The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Heated now beyond restraint, Diegan burst out, ‘You know you’ll be arrested and condemned as a dissenter? In Isaer, likely as not, they’ll throw you to the headhunters’ mastiffs. Sithaer’s Furies, man, just for some mouldy historical right to lay claim to clan fealty, you’re the living embodiment of these peoples’ fear of insurrection. I don’t care to see two hundred Etarran soldiers give up their lives to keep you from being savaged by a dog pack!’

  ‘Well then,’ Lysaer said equably. ‘The Etarran division will be sent home before any political misperception can arise to start any bloodshed.’ In maddening, single-minded majesty, he looked straight ahead as he added, Diegan, this issue is greater than me, more important than Tysan’s disorders. Somewhere in hilling, the Master of Shadow weaves plots. Sitting secure in Etarra flushing out barbarian encampments is never going to make him show his hand.’

  To which Lord Diegan could do nothing but clench his jaw, wheel his courser out of line, and pound off at a canter to review the order of his troops. Speechless in frustration, he wished he had a lance in his hand and a living target to skewer. For it was never Lysaer’s dedication to the cause of killing Arithon s’Ffalenn that had been under contention; only the folly of allowing the Lady Talith to believe herself secure amid the troop who rode out to renew s’Ilessid claim to Avenor’s charter.

  Prince Lysaer’s cavalcade travelled westward at a pace its seasoned war captains concurred was better suited to the staging of an invalid’s retinue. Those mercenaries with prior experience of moving troops complained mightily to their superiors, then arranged rough drills in the open camps to keep their cohorts smart. Unused to being fresh and idle, their men at arms diced and got fractious with each pause. Settlements and towns along the Mathorn road were favourably disposed toward Lysaer’s retainers, since the barbarian raids out of Halwythwood that distressed their trade had eased through Etarra’s campaigns. Lord Diegan grew accustomed to state dinners followed by exhaustive mornings of fielding grievances.

  For the royal cavalcade grew longer, more massive, more weighed down with gifts with every city it passed. If the Prince of the West journeyed into his ancestral kingdom to win allies against the Master of Shadow, each mayor and guild left inside Rathain’s borders set themselves to ingratiate. However they might disparage royalty, they needed Lysaer’s goodwill lest the dreaded sorcerer think to turn on them with impunity once the prince who had defended Etarra was gone. The aftermath became familiar unto habit. Diegan sat in some draughty tent with a lap-desk, grim-faced as he battled the breezes that snatched at his lading lists and tiresome tallies of wagons. From Narms, they had five loads of carpets and woven silk, sumptuously coloured; from Morvain, downcoast, wool bales profitably traded for crystal from the famed glassworks at Falgaire. They had lanterns in wrought brass, barrels of rare wines and brandies, and from some beneficent farmer, foundation stock for a pig herd.

  Lord Diegan came to wince at the creatures’ squeals, much as he did when the camp followers shrieked obscenities at cheating customers. Whatever Lysaer believed, a war camp was no place for anybody’s pedigree sister.

  Since the baggage train made transport by water impractical, the prince’s retinue crept by road around the shoreline of Instrell Bay. Caught by a late-breaking ice storm, they crawled over the low pass at East Bransing, which parted the weathered summits of the Storlains from the furze-cloaked hills that northward gave rise to the loftier spur of the Thaldeins.

  Despite Lord Diegan’s forebodings and a hostile letter of warning delivered by mounted courier from Erdane’s reigning mayor, the cavalcade crossed with the thaws into the realm of Tysan, past seat of the s’Ilessid high kings.

  Camped in pastures, quartered in hay byres, they bought wood, milk and early greens from red-cheeked country matrons. To Diegan’s everlasting uneasiness, the company blatantly proclaimed itself to the eyes of every passing shepherd. The bellying, bullion-fringed standard with its brilliant blue cloth bore a sigil not seen for five centuries: the royal twelve-pointed star of pale gold. The curious came out to stare in droves. Whatever the sentiments held by city governments and their mettlesome packs of trade guilds, the crofters of Tysan lent tacit trust once assured the prince’s captains would pay for provender. Young boys watched the marching men in their helms, shining mail, and the bright, sharp steel of their longswords, and dreamed; or else turned up in holed boots and motley tunics, reeking of cow dung from the tilling and begging to be taken on for training.

  Lysaer s’Ilessid turned none of them away.

