The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  ‘The bowmen, certainly, your Grace.’ Caught out, still coated in grime from his march, the man at arms received the prince’s direct touch with embarrassment. ‘Your quartermaster assigns them a barracks as we speak. My captain awaits you with news from the north, and a gift with my Lord Mayor’s compliments.’

  ‘Something that wouldn’t keep, I trust.’ Lysaer let Diegan’s equerry fall in step behind as he strode through the sun-seared stalks of goldenrod, left mangled from the grind of the sledges used to drag the recalcitrant old stones. Beyond the forlorn hill with its discard mound, the site of Avenor’s rebirth spread ochre and sable, the muddy wounds of gashed earth peopled by work crews like ants. The snap of ox goads and the ring of chisels peppered through the shouts of the stonemasons who directed the layout of new footings.

  Lysaer paused to savour the sight. Immaculate in his trimmed doublet, his hair spun by wind to tangled filigree, he seemed a figure stamped out of legend, the blue of his eyes enriched to satisfaction for the vista of his dreams spread before him. Over these ragged beginnings he pictured the high, square towers he would erect in sandy, gold brick; from staked chalk strings, his mind raised curtainwalls and battlements, a fortified and defended city tranquil under banners and slate roofs.

  Progress was already evident. Across acres of ploughed soil, past the riding school and its fixed rows of picket lines, above the meadows fenced aside for growing fodder, and the mowed greens where his troops drilled, he drank in the tang of coal fires. His heart thrilled to the clamour of the smiths’ hammers that forged steel strapping for Avenor’s future gates.

  In this valley bequeathed by his s’Ilessid forbears, he laid down the marrow and the sinew for the army to become his honed weapon to defeat the Master of Shadow.

  Inside the orderly works of his new demesne, the company in Karfael’s colours stood out like a jerked strand through knit. Straggled through their midst was a double file of men, half-naked and pressed by armed riders into the parade yard behind the tent barracks.

  ‘That’s no troop of archers,’ Lysaer said in brisk surprise. The glance he cast toward Karfael’s sergeant was less an inquiry than a royal demand.

  ‘No, your Grace.’ In proud eagerness, the officer qualified. ‘The reserve troop you dispatched to patrol the north road against clansmen met with good fortune in Westwood. A barbarian encampment was surrounded and ambushed, with twenty-eight prisoners taken. Our mayor in Karfael stayed their execution, in your name. He felt the wretched brutes would be better used as labour on Avenor’s new walls.’

  Lysaer launched off in long strides, his informal mien of the moment before banished to grim-faced reserve.

  The guard sergeant had to stretch to stay abreast. ‘Your Grace? What’s amiss?’

  His concern was regally ignored.

  ‘Here.’ The prince clawed off his belt and spun back toward the equerry. Take this.’ In sharp disregard of manners or ceremony, he proceeded to remove his doublet, then bundled it into the attendant’s arms. Stripped down to tinselled silk hose and the wind-snapped lawn of his shirt, he bolted downhill at a run.

  Caught at a flat-footed standstill, the sergeant punished road-weary sinews to give chase. ‘What’s happened?’ His breath snatched short over the rough ground, he pumped to keep pace with the prince.

  ‘Your mayor meant well, certainly,’ Lysaer flung back. ‘But he acted beyond his authority when he thought to send prisoners as a gift.’

  Battered by sticks through a brush brake, coughing dust from a shortcut across a meadow of cut hay, then hampered to slow agony by the additional drag of helm and surcoat and byrnie, the sergeant laboured to right a painful disadvantage in diplomacy. ‘How may I help?’

  ‘Your blade,’ Lysaer gasped. ‘Let me borrow it.’

  The sergeant unsheathed his short sword. The instant the weapon was given over, the prince redoubled his pace.

  Outstripped in a plunge down the earthworks for the moat, the hapless man at arms yielded before punishment and slackened back to a walk.

  The dignified royal who had greeted him showed no qualms about scrambling through ditches. Whether the spring-fed muck at the bottom contained sewage or stagnant water, Lysaer plunged in to the waist to wade across. The sheen of his gold-striped silk doused in filth, he climbed the berm, vaulted the raw, chiselled edges of the wall’s new foundation, and vanished to the cries of masons startled from their labour.

