The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Shakedown

  On the morn that Pesquil’s company embarked from Etarra under dismal, sleeting skies for their arduous winter journey to Avenor, balmy southern winds flapped the pennons of a newly-launched sloop, moored amid a damascened circle of reflection in the distant, turquoise waters of Merior. The Shadow Master whose misdeeds were named in Mayor Morfett’s sealed dispatches scarcely looked the mage-trained minion of evil. Clad in a plain linen shirt and loose trousers, he carried no weapon beyond a rigging knife. The tanned hands that drove the sweeping stroke of his oars as he rowed the sloop’s tender ashore were innocent of spells or subterfuge.

  Certainly no villager knew him for the author of uncivil deeds as he leapt barefoot into the shallows, beached his dory, and strode through the dunes and shoulder-high oat grass to call at the whitewashed cottage of Mistress Jinesse. Two fishermen who idled on shore leave grinned in lewd interest, for the widow’s battened windows gave clear indication that she wished no truck with any visitor.

  Arithon s’Ffalenn stood braced in the sun-washed sand of her yard, a crooked grin on his lips. Then he drew his rigging knife, pried the blade between the shutters, and slit the loop of cord that hooked the inside fastening pegs. As the loosened panels creaked wide, he laid a hand flat on the sill, saluted the watchers, and neatly vaulted through.

  A dauntless shriek and a fishwife’s imprecations drifted through the cracked boards. A mockingbird settled on the rooftree startled in a flash of barred wings. Then the bolt grated back and the widow’s painted door crashed open, not to eject an impecunious male caller, but to liberate her towheaded twins, who bounded through, yelling their excitement, an overstuffed duffel slung between them. The panel flapped agape in the sea-breeze. Something suspiciously like crockery crashed and broke against an inside wall. Moments later, Arithon emerged, the widow held in tow by her wrists.

  ‘Really!’ She tried to plant her feet, overbalanced, and stumbled into him.

  Not about to waste the opportunity, Arithon grinned and snaked an arm around her waist. She pounded his shoulder with the fist just freed, and fingers pulled untimely from the mixing of bread dough shed small puffs of blown flour.

  Jinesse shrieked, ‘It’s the woman who brews simples you should be dragging to your lair, not I, and certainly not my two children!’

  ‘I do have nicer manners than to haul you unwilling to the shell flats,’ Arithon admonished. His smile only widened, and she realized: they were bound due east for the beach. She turned her red face, and through disarranged hair, saw the little sloop perched like a gull on jewelled waters.

  Her cheeks drained to ghastly white. ‘Fiends and devils take your interfering spirit. I don’t like boats. Let me be.’

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ Arithon demurred, his smooth voice jarred by her struggles, I’ve decided the first lady to board Talliarthe should be one afraid of the sea.’

  Jinesse howled. ‘You named your blighted vessel Talliarthe!’ Her terror now spurred by indignation, she emphasized with a chop that glanced scatheless off the hard-knit muscles of his chest. ‘How fitting!’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Arithon, agreeably pleased; his sloop’s namesake was the legendary sea sprite reputed to spirit off maidens who wandered inside the tidemark. ‘Don’t be angry. Your girl Feylind made the suggestion.’ Staggered as a woman two fingers taller than his height thrashed and battered at his composure, he tucked his chin, changed grip, and hoisted.

  Jinesse gave a pealing yell that all but deafened his right ear, then found herself tossed belly-down over his shoulder. A flock of feeding rails scattered and took wing like thrown birch chips. The twins ignored her cries and launched the dory, while Arithon made a gallant’s apology and waded undaunted through the surf.

  ‘You know I don’t swim!’ The widow’s plea cut off on a racked jolt of breath as he ducked. The horizon spun through a sickening circle. Through the dishevelled locks ripped loose from lost pins, Jinesse saw herself deposited with the duffel on the stem seat. Panic overwhelmed her. She grabbed an oar and slashed to beat off her kidnapper, now waist-deep in green water with both hands clamped on the thwart to hold the dory against an onrushing comber.

  Arithon dodged the whistling attack. The oar blade smacked short in necklaced foam. Gouged spray sheeted skyward and left him drenched and still laughing. ‘Don’t say,’ he gasped, breathless, ‘if you could swim, you’d jump ship. It’s Ath’s own blessing you don’t.’

