Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  About Master Den, however, Llesho thought he could reassure them both. “Unless I have been mistaken these past three cycles of the seasons, your pirate king is in disguise as well, and I suspect he’ll have a lecture waiting for us when we are done here.”

  “The trickster god is Llesho’s teacher,” Prince Tayy explained to his bench mate, “and even worse than Bolghai about learning by experience. Or I hope that’s the idea.”

  “Unless it’s been a trick all along.” Llesho conceded the possibility. “Shou seems to think not, though. The emperor seems pretty sure this is another one of those awful tests the gods are always springing on us.” He didn’t mention Lluka’s opinion which Tayy would have taken contrarily as a good sign.

  “Now I know you are yarning stories to pull an old rower’s tail,” Singer objected. “Next you’ll be telling me that you know the dragon who resides at the bottom of this sea.”

  Llesho didn’t want to tell him any more than he already had, at least not until he got that buckle back. The stranger who had lately introduced himself as Marmer Sea Dragon had left his bench, however, as if there was nothing unusual about chained slaves wandering about the galley at will. No one was looking in his direction, not even Master Den. With each step the sea itself seemed to calm beneath his feet.

  “My Lord Dragon,” Llesho greeted the man with a proper bow, which he returned.

  “This isn’t happening,” Singer whispered, burying his head in his hands.

  Llesho had no time to comfort him, and Tayy, while willing, came from a straight-talking people. “Of course it is!” the prince insisted. “I never thought I’d meet a dragon in real life, but Llesho always knows the most interesting people.”

  “Not for long. Without some help, we’ll all be too dead to know anybody.” Llesho turned to Marmer Sea Dragon, still in human form, with his appeal.

  “Holy King of Thebin,” the human form of Marmer Sea Dragon said, “how fares your witch?”

  “As well as she can,” Llesho admitted, then explained using the polite form of speech that reminded him to be nervous around such creatures. “Captain Kaydu holds back the wind for the moment, but soon, I think, it will overtake her ship. She stands to lose all hands.”

  His cadre would drown, taking with them the only chance he had to rescue Tayy and himself from the pirates or the sea. “I have been in counsel with the emperor and the khans, and her ladyship, the mortal goddess of war, who has sent you a token.”

  He didn’t want to tell the dragon-king that Singer had stolen the gift of the Lady SienMa. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. The oarsman dropped the copper buckle as if it were on fire.

  Quick as a blink, the dragon-king reached out and snatched the ornament out of the air. He held it to the uncertain light, in which the copper coils of the dragon design stood out sharply. “This is from the mortal goddess of war?” he asked, though he seemed to know what it was and where it came from. His face alternately suffused with color and drained of it, so that he was by turns pale as a ghost and an inhuman shade of green.

  “On the other side of my dream, you promised to help Kaydu, the captain of my cadre, who is the daughter of her ladyship’s chief adviser.” He almost offered his guess at the reasons for the gift. On balance, he wasn’t certain they had anything to do with Kaydu or her father at all. He did have her ladyship’s promise, however, which he gave in place of suppositions.

  “The Lady SienMa bade me make this promise in her name, that she will do what she can.” For what, he wasn’t certain, though remembering the image worked into the buckle, he might have made some guesses of his own. “She further bade me to warn you that it may not be enough. But, she says, that is a risk we all share.”

  Marmer Sea Dragon nodded, though it seemed that he listened to something far off and not her ladyship’s promises at all. Then he flung the copper buckle high out over the water, well beyond reach of the galley. Something deeper than thought stirred Llesho into action, and he would have leaped after it. Tayy caught him by the shoulder, however, and tugged him down into the well between the benches. His eyes never left the copper token, however. He saw it blur and grow like a copper-colored mist, uncurling from its frozen coil of metal and filling the sky as it tried its gossamer wings.

  “Father!” the copper-colored mist cried in a voice out of another world, filled with anguish and pain. Then the mist slowly broke up, and with it the image of the young dragon. The buckle, for so it had become again, fell into the sea.