  Practical in his abandonment, Karfael’s rumpled sergeant at arms trudged off to find the road back to the barracks. Over-heated and set out of sorts, he concluded the contrary foibles of old blood princes were better off left to his captain’s more experienced discretion.

  At that moment, the ranking officer in command of the borrowed company sat his horse in a state of astounded inattention. Professional enough to be engrossed by the activities which occupied Avenor’s new recruits, he rubbed his bristled chin with the back of a scaled gauntlet, and gaped at the volleys of arrows that rattled and smacked in even flights to the marks. Few missed. Such accuracy by itself was unnerving.

  Across the practice field, other men rode armed with lances. Their agility in the saddle was breathtaking, despite the chaos that wove through their midst, as another team of foot, ambushed in drill, collapsed a field camp, complete with armoury tents and kitchen, and massed into bristling defence.

  For a captain who had resigned from mercenary service to settle in a garrison command, the sight was one to strike awe, and then envy, and then a profound and weak-kneed relief that such superbly-trained cohorts would never face his troops as enemies across a drawn line of battle.

  ‘Merciful Ath, will you look at that,’ murmured the staffer who waited at his stirrup. ‘They’re using bulwarks of soaked hides to douse fire arrows.’

  Karfael’s captain twisted in his saddle and paused, as someone he did not recognize plunged headlong into his idle ranks of guardsmen. A shout followed, and a roil of sudden turbulence. Then the runner burst through, streaming water and spattered with black mud. The sweat-limp shirt on his heaving shoulders billowed at the waist like a peasant’s smock. Dishevelled from head to foot, the young man charged on, straight into the roped knot of captives.

  He held an unsheathed blade in his fist.

  Caught lounging with dropped stirrups, Karfael’s heavyset captain unhooked the knee draped on his pommel. With townbred, fashionably bland interest, he held his immediate order to intervene. Every veteran knew how it felt to suffer the wiles of forest barbarians. If a steel-bearing maniac was bent on private vengeance, the escorting men at arms would be decidedly inclined to enjoy a bit of fun before they took action in restraint.

  But the intruder turned his blade to whistling use, not to maim prisoners, but to sever the cordage that yoked them.

  The captain’s bull-throated bellow sheared above the nerve-racking beat of the masons’ mallets. He would sooner see barbarians dead in cold blood than suffer even one to go free. ‘Who is that upstart? By Ath, pull him off!’

  Four guards in his troop snapped to and dismounted. As they jostled to enter the muling knot of captives, the perpetrator leapt at them, shouting. ‘By Ath Creator, this is an offence!’ The sword spun, whining. Startled guards and half-naked clansmen shrank back to escape getting slashed. ‘I’ll not have slaves here! No man serves Avenor in shackles!’

  The commotion turned heads on the wall-works. Masons and mule drovers left off their labour, while the mounted lancers at the edge of the practice field coalesced from their war-drills to stare.

  Unmindful of outside observation, deaf to someone’s rising call of inquiry, more guardsmen from Karfael elbowed into the fray to defend their assigned responsibility. Their captain screamed his indignation. ‘What are these worthless wretches to you? Who cares if they perish where they stand? Ropes are too kind for their sort Let the prince who receives them bind shackles on them all, that no soft-hearted dolt is like to cut!’

  The fair rescuer flung back a wild fall
of hair. Hedged in by bared weapons that licked in on all sides through the dusty, dazed bodies of the captives, he rammed his sword in dry earth, then clawed loose his cuff ties, peeled back filthy cloth, and raised his wrists before him. ‘Well, chain me first, then!’ he raged. A shocking, glacial blue against his flushed summer tan, his eyes held a warning to freeze thought. ‘No man born in this realm shall be lashed like an animal before I should suffer the same!’

  ‘Fiends plague my mother, a philanthropist!’ The guard captain rolled his gaze skyward, pleased to deliver the order. He stretched his toes and recovered his stirrups, unmoved through the commotion as his men swooped to spread-eagle the rash idiot amid his coffle of clansmen.

