by David Drake
“It's lovely!” Liane said. “I'll...I appreciate the token, Ilna. I...”
She looked from the sash to meet Ilna’s eyes. “I wish we could be friends,” she said. “I hope some day we will be.”
“Yes, I'm sure you do,” Ilna said with a sniff of amusement. “This has a purpose beyond clenching your tunic, though. If you're ever in need, real need, tear it apart. Just tear the cloth. If you do that I'll know, and I'll offer you such help as I can.”
“I...” Liane said. Her fancy school had taught her to conceal surprise, but not quite well enough. “I...What sort of help do you mean, Ilna?”
“That'll have to wait on the event, won't it?” Ilna snapped. She couldn't help it. She'd wanted to be gracious, sweet, the way the rich girl herself was. It wasn't in Ilna to do that, even for these last few minutes...
“Anyway,” she added, “you probably won't need it. Good-bye, Liane. I wish you well.”
Ilna offered her hand to clasp. Liane stepped close and hugged her. Ilna felt her soul shiver as Liane broke away and hopped onto the Lady of Mercy's deck.
Ilna couldn't pretend that she liked Liane or that she wasn't bitter about losing Garric to the well-educated rich girl. But Ilna could make amends for the unjust hatred she'd borne Liane in the past. That was why she'd woven the paired sashes and given the one to her successful rival. Not that Liane had ever felt they were in competition...
“Fare well!” Ilna called to all the people in the world who mattered to her. She turned quickly and walked away before any of them could see her tears.
The 9th of Heron
Beltar or-Holman had been a moderately successful mercer when Ilna first arrived in Erdin. Ilna wove ribbons which attracted men to the women wearing them: she'd used Beltar as her agent. His business had grown enormously. He'd expanded into the adjacent premises, which had been a smithy where harness chains were repaired and horses were fitted with shoes to replace those they'd thrown on the city's hard brick pavements. Ilna walked into the shop, smiling faintly. She wondered how Beltar expected to get on now that he had only ordinary cloth to sell. Well, she was here to save him from that difficulty.
Though it was late in the day there were several female customers, each with a maid in attendance with a basket for parcels. Two ladies chattered over a table of cut rolls; the shop assistant was showing a third brocade of Serian weave.
The assistant looked up when Ilna entered. She was a pert little thing who wore an elaborate coiffure of false hair, combs, and amber-headed pins.
“I've come to see Beltar,” Ilna said. She walked toward the doorway into the back, curtained not by fabric but with strands of carved wooden beads.
The assistant glanced at Ilna’s simple dress and the roll of cloth in her hands. “Trade uses the back entrance,” she said sharply. “But from the look of you, you'd be wasting your time anyway. Our customers are discerning.”
Ilna smiled at her. “Then they have the advantage of you, you silly troll,” she said mildly. “You must dress in the dark to wear shellfish dye and madder reds in the same outfit. And that silk you're trying to sell there—show your customer the edge you've folded under, why don't you, so that she can see the water damage.”
“What?” said the customer's maid. She snatched the corner of the fabric lying over the assistant's arm and pulled it out straight for her mistress.
The assistant jerked back in horror. “Master Beltar!” she cried. “Master Beltar!”
The beads clattered as Beltar or-Holman came out quickly. He still held the quill with which he'd been transferring tallies from wax tablets to a more permanent account on paper or thin boards. He stared at Ilna.
“Oh, Shepherd guard me!” he said in a husky voice. “I thought you were dead. When your house was destroyed...I prayed you were dead!”
The mercer had gained weight since Ilna first met him, but his red-blond hair looked sparser and his complexion was sallow. “I don't blame you,” Ilna said without rancor, “but prayer never did me much good either. We'll talk in your office.”
By sheer force of personality she drove Beltar ahead of her through the curtain. The women in the shop stared after them dumbfounded. Directly ahead were stairs leading up to living quarters. The room to the left had a stool and a slanted desk, a wall of deep pigeonholes holding scrolls whose winding rods were tagged for identification, and a table under the sole window where Beltar could examine fabric by natural light. A lamp shone on the accounts Beltar had been transcribing. Its translucent panels were cut from fish bladders.
