by Janny Wurts
Next morning, men bleary-eyed from short rest found the main sheets entangled. The meddler’s fingers also had shortened the lead line, which malicious trick upset the soundings in an easterly, hard against Vastmark’s treacherous lee shore. The captain wore a thunderous scowl, and the furious cook balked his duty, when his best pots were found, clanking, run up to the masthead.
The Wasp moved under oars, while the sail crew squirmed under the surly eye of the mate. “I will have the name of whoever’s sown merry hell on this ship!” Hunched against the spatter off the main yard, he bored onwards, “If no one comes forward, the rum ration’s cut. Then I’ll flense bollocks with a dull knife until somebody rats out the culprit.”
Nobody collared the saboteur. As if the mate’s warning had teeth, no more mishaps occurred as the Wasp picked her way through the rocks off the peninsula. Rounding the Cascains towards milder waters, her hackled company mellowed into routine.
Then the captain awoke with bait-fish in his berth. His roar shot the corpulent cabin steward like a singed bear through the starboard companionway, where the nippy perpetrator cannoned straight into him. The steward closed meaty arms and clung, bellowing, until the mate topside dispatched two oarsmen to help. They manhandled the struggling culprit on deck, to barrages of thumps and inventive cursing.
The insolent captive displayed no remorse. Exposed before his victims, he shot off wisecracks. Determined rage crumbled. Muffled laughter unravelled decorum, until the deck officer cuffed the buffoon into silence. Still, the feckless creature remained uncowed. Teeth gleamed through his overgrown beard, bold as the pearls in an oyster.
Several hands smothered untoward amusement. Another guffawed. The pinned scoundrel exuded the scapegrace charm of the underdog baiting authority. The divided crew hung on his fate: half vindictively wanted him drowned, while the rest choked back mirth for the novel amusement. Their hilarity peaked as the captain emerged, dripping putrid fish, his furious stomp squelching as slimy fry slithered out of his hair and clothing.
Ludicrous play aside, the Wasp’s company had lost revenue by the effrontery. Singed pride made no case for a capital charge, lawful only for murder and mutiny, and subject to oversight by the magistrates seated at Ithish. By convenience, the desolate shores of the Cascains side-stepped the hindrance of a lawful trial for summary justice.
“Let’s have the offender marooned,” the captain decided forthwith.
Through crows of approval, the Wasp’s coxswain collared sailhands to sway out the skiff. They rowed the wee rat ashore and dumped him off with his sea chest, while the purser expunged his luckless name from the crew list with nary a pang of conscience.
Arithon s’Ffalenn hunkered down on the strand, elated to have achieved his desired landfall without leaving tell-tale tracks. Caution kept his impatience cloaked under the guise of morose dejection. Bearded chin propped on his fists, he waited until the Wasp weighed her anchor and rowed beyond view. No witness remained when at length he arose.
He kneaded the cramp from his scarred thigh, shoved dry feet into his sea-boots, and dragged his trunk into the brush. The look-out’s glass on the next vessel, passing, must see nothing but the white stripes of barnacles on the barren rocks. Purposefully forgotten, Arithon took shelter out of the wind. He sharpened his knife, bathed, and shaved off the odious beard.
Then he strapped on his sword and followed the game trails to a natural spring. Muddy turf lined the verges, laced over with tangled scrub willow and hazel. He cut pliable saplings, dragged the bundled withies to firm ground, and began weaving the frame for a coracle. The plank tray from his sea chest made a seat, and stashed sail canvas covered the bottom. When nightfall shrouded the plume of smoke, he melted the tar-pot acquired from the chandlers and sealed his makeshift craft watertight.
Grey dawn found him fishing for breakfast under the wheeling dip of white gulls. Afterward, whistling, he scavenged for drift-wood and carved a paddle. The desolate wilderness soothed him, waves broken over into webbed foam to coy flashes of lucent emerald. The jagged terrain of the puzzle-cut coves wore the scents of wet shale and tidewrack in the looming shade of the cliffs—he had been here, before.
Vivid memory resurfaced, of a woman’s face set like a jewel amid fair hair and the sparkle of sapphires. Never his lover, though her beauty had stolen his breath, and exchanges of repartee like flung knives had flaunted her quick intelligence.
When grey clouds rolled in bringing rainfall, the melodious trickle of run-off and the hissing gusts through the scrub carried a familiar refrain.