  “By all the gods, heis a dragon!” Singer skittered to put as much distance between himself and the dragon-king as his chains would allow. His leg remained shackled to the footboard, however, giving him no way to escape their company. Even Tayy gave a nervous hitch of his shoulder, but he refused to show more fear than Llesho did.

  “I’m sorry,” Singer began with a trembling voice, “I didn’t know—” But Prince Tayyichiut, who had survived in the court of the Qubal-Khan, Llesho reminded himself, silenced the oarsman with a warning shake of his head.

  With his soul fixed on the distant patch of sky where lately her ladyship’s buckle had become the image of his son, Marmer Sea Dragon had paid their conversation no attention. “What would you have me do?”

  The dragon-king turned a set face on the companions in the well. He seemed unaware of tears the slaty blue of the troubled sea falling from his eyes. Llesho would have given him more time to mourn, but he felt the pressure of the storm building in the distance. They didn’t have time to wait.

  “As king of the world below the sea you must have the power to block even Master Markko’s raising in your realm,” he suggested.

  “I don’t know.” His silent tears had dried, but the dragon-king stared out to sea with the same fixity. Llesho thought his mind must still be reliving the vision of his son released from the copper buckle. Then he heard it. The sound of the wind had changed, growing higher in pitch. Angrier. The galley rocked on restless green wavelets that painted her sides with white foam. The storm crossed the shore in a darkening mass, gathering water as it spiraled out to sea.

  “Think of the waves as wild horses and the sea as the herd.” Marmer Sea Dragon explained what they heard with an example familiar to the grasslands. It was easy to picture with the white foam flying like manes streaming out across the gray-and-green backs of the choppy waves. Llesho knew the water, but he figured Prince Tayyichiut would better grasp the nature of the problem that way.

  “Imagine that your Master Markko has called down lightning and thunder to stampede this watery herd. The tools he uses will certainly set all in motion, but will the herd go where he wishes?”

  “Notmy Master Markko. His quarrel is with Llesho.” With the waves bucking under them like a horse trying to unseat his rider, Tayy did grasp the example, however. So did Singer, who sat stonily looking out to sea as the young prince shook his head.

  “Not likely to go where you want,” he agreed. “Not easy to get them stopped again once they’re spooked, either.”

  “Now you see the problem,” Marmer Sea Dragon nodded his head and Llesho noticed that his hair was the murky red of seaweed and his eyes the heavy gray of the stormy sea. “The witch has slowed the wind a little and rides ahead of the storm with a firm hand on the reins.”

  Llesho heard it as “rains,” which seemed as accurate. In the distance, ominous dark clouds scraped their green-and-purple bellies on the rooftops of Edris, blotting out the horizon.

  Marmer Sea Dragon followed his gaze. “Until it runs its course, there is little even I can do to halt it.”

  Prince Tayyichiut had spent all of his life on a horse. Llesho had spent most of the past three cycles of the seasons that way, and he’d ridden out many a storm on Pearl Island before that. So it surprised neither of them that the solution came to them both at the same time. Grinning like a madman, Llesho deferred to Prince Tayy with a bow.

  “You can’t stop a stampeding herd,” Tayy agreed, “but a good herdsman who kno
ws his way around a horse can turn it.”

  “Yes, he can,” Marmer Sea Dragon agreed. “It’s a dangerous maneuver, though, and requires that your witch ride at the very edge of the storm. Even then, it won’t necessarily work.

  “If, between us, your witch and I do manage to turn the storm, it will still run very close to her ship and to this galley, which is the course she set.”

  “And Master Markko?” Llesho feared the magician would fight them for control, bringing them all to disaster.

  The dragon-king shook his head. “He’s too unpredictable. I can’t say what he will do.”

  “He won’t stay and fight for control. If all else fails, he’ll escape in the shape of a bird and leave his ship to die.” Llesho had seen him do it before, and he had no doubt he would do the same again if his plan failed.

