by David Drake
Though come to think, when you eliminated Gods and demigods, battles and palace intrigue--and love affairs--you'd eliminated most of Reise's library of classics. Sharina tried to imagine Rigal describing his wandering hero Dann in search of chicken stew; she began giggling.
"Sharina?" Dalar asked in concern.
"I'm all right," she said as she got control of herself. "I'm a little hysterical, is all."
But it was funny.
They hopped from the brick quay to the first barge, already crowded with locals bargaining for cloth of many different patterns. Sharina didn't have Ilna's understanding of fabric, but she knew enough to doubt that any one place had generated all these styles. A heavyset man accompanied by two servants--or slaves--was trying to sell rolls of baize to the barge-owner. Women in Port Hocc used similar cloth as an overlay to their dresses. The Boats clearly spread the specialties of many localities over the whole region.
The folk of the barges were of identifiably slight build and pale complexion; instead of tanning, their faces weathered red. They chaffered fluently with their customers, but Sharina noticed that they spoke among themselves in an argot that had only slight resemblance to any language she was familiar with.
The second barge was loaded with potatoes in loose-woven baskets that shifted like wineskins when the proprietor poured six into the pan of his hanging balance. He nodded with a neutral expression as Sharina and Dalar crossed his deck, but his many children stopped their various tasks to stare openly at the bird. If the attention disturbed Dalar, he didn't show it. In fact, he stiffened his crest even higher and turned his hop to the third barge into a prancing dance step.
The staff of the floating cookshop was a middle-aged woman at the grill, with a trim-looking youth of twenty or so chopping fish and vegetables, then rolling them in thin rounds of flatbread. A boy of ten served the broiled pastries in a square of seaweed and took the customers' money.
The food smelled delicious to Sharina; she was so hungry that the raw seaweed made her mouth water. When the elderly farm couple ahead of her moved aside, prodding in wonder at their single sausage roll--there were worse new experiences to come to the city for--Sharina said, "Three of those, and my friend will have...?"
She glanced at Dalar. "Three," the bird said. "To begin with."
"So, you're not from around here, mistress," said the youth. He smiled engagingly to Sharina, but his left hand kept feeding fish under the big knife which his right hand rapped up and down on the cutting board. "Nor anywhere on our circuit, I'd judge."
The boy handed Sharina two pastries; the woman was flipping two more over the charcoal. She eyed Sharina and Dalar sidelong, but she let the youth carry the burden of the questioning.
"I'm from Haft, and my friend is from farther away than that," Sharina said as she reached into her wallet. She'd lost the copper and iron change from her sleeve miles and thousands of years ago, but she still had the silver. "I've no coins, I'm afraid. Is that...?"
"Ah, we in the Boats can give you better value for bullion than you'll get on land, mistress," the youth said. "Now Haft--where would that be?"
The woman, still silent, wrapped the next two rolls and left the grill empty while she eyed the small ingot Sharina offered. The youth wiped his knife on his apron and handed it to her; she put the ingot on the cutting board and set the knife on its corner. With a quick forward stroke and enough pressure to turn her knuckles white, she clipped off a small portion of the silver.
"Pure?" said the youth.
"Soft enough to be," the woman grunted. She returned the ingot to Sharina, then set the clipping in one plate of a knife balance and matched it with grains of corn before dropping it into a wash-leather purse hung inside the bodice of her tunic.
"Haft is an island north of here," Sharina said. The woman handed her three worn bronze coins from a sack hanging beside the grill. The only markings were a single letter stamped on the obverse.
"Ah, we in the Boats sail the southern coasts," the youth said. "East on the currents, west with our sails. My name's Bantrus, and I own Columbine here with my mother Brasca."
He pointed a thumb to the boy. "Pilf is a nephew, but we're all related more or less, all of us in the Boats. If you're strangers from the north, you might not know that."
Nor had she. "I'm Sharina, and my friend is Dalar," she said around a mouthful of pastry. Grilling warmed the stuffing, but it couldn't be said to be cooked. At another time Sharina might have objected to raw fish, but right now she'd have swallowed a mullet while it was still flapping.