  ‘Why leave them on the farms where their families must struggle to feed them?’ Oblivious to the squalor, he sat by the hearthside cracking nuts for Lady Talith in a peasant’s croft near Dyshent. Crickets chirruped in the smoke-grimed shadows of the corners and round-eyed children peered through the boards of the cattle stalls, where the matron had locked them for safety. Outside, amid a glitter of campfires, the fighting force sprawled at their ease in the mild night, while the off-duty watch laughed and cast bets, and the day’s new recruits dug pits for latrines behind the thorn fence of a sheepfold. Attentive to the timbre of the officer’s calls that wafted through opened shutters, Lysaer added, ‘These boys’ skills will be sorely needed later. Any unsuited for our fighting force will be given land of their own to husband, once Avenor’s rebuilt.’

  ‘If we ever get there,’ Lord Diegan grumbled acidly. Dark where his sister was leonine, he dug his knuckles into eyes gritted raw from the dust thrown up by his prince’s ridiculous train of wagons, columns of light horse and pack-mules. The rains ended earlier since the banishment of Desh-thiere’s mists; if the past plagues of bloodsucking insects were lessened, the air hung as close as new summer. ‘We’ll need to cut tents out of carpets, at this pace. Next winter’s frost will catch us before we can raise a roof to keep the rust from our weapons stores.’

  ‘Spend the cold season in Erdane with Talith, then,’ Lysaer said, and grinned in suave provocation. He wore neither doublet nor shirt. Since his offer to sling yoke buckets in from the dairy, the matron had carped until he stripped off his fine silk. Afterward, nobody remarked that his lack of finesse in the farmyard had left him bespattered with milk. Unjustly magnificent in fitted breeches of blue suede embroidered with seedpearls, he leaned down and scooped another nut from the poke by his ankles.

  Across the cottage, the farmwife’s daughter thumped her chum, her gaze never leaving the beautiful prince, except to stab in envy at the tawny-haired lady who curled like a cat at his knee.

  ‘Or else go back to your Lord Governor in Etarra,’ Lysaer resumed, well aware of his captain’s coiled tension as he flipped up and fielded a nut-meat. ‘The Etarran division will return as I promised, once we reach the crossroad to Camris.’

  ‘You can’t be serious about that!’ Lord Diegan’s sharp movement rucked the braided hearth-rug and upset the little sack, and nuts cascaded into the embers. ‘You’re carrying the endowment to found a city, and -’

  ‘And what?’ Lysaer stretched and pecked a kiss on Talith’s cheek, letting her retire before the debate could encompass the Master of Shadow. Left to the censure of her brother, the prince stayed unmoved. ‘This is Tysan. My ancestors ruled here.’

  ‘For which Erdane’s mayor sent an edict to draw and quarter you!’ Hot in his velvets, Lord Diegan endured discomfort rather than let the dairy girl make unflattering comparisons. ‘The fanatics on his council will have troops out to slaughter your bodyguard before you’ll gain passage through his town.’

  Lysaer looked back in reproach. ‘These are my people, Diegan. However I have to win my way past Erdane, whether my troops come to shelter under carpets or wind-breaks cut from our best murray silk, I won’t cross this land in such haste that I cannot understand the land’s needs.’

  ‘Sithaer take your royal principles, I’d do better arguing with a half-wit!’ Lord Diegan stood, the jingle of his spurs cut by the crunch of scattered nuts as he stalked past the fire and escaped to nu
rse his pique outside.

  The cavalcade pressed on at its snail’s crawl upcoast to Dyshent, over roads rutted deep by the passage of the season’s last lumber sledges. While the chip fires used to season beech blocks skeined dusky smoke above the houses, the prince’s guard troop quartered in yards piled with bark for the tanner’s, or between their own laden wagons, parked amid stacks of green planks. In complete disregard for the craftsmen who spat in the path of his retinue, Lysaer visited the guild halls and the town ministry. Gold saw his officers billeted in the sheds used to season rare woods, and his lordly good manners won over the councilmen’s wives.

  Diegan waited, edgy as the captains who lost sleep to stop their men from making trouble; but the deep-seated resentments toward Tysan’s royal blood failed to spark into contention.

  Lysaer took leave of Dyshent’s council and rode out in proud form before his cavalcade.

  Unappeased, Lord Diegan forced his mount to pace Lysaer’s. ‘This isn’t Isaer, or Erdane, where a few costly gifts can turn heads.’