  “No doubt,” the dragon-king agreed. “Many birds fly before the storm and not all of them have feathered souls.”

  That sounded like Markko. “What bargain would you make, Lord Dragon, to help Kaydu turn the storm, to save the lives that follow us and the lives on this ship?”

  Marmer Sea Dragon looked at him out of eyes of stone, letting his form flicker and melt into scales and horn. “Her ladyship has already made the bargain for my services.”

  For his son, though Llesho wasn’t sure if the goddess of war offered the peace of death or knew some way to release the young dragon from his prison of distorted flesh. But he would not have his debt paid by another.

  “That is her ladyship’s promise,” he pointed out, “and does not pay the debt I incur on myself.”

  Marmer Sea Dragon acknowledged the honor of the request with a tilt of his head in a bow. “Where is Pig?” he asked.

  “Pig is here?” Tayy asked, risking a glance over the low side of the galley as if he expected to find the Jinn swimming in the sea. “Will I get to meet him?”

  Llesho tugged on the chain at his neck, pulling it free of his collar to show the pearl wrapped round with silver wire.

  Marmer Sea Dragon recognized it for the Jinn’s disguise, or his punishment. “Keep him there,” he bargained.

  “I’ll try,” Llesho agreed, though he couldn’t promise to succeed. “I don’t command him; Pig comes to me at need, or at the beck of the gods. Until he has undone the terrible harm he has inflicted on you, however, he will have no moment of peace. That I can promise on the honor of my lady wife.”

  “That will do.” Marmer Sea Dragon sealed their pact with a deep bow and leaped into the sea. Freed of the constraints of their small boat, he soon reclaimed his dragon size.

  “There he is!” Tayy cried out, pointing down into the water. Llesho saw the flash of gleaming green scales alongside the pirate galley, but Singer refused to look.

  “Wife?” he asked. And Tayy answered, “You really don’t want to know.”

  They were interrupted by an urgent flourish on the drum then, and Llesho escaped the necessity of explaining his promises to the dragon-king. Since he didn’t quite trust Singer with the truth yet, Llesho almost welcomed the emergency.

  “Storm warning!” came the call. “All oarsmen, ship oars!”

  Most of the benches had kept an eye on the darkness growing in the distance and each immediately snapped to his post.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “WE’RE GOING to race it for landfall,” Singer said. “Our pilot has decided on a course that will take us away from the eye of the storm.” Pointing out what they were to do, he instructed them to bear down with all their weight on the handholds of their oar while he released the stanchion. Free of its chain, the great oar pivoted on the thole. They were off their count; Singer grabbed hold, pressing down on the oar so the blade raised up out of the water.

  The beater had set a rapid pace with his drum. Singer held them steady until the bench across the gangway from their own was in position. At the next beat he threw his back against the oar. Since Llesho and Tayy were both new and might lose their pace in a panic, he called the count for them: “Step, step, pull! Step, step, pull!” Llesho would have found the pace torture for his already abused back and arms, but his knowledge of the storm that followed them gave him renewed strength.

  “Starboard, hold!” came a call from the stern and all the oarsmen on their side of the galley held their oars out of the water while all the benches on the port side dipped and raised, dipped and raised. “All pull!” came the next command, and Llesho watched Singer, followed his lead to step, step, pull.

  The order had turned the galley and they fought their way out of the current that would have dragged them back to shore north of Edris, through the deepest part of the blow. The sea was higher at the boundaries of the current and the work of rowing across it grew harder still. Then they were through and the beater sounded a rest for all hands, chance for a last breath before striking out on their new heading.

  During the lull in the galley’s struggle, Singer took a moment to let his young rowers know what was going on. “There are islands all around here. Our pilot will find a sheltered cove where we can lay up until the blow passes.”

  Though it was midday, they were beginning to lose the light behind those ominous clouds. The storm was gaining on them, and Llesho didn’t see any islands. He didn’t think they were going to make it. There wasn’t time or breath for more discussion, though; the drummer had picked up the pace again. To lose the beat would mean death—at the hands of the pirates if not the storm—so Llesho straight-armed the oar out over the bench in front, taking the giant steps from footboard to footboard, and fell back again onto the padded bench until he thought the bones of his backside would be pounded to rubble.