“I've moved myself and my looms to a loft in the Crescent,” Ilna said. “Living in a slum is cheap, and I have more important things to do with my money now than keep up a mansion on Palace Square.”
Beltar sat heavily on the stool. A carafe and tumbler of faience stood on the adjacent sideboard. He poured but splashed more wine on the wood than he got into the tumbler. Gripping the carafe in both shaking hands, he drank directly from it.
“You have nothing to fear from me,” Ilna said contemptuously. “You never did, you know.”
Beltar lowered the carafe. Roundels sawn out of multi-stranded glass rods quivered in the lamplight. For the most part the mercer appeared to have his nerves under control.
“Your house was looted and there were so many bodies around it,” Beltar said softly. “I saw it and I thought the sun had come out for the first time since I met you. Even though I didn't see your body.”
“I'm not a great deal happier than you are about the reality,” Ilna said. “But that doesn't change anything.”
She laid the cloth she'd brought with her onto the examination table. “I still need you as agent to handle my business affairs,” she explained, “selling what I weave. It'll be a different business, though.”
“No,” said Beltar. He stared into the carafe instead of turning to look at Ilna. “I won't work for you anymore. If you try to twist my mind again—”
He turned to her with eyes full of the terrified anguish of a rabbit facing a snake.
“—I'll kill myself! I will! I'm not going back to being...to selling...”
Beltar dropped the carafe. Wine splashed across the legs of the desk and stool. He cupped his hands over his face and cried into them.
The vessel's decoration had chipped, but its rugged stoneware core hadn't broken. Good craftsmanship, Ilna thought. She laid the tips of her fingers over Beltar's hands with a gentleness none of those who'd grown up with her would have credited.
“Poor Beltar,” she said. “You've grown a backbone at last, have you? Perhaps there's more good in what I've done than I'd realized.”
She stepped out of the room to fill the tumbler with water from the jar under the stairs. A little boy with Beltar's red hair peered at her from the upper hallway; a woman's arm jerked him back with an angry hiss. The shop assistant might not recognize Ilna os-Kenset, but the mercer's family certainly did.
Ilna gave Beltar the water, then tossed him a swatch of badly embroidered linen that deserved no better use than for the mercer to blow his nose on it. She waited with her hands folded in front of her while he mopped his face.
Beltar raised his eyes to her. “I'd rather die,” he said softly.
Ilna nodded. “I won't force you to act as my agent,” she said, “but I'll remind you that I didn't force you before. You sold my ribbons because they would make you rich. You kept selling them even after you knew beyond question that they ruined lives, ruined people. And they made you very rich.”
“I'd give you all that money if I could go back to the way things were,” the mercer said. “I'll give you the money now if you'll just go away.”
“We have work to do here,” said Ilna. “Oh, we can't put things right, that I know, but money in the right places can help. And the fabrics I'm weaving now...”
She picked up the bolt she'd brought into the shop and let a yard of it fall free. The cloth was wool woven into a thin baize. The pattern was a series of gently
curving stripes in brown and russet thread, almost but not quite parallel. It was like looking at a kelp forest when the tide drags the strands outward.
Beltar straightened on the stool. His expression was guarded but no longer one of hate and loathing.
“As you see, they make people feel better,” Ilna said. “I suppose we'll be deluding them, but it'll be for their own good. A length of this in place of the bead curtain should be a good way to start.”
The mercer swallowed. “There are others who could act for you,” he said.
“Yes,” said Ilna, “but they don't have sins of their own to deal with. Not involving me, at any rate. You do.”
Beltar nodded. He got up from the stool, frowning in surprise when he noticed he was standing in the tacky lees of the wine he'd spilled. “Yes, all right,” he said. He shook his head in puzzlement. “I'd convinced myself you were dead,” he added. “I should have known better, I suppose.”
