment, assuming, foolishly, that the questioner would know no more about the Small Kingdoms than he did. He looked up blankly at a broad, sunburned face surrounded by thick black hair and beard.

  “What are you doing here?” the man demanded.

  “Uh...” Tobas was not yet sure just where he was.

  “Oh, never mind; come aboard, and the captain can ask you the questions.” He pulled Tobas to his feet and half-led, half-dragged him across his little stolen boat to the side of the Ethsharitic ship, where several hands reached down to haul him up over the rail onto the deck.

  It was a shock, somehow, to see that the ship’s deck bore very little resem
blance to what he remembered of Retribution, his father’s lost ship. Retribution had been built for speed and for fighting, long and narrow, with rope catwalks and platforms from which archers could fire and boarders could leap down onto the enemy; this ship was fat, so as to cram in as much cargo as possible, and instead of platforms and walkways it had nettings hung along the sides to make boarding more difficult. Several immense hatchways took up a large part of the deck, and much of the tackle on the spars overhead had nothing to do with the sails, being intended rather for use as cranes in loading and unloading. Furthermore, the deck was not one continuous surface, but in three sections, with bow and stern higher than amidships.

  Half a dozen burly, blue-kilted sailors surrounded him; what he saw of the ship he saw in glimpses between shoulders or under arms. They smelled of sweat. “This way,” one of them announced, jerking a thumb in the direction of the stern; he, too, spoke with a heavy accent.

  Tobas followed silently, and was escorted into a large, luxurious cabin, hung with silken draperies and heavily carpeted, where a sweet scent Tobas did not recognize hung in the air. A plump, balding, red-clad man sat behind an ornate desk, two sailors standing on his right and a slender, white-gowned woman on his left. The woman stared at Tobas intently; the seated man’s gaze was less intense, while the sailors almost ignored him.

  “If this is a pirate trick,” the seated man announced in the same odd accent the sailors had, “we’ll make very sure you die before anyone can save you.”

  “It’s no trick,” Tobas said. He had had a moment to think as he was brought here. “My name is Tobas of Harbek; I was accompanying my master to Tintallion when our ship was rammed by a privateer out of Shan. I was thrown clear when she heeled over, and found the boat; I didn’t see any other survivors. The privateersmen didn’t notice me, I guess.”

  “Privateer?”

  Tobas, thinking back over the conversation, suddenly realized his error. “Pirates, I mean; my master used to call them privateers.” In the Free Lands they were considered privateers, whatever Dabran might have said, and Tobas had long ago acquired the habit of using the polite term with strangers and the more accurate description with his family. Among Ethsharites, though, it appeared they were known as pirates.

  “Who was this master?”

  “Roggit the Wizard,” Tobas replied boldly. That was true enough.

  The red-clad man glanced at the woman, then drummed the ringed fingers of one hand on the desk. “What ship?”

  “Dawn’s Pride,” Tobas improvised quickly.

  “And?”

  Puzzled, Tobas said, “And what?”

  “Where did she sail from, boy, and where was she bound?”

  “Oh! Out of Harbek, bound for Tintallion.”

  “Where’s Harbek?”

  “In the Small Kingdoms.”

  “I gathered that, boy; where in the Small Kingdoms?”

  “Ah ... in the south?” He wished he had given a different origin; he knew almost nothing about the Small Kingdoms.

  The man stared at him for a long moment, then leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and announced, “I never heard of your master, your ship, or your homeland, boy, and no ship from the Kingdoms has any business sailing past Ethshar of the Sands, let alone so far as Tintallion, but I won’t call you a liar yet; some fool from some worthless little corner of the south might just have tried it. Let me suggest a possibility, though. Suppose that a lad in the Pirate Towns wanted to seek his fortune, and in a wider world than his one little corner. He might want to get on board a ship bound for one of the Ethshars. If he managed it, he’d have to account for himself once he was on board. Knowing little of the outside world, he would make up a story as best he could, rather than admit to being one of the Hegemony’s enemies, but he wouldn’t do a very convincing job of it. He wouldn’t even realize that he was speaking Ethsharitic with the accent of the Pirate Towns, which is nothing like anything spoken in the Small Kingdoms, not even where they think they’re speaking our tongue rather than one of their own strange languages. I think he’d look and sound a lot like you, Tobas of Harbek, who claims to be a wizard’s apprentice.”

  “I am a wizard’s apprentice — or I was. My master is dead.”

  “And the rest of it?”

  “Uh...” Tobas fell silent.

  “You had a good pair of oars in that boat, they tell me, and you look fit; why didn’t you row for shore?”

  “Uh...”