  The deed was accomplished with small resistance. Half the barbarians were wounded; the rest were too dazed and exhausted from the march to try more than token trouble. The tall scout they jabbed to make room for the newcomer was swollen nearly blind from a bruise. In touching and deferent courtesy, that one stepped aside, while a lieutenant volunteered the pole off his mace. The blond dissident found his wrists tied immobile and his elbows threaded through behind his back in less time than he had taken to speak out.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ cried an authoritative voice from the sidelines. ‘Your Grace?’

  Made aware that his position was now hedged in by onlookers, Karfael’s captain knew his job well enough to keep his eyes fixed on his guardsmen. As they straightened to attention after securing the new prisoner, he bellowed without turning around, ‘Where’s Avenor’s vaunted prince? We’ve brought him a gift, and with it, a problem in discipline.’

  Closing pressure from behind began to upset the stance of his destrier. The guard captain fought the animal steady in skilled play at the reins. Since he would make a shameful impression as an envoy if it turned to war training and kicked a bystander, he flung back an irritable shout. ‘If your prince is not present, then send for him!’

  A ripple stirred through the prisoners; the bound, blond insurgent strode to the limit of his noose and tipped up his mud-splashed face. Tugged a half-step as the added strain dragged the ropes, the lanky, one-eyed barbarian inclined his head in jeering satire. ‘If you wish the attendance of Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid, unless my sight lies, you behold him.’

  The captain from Karfael blinked in horrified astonishment at the scruffy personage he had issued crisp orders to abuse. ‘You?’ he said. ‘The Prince of the West?’

  Lysaer gave back a glare that could have raised curds on new milk. ‘Tell your Lord Mayor,’ he said in furious, regal arrogance, ‘he may fight clansmen who rob caravans and kill them in battle. He may take them alive and try them on criminal charges. If they are guilty, he may exercise his lawful right to execute them. But I will suffer no enemy of civilized society to be set in chains as slave labour.’

  The burly captain swung his leg over his high cantle and dismounted. ‘Your Grace, forgive my ignorance.’ Not waiting for his squire to take his horse, he gave mollified apology and drew his dagger. ‘Let me cut you loose, and quickly.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Mantled in self-possession that should have been beyond a man strapped erect in dirty clothing, Lysaer issued correction. ‘Every clansman here shall be restored to liberty first. For your presumption, to mete out Avenor’s justice without my leave, they will stay free, to depart or join my cause as they choose.’

  ‘That’s rank insult!’ The angle of his blade no longer civil, Karfael’s guard captain gave the nearest rope a vicious jerk. ‘These men are my Lord Mayor’s convicts!’

  ‘Not when they stand in Avenor,’ Lysaer said on a yielded step to avert a stumble. His magisterial presence never wavered. ‘Back down. Their fate is in my hands, not yours. Or else claim my sovereignty and my pledge to fight the Shadow Master, and plunge your damned knife through my heart.’

  A madman might make such a statement, except the blue eyes clear fit in summer glare showed only steel-clad resolve.

  The guard captain hesitated, his jaw set and every sinew primed for a thrust he could not in decency complete. Barbarian eyes watched him, mocking through their misery. Then the unfriendly presence that harried his back broke through. His cordon of guardsmen broke their line and gave ground, cowed to unequivocal surrender. Surrounding his men and the unfortunate coffle were the glittering lancers from the practice field. Hard as nails, poised on their hair-trigger leash of fine discipline, they were led by the jewelled and magnificent person of Avenor’s dark-haired Lord Commander.

  ‘You will do his Grace’s bidding,’ Lord Diegan demanded from the back of his tall, bay courser. Beyond the sun-struck dazzle that laced his naked longsword, his brown eyes stayed fixed and inimical on Karfael’s cornered envoy. ‘If you’re minded to argue the matter further, you’ll be offered an audience after the prince has withdrawn for the chance to be properly clothed and refreshed.’

  As a competent but unrefined veteran who had risen to his post through the ranks, the captain dispatched as his Lord Mayor’s emissary much preferred to argue out his differences in the sweat of a spar over weapons. Given the luxury of an attended bath, eased by servants who fussed over his old injuries and clothed him in lace and court velvets, he struggled to throw off embarrassment. When assigned this tour of duty, he had given little thought to the prerogatives of royal hospitality.