  The peaked roofs of the city’s mills were by then lost to sight. Ahead stretched league upon league of wild downs. Rounded, scrub-clothed hills cradled the stones of a Second Age ruin, and chipped old arches lay throttled under greening trailers of bitter vine. There, where wispy marsh-lights flocked the fogs on dank nights and the spirits of long-dead Paravians were rumoured to wander abroad, no town-bred company cared to linger. Astride his steaming, mud-spattered courser, Lysaer drew firm rein, while behind, in a welter of belatedly shouted orders, his massive column blundered to a stop.

  Straight-shouldered in a hooded cloak pinned with a sapphire, the prince waited, while the mists licked through the air between. ‘Are you for me, or against?’ he asked softly.

  Lord Diegan ignored the chill that grazed the length of his spine. He strove to stay angry, to outmatch that worldly gaze which caught and pierced him to the heart. But like an onset of sudden pain, emotion wrung the truth from him. ‘I fear for you, friend. You’re the only man we have whose gift of light can match the Shadow Master’s sorceries.’

  ‘Then give me your trust,’ Lysaer said. ‘Worry does nothing, after all, but undermine morale and abet the cause of an enemy ruthlessly prepared to exploit every one of our weaknesses.’

  The next day, they reached the crossing of the Great West Road. Against every reasonable inclination, Lord Diegan presided over commands shouted through a misery of rainfall as the crack Etarran divisions he had personally selected to protect his prince were split off and turned back to Rathain.

  Afterward, with the downpour a fringe of silver off his mantle, Lord Diegan huffed through the runnels that channelled through his moustache. “By Ath, I’ll trust you have a plan. Would it strain your royal pride too much to share it?’

  ‘You couldn’t guess?’ As sodden as the house staff and officers who attended him in gloomy huddles, but oddly outside of their misery, Lysaer shook back wet hair and laughed. ‘My Lord, your Etarrans are too loyal. All filled with brash courage and intent to ruin Arithon, which is just what we’ll do on a battlefield. But since then-numbers are too small to flush out the Shadow Master, just now their sentiments could cause problems. For our safety and theirs, they can’t be risked.’

  The long-faced secretary intended for the post of Avenor’s seneschal looked ready enough to offer protest had the prince not spurred his mount to a trot. Any mercenaries who groused over his dispersion of troops found themselves reassigned drover’s work. In rainfall and mud, the caravan slogged its way westward under half its original armed escort.

  The trouble Lord Diegan expected found them soon after the Etarran cohorts had passed from sight. A body of lancers swept down on Lysaer’s company in fast moving formation from the north. Through trailing curtains of rain, the men set as watch scouts squinted to make out their banner; the wet rendered everything colourless, except for the axe-blade sigil done in silver, and encircled by a linked wheel of chain.

  ‘That’s a headhunter company out of Isaer!’ identified an inbound rider. ‘Here under orders to spill the guts of a royal pretender, I shouldn’t doubt.’

  The doleful secretary spun in agitation to the prince. ‘Fiends plague your Grace’s stubbornness, your captain at arms tried to warn you. The bounty offered for s’Ilessid blood won’t have changed for the past five centuries.’

  Silent and whitely bitter, Lord Diegan spurred his horse to try against weather and odds to assemble a defensive deployment from mercenary captains now scattered throughout the caravan.

  But Lysaer’s fist on the bridle rein jerked the Lord Commander’s move short. ‘No, Diegan. Stay. Have your officers hold their position. You’ll start a pitched battle if our troops draw their weapons and I don’t want anybody killed. Not when I’d hoped to be asked to pay respect to his Lordship, the Mayor of Isaer.’

  Then the moment for organized defence was lost as the headhunter lancers thundered down and swarmed like bad-tempered hornets around the liveried horsemen and banners that surrounded Prince Lysaer.

  ‘We’ve come for the upstart who styles himself heir to s’Ilessid!’ The captain who shouted was bald, had a torn ear, and wore chainmail and bracers set with wrist spikes. The huge grey gelding who bore him was ugly, but unscarred, and taken by a sudden, poisonous aversion to standing still. The beast backed and sidled in half circles, gouging up spatters of soaked turf. Its rider sawed reins and cursed, while the younger of Lysaer’s liveried page boys approached and bowed, then announced in his clear child’s treble that his Grace the prince was pleased to accept invitation to call on the Lord Mayor of Isaer.