  Even here, well beyond the gray line of rain as they were, he knew they were losing the race. A fresh wave higher than the rest hit them broadside and the galley heeled over, dropping their port side almost flat to the water. Llesho heard the thunderous crack of an oar snapping under the strain. Men shouted in terror as the oarsmen who had lost their hold flew through the air, caught up sharply by the chains around their ankles. One man, thrown against the thole braces, fell unconscious to the bottom of the boat. His bench mate was flung with such force that he spilled overboard, leaving a severed foot dangling from his chains.

  Llesho held on tight. The pirate galley rode high in the water at the best of times and the next wave might turn her over. If that happened, they would be trapped underneath and drown. His first instinct had been to pick the locks on Tayy’s shackles and free his companion. The chains had saved one man on the port side, however; he was already stirring from where he’d been knocked insensible by the wave. It hadn’t been enough to save his companion, however.

  There wasn’t time to do anything about it anyway. Already the horizon had disappeared again behind a cresting wall of seawater that swept inexorably down on them ahead of the storm. They had managed to turn their nose around and the galley rose on the great wave’s back this time. Llesho clung to his oar as the sea fell away below them, leaving the bow suspended in the air for a terrible moment. Then they pitched forward, grabbing at their oars while the galley dropped with a dizzying plunge into the trough. The thick spray tossed up by the crashing sea washed over the side, soaking the rowers and leaving behind a wash of seawater to slosh at their feet in the well between the benches.

  Llesho shivered in spite of the sweat he was working up at the oars. The low sides of the galley had seemed like a blessing from the god of Mercy himself for the success of his escape plan. Suddenly, however, they had become the greatest danger. Without their shackles to anchor them to the galley, they might be washed away in the next wave.

  He’d experienced that contradiction of chains before, so it didn’t surprise him that they might owe their death or their survival to their bondage. Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought to put the chains back on his own leg when he’d fallen out of the sky onto Singer’s bench. The next wave might well sweep him away. He could probably dream travel himself out of danger, but Tayy
didn’t have that option. The prince would die in the water he hated and feared.

  Escape was out of the question if it meant leaving a friend without even a familiar face for comfort at his death. Sometimes, being a king was harder than others, he had long ago come to understand, and this was one of those times. So he stepped, stepped, pulled. Beneath his feet the well filled up with water while next to him, Tayy, with his reserves of energy already gone, moved only because his hands had clenched in knots around his oar hold and he couldn’t let go.

  Overhead, flocks of birds raced ahead of them in long, ragged vees, all following the same road in the sky. Their pilot made corrections to their course, following the winged scouts who must, Llesho thought, find land when sailors searched in vain for any sign to lead them. They pulled, pulled on their oars, afraid that the birds would leave them behind when, suddenly, a great winged beast crossed the sky, heading back into the storm and painting a long dark shadow across the deck as it passed.

  “The ancestors fly to battle,” Tayy remarked with a superstitious glance upward.

  “Somebody’s ancestor,” Llesho agreed. Neither Mergen nor Shou had such powers of transformation. He didn’t know how the Lady SienMa might travel, whether she could turn herself into a bird or follow the dream-road through time. But she wouldn’t leave in the middle of negotiations, when an ill-considered word might see the grasslands at war with the Shan Empire.

  Habiba had traveled both the dream-road and the road of magical creatures before, though, and he wouldn’t leave his daughter to fight the storm alone. Llesho took comfort in the knowledge that Kaydu would have powerful magical assistance from her father as well as Marmer Sea Dragon. Maybe even from Little Brother, if the suspicions he had formed proved true. A monkey god, if such he was, had more of a reputation for mischief than for rescuing hapless travelers, but for Kaydu he might make an exception. Their own fate was not so well provided.