by David Drake
Ribbons hung from a crossjack on the stern to give warning of any change in the breeze. They slackened an instant before the sails also went limp in an unnatural calm.
The Lady of Mercy rocked violently. She entered the lens. Sunlight vanished.
Cashel continued to spin his staff. His face was calm, but he didn't look like the youth Sharina had grown up with. His visage now was one that might have looked down from the sanctum of a great temple, the Shepherd in His aspect of Protector rather than His more common depiction as the lithe, handsome Consort of the Lady.
Lightning spat from the grayness, then rebounded in a crash as it met the globe of blue light enclosing Sharina and Cashel. The gunwale shattered and the foremast flew out of the bitts. Cordage and the linen sail burned with wan red light until shadows swallowed them.
The Lady of Mercy was breaking up. The deck buckled and one of the great cross-timbers binding the sides of the hull together lifted vertically. The screams from sailors' open mouths were lost in the avalanche roar that followed the thunderclap.
Cashel and Sharina were in a cocoon of still air. Beyond them a gale ripped the mainsail. Sharina saw the captain fly from the top of the deckhouse, lifted by his billowing tunic.
Garric gripped the steering oar with one hand while he hacked at its rope pinions with his sword. Liane knelt beside him, tying herself and Tenoctris together with a brail from the shredded mainsail. The oar would float if Garric could get it free, but Tenoctris might be too frail to hold on to it alone until help could arrive from Pandah.
As for Sharina and Cashel—
The roar ceased abruptly. Sharina felt as though she were floating; perhaps she really was. She could see nothing but Cashel and the sparkling blue globe that the quarterstaff wove around them.
Sunlight blinded her. Sharina splashed into the warm, salty water of the Inner Sea. Cashel struck beside her. He still gripped the staff, but he wore the slack expression of a man who has worked beyond human limits.
Cashel's face dipped underwater. Sharina lifted his head with one arm. The dinghy floated nearby with only a tag remaining of the heavy rope by which the ship had towed it. Sharina swam to the boat, stroking with her free arm and kicking. When she lifted her head to breathe she could see that a galley had put out from Pandah. It was approaching on the rippling motion of many oars.
There was no debris on the sea's calm surface; no sign at all of the Lady of Mercy.
The 9th of Heron (later)
The storm roared about them. Garric had cut the upper lashing, but he still couldn't get the steering oar loose. There must be a carrying rope deeper within the hull which he couldn't reach with the blade.
The wind pushed against him like the wall of a collapsing building. He braced his right leg against the rail, knowing the Lady of Mercy would break up soon. He sheathed the sword so he'd have both hands to wrench at the oar.
Carus must have been helping unnoticed: the sword point found the scabbard's narrow slot and shot home without hesitation. By himself Garric couldn't have managed that task one-handed, even without gusts tugging blade, sheath, and arm at different angles.
A split twisted halfway up the mainmast, following the grain of the wood. The mast parted just below the spar from which only scraps of cordage fluttered. Still linked by the lifts, the massive timbers spiraled off into lightning-shot darkness.
Garric leaned into the oarshaft. The gale roared from starboard, thrusting the Lady of Mercy into the gray maw. It was hard for Garric, facing in the opposite direction, to breathe. The carrying rope was bull sinew, elastic and enormously strong.
Liane had wound a rope under Garric's sword belt and through the brail that linked her and Tenoctris. She knotted the ends, drawing the heavy cordage as tight as possible. Tenoctris cuddled against the younger woman, gripping with all the strength of her frail arms.
Garric strained, using the whole strength of his body to no avail. His eyes bulged, tendons stood out from his neck, and his triceps burned as though coated with blazing pitch.
Liane and Tenoctris should be all right so long as they hunched below the level of the deckhouse. Their tunics, longer and fuller than a man's, would snatch them away in a heartbeat if the wind—
There was a loud crash. Garric hurtled into the sea with the oar in his hands. He felt an instant's triumph when he thought he'd broken the carrying rope. The Lady of Mercy had disintegrated around him. Garric hit water whipped to froth by the storm, praying that the tug on his sword belt was the weight of Liane and Tenoctris.