  Hot in his layers of borrowed finery, nakedly vulnerable without his arms, he pitched himself to weather his formal meeting with temperamental blooded royalty. His mistake had been accidental; a prince who ran about half-clothed and dirty ought not to cavil at insults from town-raised strangers who, at best, were distrustful of his station.

  If the jewels, the candles, and the splendours of the court were not beyond his scant learning to recount, the captain resolved to salvage the more pleasant memories of his experience to delight his wife and small children.

  But Avenor’s grand hall was as yet a foundation, roofed over with summer haze and stars. Torn between disappointment and jittered nerves, Karfael’s envoy was escorted to the shingled shack used by turns for tactical meetings between the ranking officers, and by Avenor’s shrewd old seneschal to manage the city’s diverse finances. The interior with its rough plank floor was scantily furnished. It held no carpeted dais. The trestle at its centre, draped in white damask and arrayed with glittering crystal, could have been a jewel fallen out of its setting into the hovel of a thief.

  Attended only by the pedigreed elegance of his Lord Commander at Arms, Lysaer pushed back his chair. ‘I owe you my royal apology, Captain.’ His tabard of indigo velvet flashed as he rose, spattered with reflections thrown off gold braid and seed pearls and sapphires. A captured sheen of lamplight played over his tinselled sleeves, and fair hair, now clean, bound under a gold wire fillet. The shoulders that filled out the doublet were not broadened by padding; the face, in planes like masterworked sculpture, needed no crown to heighten its nobly wide brow.

  Thrust unschooled into refinements outside his experience, professionally shamed before the military excellence displayed unabashed on the practice ground, the guard captain squared his jaw.

  Lysaer met his unease with a self-effacing smile. The strictures of my upbringing got the better of my temper, this afternoon. A sorry lapse, since, as you see, I have no hall yet, and no proper state for guesting visitors. Come, be welcome and sit. The wine won’t be rough, or the food.’

  A servant stepped from the shadows and pulled out a padded leather chair. The guard captain sank into the place he was offered, startled to scarlet embarrassment by the squeak of the horsehair upholstery.

  ‘Your Grace, how was I to know you?’ he burst out. ‘The clan captives were not sent to offend. My Lord Mayor wished to be helpful.’

  ‘No harm done.’ Lysaer arranged his wrists on his chair arms, while the servant went on to serve wine from a cut-crystal decanter. ‘But you must understand, far more lies at stake than a matter of idealistic principle. To chain hostile clansmen within a loyal enclave is l
etting the viper into our midst. Such men could become a ready tool for our downfall, should an enemy steal in and cut their chains. As oppressors, our ranks would stand weakened. I’ll sanction no such liability in the heart of my city, to risk the security of my following.’

  His goblet now filled with red claret, Lysaer turned the glass in jewelled fingers. ‘So you see, the offence was not yours, but against my own royal trust, a private integrity I am oath-sworn as sovereign never to bend or to break.’ Arrows of stained light bloodied his rings as he looked across in earnest entreaty. ‘Best to kill cleanly, or else let any who oppose our new order stay at liberty to amend their reiving ways.’

  ‘A worthy thought.’ The guard captain raised his glass and swallowed, ill at ease, but at least lent fair grounds on which to argue. ‘But what of my Lord Mayor’s prisoners? Karfael restored your charter to these lands. His city’s confidence has been breached, since he entrusted men into your hands who have done injury to his merchants. In setting them free, you have spurned him.’

  Swift to resume an ongoing point of contention, Lord Diegan agreed. ‘My liege, there’s been an insult. You can’t just let the issue rest.’

  No glazing graced the crude casements. Summer moths pattered into the pool of the lamplight, to dance in crazed circles and die wing-charred. The damask table-cloth held a Utter of tiny corpses, fluttering and maimed, or fallen limp. As if they were human, and bloody, Lysaer sighed, pained as few ever saw him. ‘I understand the mayor’s cause for outrage. But the sordid outcome of this case should be obvious.’

  When the look on the captain’s shaved features remained blank, the prince gripped his goblet and dashed off a neat swallow, as though to erase the sharp taste of bitterness. The clansmen I released were weary enough to drop where they stood. Most were wounded. Where can they run? They are weaponless. When darkness fell, a discreet troop of headhunters with tracking dogs were set after them. This far removed from their bolt-holes in Westwood, I doubt if a man of them survives.’