"You've come to Port Hocc to watch Mykon's procession?" Bantrus asked. He'd returned to work, but his smile was an obvious attempt to keep the conversation going even though Pilf was wrapping the last pair of pastries. "We've seen it ourselves now the sixth time, but it's a fine performance."
"Mykon's following us down the length of the coast," Pilf said as he handed Sharina and Dalar the last of their food. "My brother Jem says Mykon knows he can't gather a crowd for his nonsense, so he rides along the shore beside us."
"Don't talk politics with strangers, Pilf!" Brasca said. "And don't talk land politics with anybody. Jem hasn't the sense of a sea urchin, but I do--and I'll send you back to the Tailwind with the hide off your butt if you forget what I've just said."
"Yes 'm," Pilf muttered. Without being told, he lit a twist of woven grass from the grill and shinned ten feet up the barge's mast to light the lantern hanging there. It was protected by dried fish skin on a wicker frame.
Trumpets blew from well up the waterfront. The sky was purple, and stars winked brightly above the eastern horizon.
"Say, they're starting the procession!" Bantrus said. "Mom, how about I take our guests here up the mast for a better view? You know there won't be any business while the entertainment's going on."
"Seems to me that they could climb by themselves," Brasca said, eyeing Sharina without warmth. She shrugged. "You're an adult now and not beholden to your mother--you made that clear over the business with--"
"Mom!" the youth said. "I told you what--"
"I think we'd best be going now," Sharina said loudly. Her voice rang more clearly than it might have done before she'd become Lady Sharina of Haft. She hadn't wanted or liked to be a noble, but she'd learned to do it as well as she'd served food to drunken strangers during the Sheep Fair.
Sharina turned. Dalar bolted the last of his pastries as he stepped between her and Bantrus. There wasn't any threat from that direction, but it was the bodyguard's reaction to any sort of raised emotion.
"Wait, there's no point in this," Bantrus said in a controlled voice. He sounded like a man again instead of the furious boy who'd answered his mother a moment before. "Sharina, ah, Dalar?"
The bird nodded agreement. It didn't strike either of them as surprising that the youth had remembered her name better than that of her companion.
"Come up to the spar with me and we'll have a good view of the procession," Bantrus said. He made a slight bow toward his mother. She stared stolidly off the bow of the barge, refusing to acknowledge him.
"Thank you," Sharina said. "We will."
A knotted rope dangled from the mast truck in place of a ladder. Sharina deliberately ignored it, climbing instead with her hands and bare feet. She'd climbed trees at home, and she wasn't going to have Bantrus thinking of her as a delicate city girl ripe for his protection.
Twinges in her pectoral muscles reminded her she hadn't climbed trees in a while, though. Odds were she was going to feel the strain tomorrow morning.
She seated herself on the furled sail, far enough out along the spar to place Dalar between her and Bantrus. Bantrus couldn't take a hint--or perhaps he mistakenly thought he was taking a hint when he turned at the mast truck to sit beside Sharina. Sharina started to say something. Dalar leaped onto the spar from six feet down the mast; his claws gave him a grip that no human acrobat could have equalled. From his perch he bowed to Bantrus.
The youth st
arted to look angry, then barked a laugh and settled on the other side of the mast from his guests. He pointed up the waterfront to where the trumpets were calling again. "There," he said mildly. "They'll start soon."
The shoreline was crowded, but Sharina noticed by the light of hanging lanterns that those watching from the spars of other barges were landsmen rather than folk who lived on the fleet. She remembered what Bantrus had said about Mykon following the Boats. Torches gleamed where the trumpets were calling, and more were lit as Sharina watched. She could see horses; one lifted its head in the harness and whinnied. A spectator screamed in apparent delight.
"Mykon tells people he's the brother to Brut, the Storm God," Bantrus said in a voice pitched low enough that his mother on deck couldn't overhear him. "I guess people believe him--the farmers from the backcountry, anyhow. It wouldn't make sense go to this trouble if they didn't."