  “You wanted to get aboard this ship, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Tobas admitted after a moment’s hesitation, seeing no alternative.

  “I thought so. And I don’t think it’s because you were afraid of what the Pirate Towners would do to you, either, not with that accent you have.” He sat back and looked up at Tobas, his hands pressed together before his chest. “Well,” he continued, “wherever you’re from, I’d guess you’re pretty much alone in the world or you wouldn’t be here, and whoever you are, I don’t mind letting you work your passage to Ethshar of the Sands, or even Ethshar of the Spices. You will work, though. The overlords have decreed that castaways and refugees are to receive free passage, and if I’m wrong about you you can go and complain to old Ederd the Fourth when we reach Ethshar of the Sands, but until then you’ll work. If you don’t, we’ll put you back in that boat we found you in. Fair enough?”

  Tobas nodded mute agreement, and did not dare to ask for an explanation of the difference between Ethshar of the Sands and Ethshar of the Spices, or who Ederd IV might be.

  He allowed himself to be led meekly away and assigned a hammock, and was on his way to the galley to help the cook with the crew’s dinner when it finally sank in that he had made it, despite the failure of his concocted story. They were not going to hang him as a pirate, nor throw him back in the sea. He was on his way to Ethshar to seek his fortune and find a new home!

  He smiled. His bad luck was obviously past. He had needed a ship, and here he was on a ship. He had needed a boat to reach the ship, and he had found one.

  Then he remembered that he had stolen the boat, which the ship’s crew had hauled aboard and lashed down on deck, and the smile faded. Some day, he promised himself, when he was rich and powerful, he would pay those two lovers back for their boat and for the trouble he had put them through.

  And for the chicken, too, while he was at it.

  Chapter Five

  The first port of call was Ethshar of the Sands, and at the sight of the city Tobas, already unsettled by the strange flat landscape they had been sailing past, lost his nerve completely. He had not realized that a city could be so large. He had known Telven wasn’t much, but he had thought that Shan on the Sea was a good-sized town, with a population he guessed at a thousand or more.

  The entire population of Shan on the Sea could be lost without a trace in Ethshar of the Sands.

  Tobas had first begun to have misgivings when they left the familiar hills and patchy beaches behind, passing league after league of almost featureless flat coastline, flat as a calm sea, an endless plain of sand and grass. He had not realized that land could be so flat; never before had he seen any sort of terrain but the gentle hills and graveled beaches of his homeland.

  And when he glimpsed the Great Lighthouse in the distance, even before he realized its actual size, that did not help at all; the single huge tower thrusting up from this strange, level world had seemed almost threateningly out of place. As the ship drew nearer and the palace dome appeared, followed by the endless expanse of red-tiled roofs, his uncertainty grew steadily. Row after row of buildings lined the sandy shores, leagues of them, it seemed, as the ship worked its way up The Channel, past the Outer Towers, past the Outer Docks, past the Inner Towers, and into Seagate Harbor.

  The city even smelled strange; an odd, hot scent reached the ship, compounded of smoke, fish, and tight-packed humanity, as well as other things he could not identify. No place in the Free Lands had smelled like that.

  He stood at
the rail, fending-pole in his hands, and stared in dumbfoundment. How could there be enough people in all the world to fill so many buildings? What did they all do? Where did their food come from, with no farmland inside the walls?

  A fishing-boat drifted uncomfortably near, and the next man aft from Tobas fended it off, then cursed the Telvener roundly for his negligence. Tobas woke up enough to turn his eyes from the shore to the surrounding water, but even that was mind-boggling; more shipping was crowded into this one harbor, he was sure, than could be found in all the Free Lands of the Coasts put together.

  It was all too much for him, and when the ship was safely docked and the captain called for all who were going ashore he remained where he was, hanging onto the rail and staring at the bustling streets.

  A few moments later, the captain — Tobas had learned two days out that the captain’s name was Istram and the ship’s was Golden Gull, but he still thought of the man simply as “the captain” and the vessel simply as “the ship” — came up behind him and asked, without preamble, “Aren’t you leaving the ship?”

  Tobas jumped. “Ah ... no,” he said. “I think I’ll stay on, if you don’t mind.”

  The captain shrugged. “An extra hand is welcome — if you pull your weight. You weren’t much use with that pole coming into port, and you have yet to show me any of the magic you claim to know.”

  “It’s all fire magic,” Tobas explained defensively, his hand falling to the hilt of his athame. “What use is that on a ship?” He had settled on this explanation when taunted by the crew, and had gone so far as to use his single spell to ignite his worst tormentor’s bedding to prove his ability. After that no one had bothered him, but apparently word had not reached the captain. “I’ve been lighting the galley fires, but what else can I do?”