  ‘Invitation!’ The captain hammered his mount’s neck with a fist, then hauled its nose around to his stirrup to forestall a bucketing rear. ‘What gall! There’s been no invitation!’ His ire found no other outlet; underneath him, his warhorse went berserk.

  Ears flattened to streaming neck, it bit the air, crow-hopped and danced sideways on bunched hindquarters. The headhunter captain stayed astride by dint of determined fury, while the neat ranks of his riders were bashed out of formation by the unravelling temper of his mount. Lances dipped, wavered and cracked into a cursing tangle of men and disgruntled horseflesh.

  Too cynical for surprise, Lord Diegan glanced aside to find Lysaer watching the affray, his unruffled, wide-eyed dignity at odds with innocent intentions. The older page half-hidden by his horse cloths was deviously engaged with a handful of smooth pebbles and what looked like a rawhide bird sling.

  A lifetime of Etarran politics lent Diegan the presence to mask astonishment. He was prepared and listening for the low-voiced string of orders from his prince. ‘The headhunter captain’s horse is shortly going to bolt. Before it does, I’ll need an honour guard assembled, a delegation from our guild representatives and city officers, and the wagon bearing Lady Talith and her servants. This will be a state visit to Isaer, I shall make it so. But warn the men: on pain of punishment, and despite the most grievous provocation, they must hold their tongues and their tempers.’

  No fool, Lord Diegan did as he was bidden; and so he missed the moment when the headhunter’s huge grey at last tore free of restraint and exploded kicking and snorting into a tail-streaming run. Somebody dispatched an equerry at speed to chase after the luckless captain. Before the sergeant left as second in command could restore the wrecked order of the troop, Lysaer rode forward to meet him.

  ‘Never mind the formalities,’ the prince opened, magnanimously forgiving, and sure enough in stature to shake the confidence of a struck bronze monument. He followed with a phrase that caused several lancers to break into laughter. While the sergeant was torn between outrage, uncertainty, and an explosive attack of pure mirth, Lysaer managed with light-hearted, lordly arrogance to make several sensible suggestions.

  The headhunter lancers sorted themselves back into order, to find themselves seamlessly joined by the prince’s personal honour guard, a wagon bearing a woman beautiful enough to leave a man staring
and silly, and a dozen trade dignitaries who were fed up with rain, and expressing thanks for the Mayor of Isaer’s timely consideration.

  At the sergeant’s stirrup rode Lysaer, at patent length and diffidence inquiring what sort of silk would compliment his Lord Mayor’s colouring; the other gifts, he added hastily, were less personal. Unless the mayor’s lady wife had the misfortune to disdain Falgaire crystal?

  Thoughtful, bemused, not entirely without sympathy for the sergeant who stammered answers to the royal inquiries under Talith’s distracting regard, Lord Diegan rode silent through the rain. In a humour that was piquantly Etarran, he watched Lysaer’s masterful diplomacy take the city of Isaer by storm.

  There followed six days of formal dinners and protracted hours spent touring guild sheds where last year’s flax harvest lay hackled for bleaching. Lord Diegan followed the talk as he once had ravished the courtesans he seduced from the beds of wealthy patrons.

  Yet even under close scrutiny, these discussions pursued the same topics as others in cities to the south, once Isaer’s mayor recovered from the flustered irritation of being hazed into guesting the very same prince he had dispatched his headhunters to set shackles on. The city’s guild ministers in circuitous politeness inquired whether Lysaer intended to launch from Avenor the same campaign he had spearheaded at Etarra: raise a garrison to meld forces with the headhunters’ leagues to clear Tysan’s wilds of barbarians. Trade with Camris, they said, suffered unduly from raids in the Thaldein passes.

  Lysaer heard their woes in rapt sympathy. When the banquet was finished and the fine brandies poured, he graciously ventured opinion. ‘The clans of Rathain were stamped out by Etarra because they fell to ill usage by the Shadow Master.’ A frown marred his brows. The glitter of his hair and his jewels hung still in the lamplight as he paused in disturbed reminiscence. ‘Your difficulties in the passes of Orlan must be approached carefully.’ In the face of poisoned fear - that as scion of s’Ilessid he might lay claim to clan loyalty and upset rule in the towns - he said outright, If a way can be found to avoid outright slaughter, I would seek that before war.’