"It has not been my experience that humans invariably do things because they make sense," Dalar said, his eyes on the preparations. "Nor was it my experience of my own people when I lived with them."
Bantrus paused to process the words he'd just heard. He didn't strike Sharina as stupid, but she suspected he was used to getting more content from the tone of a comment than from the words themselves. Dalar never let emotions color his speech, and Sharina doubted that the warrior ever said anything that he didn't mean precisely as he said it.
"Well, anyhow," Bantrus said, "it makes a good show, especially for the first time."
He cleared his throat. In a conspiratorial tone he went on, "This Prince Mykon, he hasn't done the Boats any harm, not yet, but he's not... friendly, you see? He's set on bringing everything under him personally, all Cordin and I shouldn't wonder if he plans to go farther before he flutters back to the clouds on a lightning bolt--or however he figures to go."
"You have all the sea," Sharina said. "Can't you keep away from Mykon? Keep away from Cordin, if you have to."
"That we cannot," Bantrus explained. "The Boats put in to land every night, mistress. Look at us--"
His gesture indicated the whole harborful of flat-bottomed, bluff-ended vessels. "We can run up on any shore and do, when there's no community to overnight us. But sail from Pare to Yole--not in our ships. The business of the Boats is trade, not seafaring."
"Yole?" Sharina said. She hadn't meant to speak.
"It's an island to the east, mistress," Bantrus explained equably, thinking she'd repeated the name because it was unfamiliar. "They do a fine trade in grains and citrus fruit. Also casks of what they call orange wine."
"Ah," said Sharina. She'd forgotten that in this age--and for the next thousand years--Yole was simply one of the Isles. The wizard's error that sank the island into the depths and made 'Yole' a byword for evil was yet to come.
"The Boats serve the people of the land, mistress," Bantrus said. Sharina heard pride in his voice, but also a note of concern. "The rivers to the Outer Sea run down steep valleys on all the islands of our route. It's easy for inland folk to raft down, trade with us, and trek back to their farms. They may only be a few miles from the people in the next valley, but that's miles of hills with no roads and few passes."
Something had begun happening high up the waterfront, but Sharina continued to lean forward to hold Bantrus' eyes. He was telling her things she hadn't known; and quite apart from the scholarly curiosity with which Reise had infected his children, she might have to know what was going on in order to stay alive.
"The people of the land need us," Bantrus continued. He paused to swallow. "But the Boats can't exist without the land either. In my great-grandfather's day, every little patch of coast had its own chief and its own law... some better and some worse, but they all knew they needed the Boats. Now...."
He shrugged. "Mykon is putting all Cordin under him," he said. "He doesn't like anything that doesn't kneel to him--worship him, he's saying, now that he claims to be a God. We in the Boats don't bow to anyone on land; and even if we were willing, we couldn't serve Mykon and the Priestess of Gelf on Shengy, and Ragga of Tisamur. And who knows how many others, before I'm my mother's age?"
"The princes of whole islands may not need the Boats the way village chiefs did," Sharina said, trying to be both logical and reassuring. "But they're better off with you serving them than they would be by making it impossible for you to operate."
"There are people among my race," said Dalar, "who would rather have less for themselves than to know that they'd let something go free when they might have squeezed it in their hand. In this too, I have seen much similar between humans and my people."
Baltrus grimaced and gestured toward the shore. "I don't want you to miss the show," he said. "And unless you're Gods yourself, there's nothing you can do to help us."
The trumpets, now at least a score of them, blew a long note and fell silent. A man using a megaphone bellowed, "Hail Mykon, Protector of Cordin and brother of the Storm God!"
"That's thunder," Sharina said. She could see a man standing erect in a chariot that rolled slowly down the boulevard. Torchlight winked from his silvered armor and that of the soldiers walking beside the vehicle. The sound, though... the night sky was clear!
A squad of servants in simple tunics and headbands ran from behind the chariot and down the street in front of it. They were carrying--
Sharina started to laugh. "They're carrying sheets of bronze," she said. 'They're laying it on the street ahead of the chariot so the wheels make it rumble against the bricks. That's all there is to Mykon's divinity!"