He had been here before: the forces of wind and tide framed a rhythm he understood as a mariner. Though he had no chart of the maze through the Cascains, the channels were narrow, and the coracle’s weight light enough to be carried. Judicious use of the current would steer his tentative course.
The storm passed, and slack tide smoothed the water to a silvered mirror. Arithon launched his frail craft and sculled through the black reefs where few hardy souls ventured. For a fortnight, he heard no human voice. Only the piping cries of wild birds and the splashes of jumping fish. He waited out squalls beneath his egg-shell boat, while the waves thundered and crashed, unravelled to whipped spume. Slowly, the way unfolded before him, like images on a painted fan: this jutted point, and that remote cove, and the misty, notched profiles of certain, cragged ridges.
And the day finally came when he passed the tight narrows that twisted through slabs of dark rock, the coracle buffeted by the foam riffled off the submerged shoals. The keyhole notch resounded with echoes, cacophonous with the weave of flocked birds startled up by his presence. Then the close channel opened out into a protected bay. Calm water lapped at iron-grey cliffs, gripped in preternatural quiet. Ahead, egress between facing islets and the jutted spine of a point led him to the secluded inlet referenced by his late caithdein. Low swells lifted gently into the shallows and curled against a shingle of rounded stones.
Almost, Arithon heard the echoes of diligent mallets in the crescent cove. Raucous laughter rang behind silence, to hoots and coarse comment by yesteryear’s shipwrights, and the tart barbs of a blind splicer hired under his former employ. Arithon’s throat tightened. The sudden edge of grief stopped his breath, for the friends dead and gone, and the distance in time that had plundered their vivid comradeship. The wood shack was gone, that once housed the haughty, spectacular beauty of Lysaer’s cherished princess, tendered by note for her ransom. For a pensive moment, the coracle drifted beneath the cries of the gulls.
Then the tug of the tidal bore jostled Arithon from reverie. He gripped the oar and sculled forward, before the current endangered his cockle-shell craft. Coasted landwards on a lisping breaker, he leaped barefoot into the foam and stepped ashore.
Almost, he still smelled the pine shavings scrolled off the planks being planed by the coopers.
The present showed no sign of habitation. The notched rim wall above raked the pied clouds, adrift in a fair-weather sky. Beached seaweed entangled no trace of human flotsam. The song of the flux and the nuance of mage-sight revealed the natural world in stately unison, until Arithon reached the west rim of the cove.
There, where the brackish eddies of a little inlet met the plumed falls unreeled from a cleft, a signal note quivered beneath the surface flow of the flux. Intuition prompted Arithon for his true Name, not spoken, but framed by the signature tones that defined his spirit.
A veil parted, stripped of the glamour that suggested a shallow brook. Revealed in its place, a deepwater channel let into a hidden anchorage. A little pleasure sloop rode on a chain cable, swathed in stayspells against time and rot. The preservative spellcraft was his own, sealed under the shadow-wrought bindings of a long-term concealment. The shock of the unforeseen revelation accessed his lost trove of a lifetime’s trained mastery.
Arithon gasped as rich chapters of recall cascaded into remembrance. He knew the sprightly name embellished on the craft’s stern: Talliarthe, called after a mythica
l sprite and built by his hands, from her keel to her cordage. The thrill raised a flush of delight and chased gooseflesh over his skin. Back-tracked at a sprint, he relaunched his coracle and sculled out to the boat’s mooring. Her elegant bright work and varnished spars flooded his heart when he grasped her spooled railing and boarded. For the planks underfoot sang to him with the splendour of everything dear he had lost.
Wonder embraced the tangible proof of his most personal roots. He touched a taut shroud. Traced a finger-tip along her starboard pin-rail, then breathed the bracing aroma of tarred oakum, clean paint, and the tang of a hull sheathed in copper. The excellent craft remained seaworthy, awaiting his hand for more than two hundred and fifty years.
Displaced and alone ever since his escape from the Koriathain’s incarceration, still hounded by murderous enemies, Arithon shivered under the impact of reintegration. Belowdecks, the crew locker promised him clothing, tailored to measure and fitting his taste. This moment’s homecoming was not transient. Restored pride in a place all his own made him whole, and beholden to no one at last.