The wind had been a burden, but the roiling water was the grasp of the Sister dragging dead souls to the Underworld. Garric wrapped both arms about the oar stock, shocked each time the heavy wood buffeted him as they rolled together in a maelstrom.
He didn't know when his face was above the water or if it ever was. He choked on saltwater every time he tried to breathe. His lungs burned, the tiller battered the side of his face numb, and he wasn't sure whether his leaden arms still held the oar.
Garric stopped moving. He supposed he was dead, but he didn't care anymore. There was soft green light all around him; and then there was nothing but black oblivion.
Garric's dream self stood on the marble balcony. Weathering had given the stone's exposed surfaces a gritty texture, though the undersides of carved moldings were mirror smooth.
He stared at his physical body sprawled unconscious on the muddy strand below. The steering oar lay beneath him, so he hadn't lost it after all. The women were beginning to stir. “I've got to get down there!” he said.
“Not yet,”King Carus said, his expression more tautly eager than Garric usually saw in these reveries. “Your body needs as much time as they'll give you to recover, lad. You did more than any two men should have to do.”
The sky was sullen green. Half a dozen men were a hundred yards away, walking toward the castaways. They were armed with a mixture of clubs, axes, and spears. If any of them had come cadging around Barca's Hamlet during the Sheep Fair, he'd have been run out of the borough as a vagabond.
“There'll be time enough for them,”Carus said judiciously. He stroked the railing in a gesture Garric recognized as the king's way to keep his right hand from grasping the hilt of his sword. Carus knew the truth of what he was saying, but his emotions were just as impatient as Garric's own.
“Hey, there's a body!” one of the men called. “Hey, he's alive! She's alive or the Sister take me!”
Liane struggled with the knot in the rope by which she'd tied herself to Garric's belt. As the men broke into a shambling ran toward her, she drew a dagger from beneath her tunic. Its point was sharp enough to cut sunlight.
“Watch the sticker!” a man said. The gang spread out as they advanced. Their feet splashed on the mucky ground.
“The other one's got a sword!” bellowed a man carrying a club shaped roughly from a broken spar. “The sword's mine! By the Lady, I'm due a sword! If Rodoard won't give me one I'll take it!”
The rope was thumb-thick sisal and salt-soaked besides. Liane parted it in three quick strokes of the keen steel. She helped herself up with one hand and faced the gang.
“Who-ee!” said a Spearman. “You can have the sword, Othelm. There's what I want!”
“Maybe when Rodoard gets through with her,” another man sniggered. “If his bitch wizard doesn't decide to dispose of a rival first thing.”
“There's an old woman too,” said the man who carried a short-hafted axe, part of a ship's tool chest. “We may as well knock her on the head here.”
“Now lad,”King Carus said in a voice as soft as the rustle of a sword being drawn. “Now it's time.”
The green sky wasn't as bright as it had seemed in Garric's reverie. He'd known as he looked down on his unconscious body how much every joint and muscle must hurt after the strain he'd put on them to survive, but feeling that pain was like hurling himself into a just-opened lime kiln.
Garric rose without stumbling. White fire flashed,
blinding him at every heartbeat. He drew the sword, swinging it in a shimmering figure eight, and croaked, “Which of you wants to die first? Or shall I test the edge on the lot of you with one stroke?”
It was a good weapon. He'd bought it in Erdin, with King Carus nodding approvingly at the back of his mind. It wouldn't hack through six men at a stroke—or one either, the way Garric felt now. Though perhaps one...
“Sister take me!” a man shouted in terror. The whole gang leaped back as though burned. “I thought he was dead!”
Garric gripped the tip of his sword in his left hand and flexed the blade slightly. He wasn't sure he had the strength to hold the steel out with one hand; this gave him an excuse to use both.
Tenoctris whispered an incantation. Garric felt the spastic trembling of his muscle fibers calm. The old woman was giving him assistance from her own slight store of strength.