"Hail Mykon, Protector and God!" the man with the megaphone called, though only familiarity made the words intelligible over the thundering bronze. Soldiers cheered as they marched ahead of and alongside the chariot, keeping the way clear for Mykon and the bronze sheets.
Ordinary spectators took up the cries. Sharina thought of the man who'd accosted her and Dalar when they emerged from the settling tank. Aloud she said, "Some of them do believe it, or anyway they're willing to go along with Mykon for their own reasons. And not just country folk."
"Yeah," said Bantrus. "And even those landsmen who don't believe or don't care--not one of them in ten would object if Mykon said he was taking over the Boats."
The youth leaned closer and lowered his voice still more. "If we're to survive, we have to fight for ourselves," he whispered. "At least be willing to fight. My mother won't ever admit that, but me and some of my friends have been making plans."
Sharina nodded solemnly, hoping she wouldn't be asked to comment on the notion. If the Boats were inadequate as long-distance sailing vessels, they made an even less likely pirate fleet. The princes of the islands could survive without the Boats, but the Boats were completely at the mercy of the princes' goodwill--or at least forbearance.
She could understand why no mention of the Boats survived to her day. They were a footnote at the margin where myth became history; they'd disappeared in Bantrus' generation, just as he feared.
The waterfront procession continued at the speed of a slow walk, rumbling and flashing. It had a sinister appearance in Sharina's mind now.
Bantrus was looking nearer by. A man came toward the Columbine across a long line of barges starting at the eastern end of the harbor.
"That's Jem," Bantrus said. "Something must've happened."
He looked at his guests. "I'm going to talk to him," he said. "You can stay here and watch--"
"No, I think we've seen enough," Sharina said. Dalar gave a tiny nod of agreement and followed Bantrus down the mast ahead of her.
They reached the deck just as Jem, a husky youth with a scar running from his right eyebrow almost to the peak of his shaven scalp, arrived. Brasca glared from him to her son and said, "You needn't think you can stay here and talk your foolishness. You think I don't know what you're planning? I do!"
"They're here!" Jem said, staring at Dalar. To Bantrus he added, "He's real?"
"I am real," Dalar said, and for emphasis he kicked his right leg
high in the air. The central toe of the other foot gouged splinters from the deck. No one watching could imagine that Dalar was a man wearing a bird suit.
"What did you mean by, 'They're here'?" Sharina said with a cold feeling.
"You're the ones that Mykon's looking for!" Jem said. "Somebody told him there was a huge bird and an beautiful princess with the Boats. Mykon says his brother Brut the Storm God sent them to him. He's got his men working down the harbor looking for you."
To Bantrus he added, "I didn't think it was true, but I figured Mykon had some reason he was searching the Boats, so I came to warn you. I never thought...."
He stared at Dalar. "Is it true?" he asked the bird. "Have the Gods sent you to Mykon?"
"You've got to leave here!" Brasca shrilled to Sharina. She'd picked up the butcher knife, her eyes wide with terror. "Now! Leave!"
Dalar poised. Sharina stepped in front of him. "Yes, we have to leave," she said. She didn't know what Mykon had in mind for Dalar, but she could guess what her own role in the prince's court would be. "And no, we don't want anything to do with Mykon. Is there a place we can go?"
"She can't stay here!" Brasca said. Her arms trembled and her eyes no longer focused. She was a strong, competent woman, but fear for a bleak future had virtually paralyzed her.
"Jem?" said Bantrus. "If we sail to Klestis tonight, we'll have time to get things ready. We have to act some time."
"Right," said the other youth after a moment's hesitation. To Sharina he added, "Come on, we'll get aboard the Tailwind and out of here. You'll be a symbol, all right, but you'll be our symbol!"
He turned and jumped from the Columbine's bow to the stern of the next barge in this rank, retracing the route by which he'd arrived. Sharina followed him without hesitation. She didn't know what she was getting into, but she had a good idea of what she was escaping.
Behind her, Bantrus was gathering a few possessions into a blanket. His mother had dropped the knife onto the deck. She was sobbing.