Talliarthe breasted the blue-water swell with a grace that calmed the spirit and bordered upon ecstasy. Arithon rested in his berth to savour the moment. Above deck, the tiller was lashed for self-steering. While the thrum of fair wind through taut canvas filled the hours, he reviewed the sweet, private fortnight spent mapping the records in Elaira’s crystal. Her personal memories were not as his own. The fact that the matched portion of his experience stayed elusive suggested an act of deliberate tampering.
He would unearth the reason for the disparity, come whatever cost.
Meanwhile, the respite of unpressured solitude let him put his recovered sloop through her paces. He paged through the notations in her log-books, a jotted chronology of his affairs from the day of her launching at Merior. The lost joy of children’s laughter and the renewed pain of adult friendships ended untimely annealed the rediscovery of who he had been, before Koriani imprisonment had robbed the foundation of his existence.
The sough of the sea rocked his circling thoughts into sleep. Arithon dreamed of his father, lost in blood and flame on a ship’s deck, far offworld on Dascen Elur. Aroused, drenched in sweat, he recalled another nightmare captivity, written under drug-ridden anguish and marked by old scars on his wrists. He shoved upright, lit the gimballed lamp over the chart desk and flipped open the last volume of Talliarthe’s log.
The dated entries spanned the years from 5671 to 5674, and finished with the blank page whereupon Talliarthe became shrouded in spellcraft. Between, inked in his own words, Arithon perused the idyllic descriptions of moments spent aboard with Elaira. At long last, cherished proof stared back from the page: an intimate relationship had matured between them after the initiate sister’s quartz pendant had left her keeping. Yet no matter how deeply he sounded the well-spring of his unconscious, his memory of her remained dark. No trace surfaced. No means recovered the empathic connection once shared between them.
Arithon lifted the sconce and pinched out the fluttering wick. In darkness, he smothered his dread, that the blank silence meant she might be dead. Without contrary evidence, hope clung to frail logic: the lock on his recall had no reason unless she still lived. Offshore, stocked with adequate provisions laid in at Ithish, Arithon suspended his driven pursuit for more answers in favour of healing his body and soul. He checked the trim of the sails and resettled, drifted off to the glimmer of stars above the cracked-open hatch.
He roused to the sharp heel of a freshened gust, then the thunder of changed wind against slackened sails. The air wore the ominous thickness of storm, under a sky torn ragged as spilled ink by the edge of a towering squall. On deck, wide-awake, he freed the tiller and swung the sloop head to wind. Fast as he dropped canvas and storm-reefed her main, the freshening breeze frothed the whitecaps and shrilled through the rigging. The wind reversed again and blew hard from the west, while the hammer-to-anvil crack of close lightning glittered through tinsel rainfall.
Then the battering torrent broke over the cockpit with the scream of a full-blown gale.
Talliarthe was a sound vessel, steered by his seasoned experience. Arithon had weathered many a rough bout, worried in the teeth of the blue-water tempests that whipped the far southern latitudes. He secured the hatch, seized the tiller, and whooped in exhilaration as his braced weight manned the buck of the rudder. The sloop slewed as though winged, scudded into a trampling downwind course that eased the strain on her timbers. Like a chip in a race, she pitched down the rollers, then breasted the troughs with a saucy dip. Spume crashed at her bowsprit, tossed at the crests like the manes of wild horses.
The squall spent by daybreak. Swollen cloud shredded and burned away to an enamel-blue sky. Arithon took a sun sight at noon, formulated his notes in the running log, and fixed Talliarthe’s offshore position. The storm had blown her east of Scimlade Tip, under a fair breeze running westerly. Yet mariner’s instinct whispered in the blood: the flawless blue dome, horizon to horizon, bespoke a fresh gale in the making. The Cildein could brew vile weather with a speed that walloped the headland like vengeance unleashed. Rather than bear northward and risk that lee shore, Arithon maintained a broad reach, south-east. If prudence might have beat for a safe harbour, he had a chafed head-sail to mend, and unfettered freedom. The thought of port-side humanity chafed, noise crammed between the incense-soaked dives, with harbour fees regaled in regulations and taxes. Shelter along the less populous coast invited an even less welcome encounter with the Biedar Tribe in Sanpashir.
Which blithe miscall overtook him before he restitched the sail that enabled the westward turn onto port tack. The gale raked down as a black cauldron of cloud, the change from steady breeze to flat calm freakish even for these changeable waters.