Ilna dropped the bolt back on the table. “Come with me now so that you know where I'm living,” she said. “At the start you can visit me every other day, but we may need to modify the schedule as word gets around.”
Beltar marched out of the shop in her wake. She'd bullied him into agreement, Ilna knew; but it was for his own good.
The water of the Inner Sea was all the colors from green through violet; where seamounts neared the surface there were fish and coral of red, orange, and yellow besides. Garric leaned on the stern rail as though he were eyeing the dinghy which bobbed after the Lady of Mercy at the end of a twenty-foot painter. His mind watched with King Carus from the dream balcony, viewing preparation for a battle below them.
“The Isles are too big to rule except by the consent of the people being ruled,” Carus said, eyeing the troops critically. He grinned and added, “Most of the people, that is; there're always going to be a few heads to knock.”
The royal army was a force of lightly armored men with long spears, formed with unhurried precision into blocks sixteen ranks deep. They'd disembarked from the hundred warships that were drawn up on the beach behind them, protected by a palisade.
“And most people are willing to be ruled, lad, at least if you're doing a halfway decent job,” Carus said. “Oh, they don't want to pay the Royal Portion any more than they want to pay any other debt. They'd sooner your father poured them beer for free in his taproom, right?”
The king turned to look directly at Garric. There were laugh-lines at the corners of his eyes, but the gaze itself had no more give in it than the edge of a sword has.
“But people don't want pirates swarming out of the sea to kill them all, either,” Carus continued. “And they don't want a dozen of the local toughs deciding they're going to rape all the women and steal all the sheep.”
On the ground below, a band of armored horsemen spurred from the enemy camp to disrupt the phalanx before it could complete its formation. Skirmishers met them, hurling javelins at the horses and scampering aside.
Horsemen slashed and wheeled like so many boxers beset by gadflies. The charge lost impetus. At last the horsemen returned to the ragged camp from which they'd come; some on foot, others nursing mounts restive from the pain of a dangling missile.
“They'll accept being ruled,” Carus said, “if you're fair or fair enough, and if they think you're doing a job that needs to be done. Taking care of Count Hitto of Blaise—”
He nodded with satisfaction at the scene taking place beneath the rose-twined balcony he shared with Garric.
“—needed to be done. There were plenty of people on Blaise who didn't like paying taxes to Carcosa, but they liked that better than having Hitto strip them bare to raise an army to make him King of the Isles. Cavalry, lad! He was going to use heavy cavalry to conquer islands!”
A hundred and seventy free oarsmen drove each of the king's beached triremes. On land they traded their oar-looms for long pikes or three-foot staff slings and a wallet of pointed lead bullets that could outrange any peasant archer.
The phalanx shifted into motion with the leisurely implacability of the tide coming in. Parties of slingers sauntered between the blocks of pikemen. The skirmishers fell in on the flanks as the main force advanced.
At the rear, as a reserve and the hammer to strike the killing blow when the phalanx had pinned the enemy, was a party of five hundred armored swordsmen on foot. Their helmets and cuirasses glittered with gilt and gorgeous inlays.
On the shoulders of four burly swordsmen swayed a light platform like the frame of a sedan chair. King Carus stood on it, watching over the heads of his troops as the battle developed. Under his arm he held a helmet to don when the time came to lead rather than command; his mailed right hand rested on his sword hilt.
“Remember, lad,” said the figure watching with Garric from the dream balcony. “You can force any one man to do what you want.”
He chuckled. “I could, at least, and you've got the size for it too. But when you try that with two, it's hard not to turn your back on one or the other sometime. If you've got a whole kingdom to rule, you'd best arrange that most everybody thinks it's good thing that you're ruling.”
Below, the count's armored horsemen were beating forward a mass of Blaise peasants armed with crude spears and the bows they used to hunt rabbits. Despite the threat of swords behind them, the peasant infantry scattered when the first volley of sling bullets slashed into them like hail on standing grain.
The phalanx strode forward briskly. The first three ranks lowered their pikes; the points of the others wavered in the sunlight as a canopy of polished steel.