“You'll take us to Rodoard!” Liane said in a strong, clear voice; a noble, issuing commands as an instinctive right. She deliberately tucked the dagger away in its concealed sheath. “And you'll walk in front of us. Do you understand?”
The men looked at one another. None of them wanted to take responsibility, for the decision. After a moment the spearman turned without speaking and shambled off in the direction from which they'd come. The others joined him in a tight clot.
Garric and the women followed. Twice Garric would have fallen without Liane there to support him; but Liane was there.
Sharina sat in the bobbing dinghy, holding Cashel's head in her lap. His color was normal again, no longer the hectic flush it'd shown as he spun his quarterstaff against the lowering danger.
Sharina was exhausted. She'd not only towed Cashel to the dinghy, she'd had to lift him aboard. That meant standing in the boat while Cashel floated alongside, then pulling up his outside arm to roll him over the gunwale.
Sharina was a strong girl, but Cashel's sheer weight had almost been more than she could manage. Fortunately the dinghy was flat-bottomed and broad for its length, so she didn't capsize it during the process.
Sharina didn't know how Cashel had saved them. She suspected that Cashel himself didn't know either. But she was quite sure that without Cashel's action, the two of them would have been swallowed down with the Lady of Mercy and everything else aboard her.
The galley from Pandah had drawn close. It was a nobleman's barge, a lightly built craft with fifty oarsmen seated on open benches. A mast and a yard with the sail furled about it lay on deck parallel to the ship's axis. They could be pivoted up when the wind was favorable, but the oars were quicker for this short run from harbor.
In the bow a man of twenty-odd leaned eagerly on a rail of gilded bronze. His cloak of parrot feathers marked him as a noble. An older fellow, obviously a servant or aide, hovered close in order to catch the youth if he went over the side.
Beside the noble stood an even younger man who wore a red velvet robe embroidered with silver astrological symbols. Neither velvet nor the feathers would have been Sharina's choice of garment for a sea voyage, but nobles and wizards seemed generally to feel a need to keep up appearances.
A large monkey clambered about the bow platform with the men; once it even hung nonchalantly from the railing and tried to dip a hand into the wave curling from the galley's bow. The rowers feathered their oars at an order from a helmeted officer in the stern. The monkey twisted up to stand between the men again. The beast spoke to the wizard; and, though the amazed Sharina couldn't make out the words of the exchange, the wizard replied.
“Back water!” the officer cried. The rowers rose from their benches, leaning forward to push their oarlooms instead of pulling them in the usual fashion. The galley halted twenty feet short of the dinghy. Around the hull swirled water spun by the perfectly judged oarstrokes.
Instead of the motley garb Sharina had seen on sailors from Sandrakkan and Ornifal, these rowers wore identical kilts with a saffron border around the hem. Their livery showed even more clearly than the feather cape did that the youth was the ruler of Pandah or the ruler's son.
“Throw them a rope, Tercis!” the youth snapped to the servant, whose utter amazement suggested he might as well be asked to fly.
“I'll do it, Your Majesty,” the wizard said. He seized a mooring line and spun the coil out with an underhand toss that brought it directly to Sharina. She wrapped the line about the forebitt and let the wizard pull the boats together. The dinghy's oars had been in the Lady of Mercy when she went down.
Cashel was still comatose. “My friend will have to be carried aboard,” Sharina warned as the dinghy thumped against the galley's port bow. It was disconcerting to be stared at by the ruler, his wizard, and the great brown eyes of the monkey, who was now hanging upside down from the rail.
“Captain Lashin!” the ruler said. “Get the man aboard. We'll take him to the palace.”
He leaned even farther out to extend his hand to Sharina. “As we will you, mistress. I'm Folquin, King of Pandah. Someone as lovely as yourself must be of noble blood.”
Without further orders, four rowers boarded the bobbing dinghy while one of their fellows held the stern firmly against the galley's flank. Sharina climbed onto the bow platform to get out of the way as the sailors lifted Cashel, a respectable weight even for all of them, over the side. Other sailors placed him on the furled sail.