The storm struck before Arithon could hank on the trysail. Talliarthe’s reinforced, reefed main blew to rags and left him with bare poles. He deployed the sea-anchor, poised at the aft bitt to make fast, while the water rose green and broke under the bowsprit. The pin-rail holding the head-sail halyard sheared into splinters and was carried away. The freed line lashed alee like a berserk whip until the endsplice jammed in the masthead sheave. The rough seas prevented him from going aloft to retrieve the bound tail, or rove through a replacement. No chance he could draw an iyat to answer with the sprites satiated on the wild charge of the elements. Combined set-backs crippled his choice to heave to, lash the tiller, and ride out the worst.
Talliarthe porpoised, her stern held to the following swell by the drag of the canvas drogue. She reeled by evening, as the onslaught intensified. The monstrous waves reared and crashed, white water broken at the crests boiling over her counter. Raw might raged in an ocean gone mad. Arithon roped himself into a cockpit sloshing like a spun cauldron. The gyrating compass vanished into the murk. Wind lashed up spindrift until air and sea were no longer separate, and the howling blast threatened drowning. Huddled with salt burning his eyes, Arithon wrestled the helm against forces fit to spring planks and tear out oak fastenings.
He had sailed through great storms on the Cildein before. Yet by dark, under savage conditions, the onslaught tested his hardy expertise. Talliarthe careened like flotsam in the brunt. Her swamped cockpit forbade opening the hatch to snatch respite below. Arithon slaked his thirst in the brackish deluge from his hair. He napped in bursts, doused awake by the punch as rogue crests rampaged over the stern-rail.
Night thick as felt yielded to a dim day like sopped flannel. Still, the storm flailed the face of the deep. Talliarthe thrashed over the massive seas, the wallow and roll of her sluggish recovery taking on water. Arithon blistered his palms on the pump, unable to sound where the caulking had sprung or assay the stressed planking for damage. Blinded amid the thundering gale, and deafened by its banshee shriek through frayed rigging, he endured, pummelled to bruised exhaustion.
Arithon hung on with grim fortitude. Conditions in due course must ease. Instead, the grim storm got worse. Th
e seas steepened. Talliarthe battered upwards. Her bow plunged against the scud, lurched in hesitation, then bucked each crest, tilted, and walloped into slewed descent towards the troughs. Pitched again and again, the sloop fought to shed the green tonnage of water until her deep keel dragged her upright. Arithon wrestled a tiller that stripped swollen skin and pulled at his aching sinews like lead.
The shift, when the winds backed and turned, did not come, nor any sign of abatement. Instead, the enormous, peaked swells tore away, frayed into the mercury downpour. Day’s end dropped like a sable wall, with the little sloop hammered like a toy through the howling elements.
Dawn on the third day brought the beaten fatigue of oblivion, a charcoal tableau of soaked misery that vanquished all memory of comfort. The winds crescendoed to a roar fit to shake apart flesh, bone, and timber.
Then, at a breath, the punishment abated. The lour of cloud thinned and broke port-side, and silvered the horizon with light. An azure circle of sky opened up, set like the gem in a bezel. Arithon shoved erect. He yanked free the knots that lashed him aboard. Talliarthe bobbed into the storm’s eye, a brief respite before a redoubled onslaught. He had minutes to unfasten the hatch, nip below, and gather provisions: jerked meat and hard-tack, honey and water-jacks, fast secured under oilcloth in the stern locker. Midships, he tightened the dead-eyes that hardened the sloop’s slackened stays. He cleared the snarled lines, then pumped the bilge, his raw palms wrapped in rag. Last precaution, he replaced the frayed tackle on the sea-anchor. Under the loom of catastrophe, he strapped himself into the cockpit again and wolfed down sustenance.
No time left, to grease his salt-water sores, or to pine for dry clothing and oilskins. Westward, the sky glowered, massed cloud streamered black as the manes of Dharkaron’s Horses. The eye-wall of the storm scythed down like damnation, the sped winds of the cyclone worse on the far side. Talliarthe faced the trampling maelstrom with worked seams and tackle already harrowed. The calm passed like the blown flame in a lamp. One moment, Arithon breathed mild air, dazzled under clear sunshine. The next, the gale’s shuttered darkness clapped down with unbridled vengeance. Talliarthe heeled sharply, rolled onto her side, the first brutal knock-down of many.