“But why me!” Garric said. “What right have I to be king? What right have I to be anything but a peasant on Haft?”
“It's not a right, lad,” King Carus said. “It's a duty you have because your ancestor failed a thousand years ago. I failed. Not for lack of trying, but that wasn't enough. You've got to do it right, King Garric—”
He smiled. The Carus on the battlefield leaped off the platform to lead his shock troops into the enemy. His sword flicked like a serpent's tongue.
“—because if you don't, there won't be another chance. Not this time.”
“Land ho!” a voice called. The words cascaded into Garric's consciousness, though it was a moment before he realized that he leaned against the wooden rail of the Lady of Mercy rather than a balcony of weathered stone.
“I make Pandah three points off the port bow!” cried the lookout at the masthead.
Liane sat a few feet away with her back to the railing. She was reading a codex of Celondre's Odes. When she heard Garric stir, she looked up with a smile.
A green light quivered momentarily at the corner of Garric's eye, near the northern horizon. He decided it must be a last echo of his reverie.
Cashel stood on the bow rail, bracing his left hand on the foremast which slanted forward at forty-five degrees. From what Cashel had seen during the voyage, the small sail hanging in front of the bowsprit was used mostly for steering. He couldn't see Pandah yet, but he knew the clouds piling in the center of the clear sky must have formed on the updrafts from land still beneath the horizon. “Won't it be nice to be on solid ground tonight instead of some sandy hill in the middle of the sea?” Sharina said. “And fresh water!”
“What's in the ship's jars tastes of tar, that's so,” Cashel agreed. He didn't mind being on shipboard. The motion didn't bother him, and he never felt confined so long as he had an open sky above him.
The lookout slid down the backstay of the mainmast, landing on the deck near Garric and Liane. Liane waved when she saw Cashel looking over his shoulder in her direction. Garric stared toward the northern horizon, shading his eyes with his left hand.
Sharina noticed her brother's interest. She ducked under the foremast and stood at the port bulwark; only the stern quarter had a railing. Cashel couldn't see in that direction because of the way the foresail was rigged.
“Cashel,” Sharina said. “Come look at this.”
&n
bsp; Cashel stepped over the slanting mast instead of crawling through the cordage beneath. A sailor running to adjust the foresail bounced off his shoulder and shouted in anger. Cashel ignored him, watching the sea with a shepherd's eyes that were trained to spot hidden dangers.
The breeze moved the Lady of Mercy at a pace not much greater than that of sheep ambling to pasture. There wasn't enough wind to lift foam from the gentle waves.
A fish turned on the surface and flashed its silver flank before vanishing again into the sea. The scene was placid and practically identical to any other during the voyage.
The back of Cashel's neck prickled. He held his staff crossways at arm's length as though to form a barrier in front of him and Sharina. Nearby, sailors adjusted the sails under the captain's cheerful orders. They were eager to make port and unaware of any reason for concern.
“There was something in the sea,” Sharina said, speaking with the deliberate calm of someone keeping strict control of her emotions. “It seemed to be a mile away. It was gray or green and I can't remember its shape. But it isn't there anymore, and there's no sign that it ever was.”
Tenoctris came out of the cabin where she'd been resting. She glanced at Cashel, then looked off the port side.
“Maybe it was a whale or—” Sharina said.
A lens of gray distortion spread across sea and sky a hundred feet away. Cashel saw the waves and horizon through it, but they were shadowed and twisted out of their normal shapes. Lightning the color of rotten bronze leaped through the gray. A roar like bees swarming in unimaginable numbers smothered even the sudden screams of the sailors.
The lens swept down on the Lady of Mercy like a tidal wave.
Sharina gripped the gunwale with both hands as though she faced a storm. She didn't think of going inside. The lightly framed cabin would be no real protection, and even the ship's holds were unlikely to bring safety from this, whatever this was.
Cashel braced his legs apart, holding the staff as if he faced human opponents. He began to rotate it sunwise, crossing one hand over the other at increasing speed. Sparks skipped from the iron ferrules and hung in the air, forming a blue haze.