“I'm not—” Sharina said to Folquin. The bow platform was far too constricted for comfort among strangers.
“A pretty female as humans go,” the monkey said in a grating voice. “Is the big one her mate?”
“Zahag!” the wizard said. He was tall and gangling with the look of a colt who has yet to fill out. “You're not to disturb the lady.”
Clearing his throat he went on, “I'm Halphemos, King Folquin's wizard. Can you tell us about what made your ship vanish, mistress?”
“I don't know,” Sharina said. The galley was under way again. The rowers on one side backed while those on the other stroked forward, reversing direction in little more than the vessel's own length. “It just happened—like a storm, but it wasn't a real storm.”
She looked at the excited, concerned faces of these strangers; staring at her, wondering about things she couldn't answer. “I'm Sharina os-Reise,” she said. “I'm just...”
She didn't know how to go on. She wasn't a princess, but she wasn't just an innkeeper's daughter anymore either. She wasn't even Reise's daughter if what the royal emissaries had told her was true. “I'm...” she repeated.
And then, overwhelmed with worry, physical exhaustion, and relief she blurted what was at least the truth: “I'm very glad you came to rescue me and my friend Cashel!”
Garric gained strength as he and the women followed the gang through a forest of trees like none he'd ever seen before. He knew that in a day or two he'd feel the racking stress of his struggle with the steering oar, but for the moment the gentle exercise of walking was just what he needed to keep his muscles from cramping.
He sheathed his sword with a vibrant zing/clank as the simple iron crossbill met the lip of the scabbard. Othelm looked over his shoulder. Garric let his lip curl in something between a sneer and a snarl. Othelm's head jerked around again.
The sky remained a uniformly pale green. There wasn't a bright patch to suggest that the sun was above a layer of sickly clouds. The vegetation, both shrubs and the trees that reached sixty feet into the air, had knotted stems; branches kinked and twisted more like honeysuckle than any woody plants Garric had seen before.
He glanced at Tenoctris. She gave a quick shake of her head which Garric took to mean that their surroundings were new to her also. By common instinct the three were remaining silent until they knew more about what was going on.
Because the gang leading them cursed as they stumbled along with the massive steering oar, Garric doubted that the men could have heard the castaways' words. It still wasn't a chance he wanted to take.
He looked quickly every time he heard someth
ing scrabble in the undergrowth. This land didn't have true ground cover, grass or even ivy. The only animals he glimpsed were rats. They, like the humans, were probably survivors of ships engulfed the way the Lady of Mercy had been.
Garric smiled faintly. The same was true of the roaches and flies buzzing and scurrying wherever he looked. He was glad he and his friends had survived, but that put them into a company which he couldn't regard with pride.
The path broadened. The watchman standing there looked as disreputable as the gang who'd found the castaways. He thumped a drum made from a hollow tree trunk several feet in diameter.
Garric's bowels trembled in sympathy with low notes which would penetrate for miles through the humid air. He straightened his back and noticed that his companions had reacted the same way.
More men—and a few women—came out of the forest to view the castaways. Most of their clothing was made from bark and fibers stripped from the long, sinuous leaves of the local trees, but many of the huskier and better-armed men wore an item or two which had been sucked here from outside.
“Why's he got a sword?” a man asked Othelm in a challenging voice.
“Because I'd have killed all of them if they'd tried to take it!” Garric said. He'd called sheep out of the woods of home. In this hushed, twilit place, his voice rang like a tocsin. “Will you try me?”
The man who'd spoken was a squat troll with one eye and a ring through the septum of his nose. He spat on the ground but backed away when Garric came abreast of him.
They entered a broad muddy beach around a lagoon. Garric couldn't tell how far the water stretched. There were rafts on the reedy surface and dimly visible figures on the other side.
Hut-sized palisades lay along the treeline like lichen speckling stone, but the structures didn't seem to have roofs. There was no sun here and presumably no rain, so privacy rather than shelter was the only reason for construction.