  Jinesse spat out the taste of brine. She mopped a plastered swathe of hair from her neck, her glare fully spoiled by the trickling sting of saltwater. Then his firm push shot the dory ahead through the froth, and fright ripped a scream from her throat.

  Arithon breasted the crest. Sleeked in wet clothes and lean as an otter, he vaulted the gunwale. Diamond streams of runoff spattered from his hair, no impediment as he twisted his purloined loom out of the widow’s locked grasp. While shrieks that would credit a wild harpy shredded the mid-morning quiet, he proceeded with his abduction. Watching from shore, Merior’s idle villagers absorbed every nuance and chuckled themselves into stitches.

  ‘Well, it’s fitting!’ declared the boarding house landlady, drawn to her porch with her broom still in hand to oversee the outcome of the fracas. ‘That Jinesse has been too straitlaced for health since the sea took her husband. Yon’s a comely enough young man, for an outsider. His company just might lend a bloom to her cheeks. Mayhap then she’ll stop fussing. To hear her carry on, you’d swear those poor twins were like to drown in Garth’s pond!’

  A kindly neighbour volunteered to douse the widow’s fire and close up her vacated cottage. Over their laundry and their baking, Merior’s gossips warmed to loquacious speculation. Lulled under mild southern sunlight, they remained unaware that larger threads of happenstance tied their favoured visitor to an imminent muster of armies.

  The prophet whose gift of sight might have warned them held himself oblivious by acrimonious design.

  Having twice stifled the onset of his talent for prescience, Dakar sprawled in a drunken stupor in the berth he had inhabited since the hour of the little sloop’s launching. He moaned green-faced in his blankets, while the waters broke into chop and shoaled with the tide off Scimlade Tip, and the neat, painted dory bobbed to her destination. The vituperative outrage of the widow mingled with gulls’ calls and the delighted shouts of children. Talliarthe’s insolent, black-haired master boarded his passengers and cleated his tender to a tow-line. Then he slipped the pretty sloop’s mooring and spread smart, tanbark sails to the wind.

  Five days of fair-weather winds coaxed Jinesse from the grip of pale nerves. The sloop sailed through her shakedown like a pert, saucy lady, the slack as the breeze stretched new stays drawn in daily, and the promise of her design proven through in a smooth dance of passage. Jinesse emerged from clenched fear to final, exhausted recognition that her dread of blue waters gnawed her hollow and sick to no purpose. The twins thrived on clean sun and hours spent fishing from the stem rail. Arithon’s company proved polite but evasive. His assiduous good manners at last reassured her that his plans matched his stated intent: to wean away her visceral distrust of the sea.

  At dusk, with the black, notched forests of the southcoast a lacework border to a cobalt sky strung with stars, the little sloop’s decks offered peace. While the moon spilled a path of molten light on dark waters, Talliarthe sailed lightly west. Soothed by the whisper of the wake against the crocheted caps on the wave crests, the widow perched on the cabintop with her knees tucked up in clasped arms. The strung tension she had suffered since her husband’s loss had eased with the days. She could breathe the sea air, content, while the breeze off the sail combed her loose hair and spun the ends into tangles.

  A lithe shadow against the frame of the cockpit, the Prince of Rathain stood in his loose linen shirt and plain jerkin, the tiller braced in hands that other nights, in quiet anchorage, had woven wizardry magic on his lyranthe. The twins slept below, entangled like kittens in
a berth; Dakar lay wedged in the forepeak, his bilious temper stilled by the ale provisioned in casks at Shaddorn.

  Enspelled by the moment’s tranquillity, enervated by the unaccustomed freedom of having no household and no cares, Jinesse gave timid rein to curiosity. ‘Why did you come to Merior?’

  Arithon’s face turned, his steep, angled features inscrutable against stars and sky. His answer came back unhurried, in the form of a chorus from a sailor’s chantey. ’ “Where sands lie like sugar, heave, me bully boys, ho! Where flowers bloom red, and the lily fair maids, boys, the maidens never say no.”’

  When his light lines met with prying silence, he did not again shy from the subject. ‘Why ask?’

  ‘Somebody must.’ A film of moisture cemented her palms to her shins. ‘Nobody harmless has scars such as yours, and you made a free gift of your blazon.’

  The sloop rocked over a swell, cupped a gust in taut gear, and thrummed into a complacent heel. Arithon braced a foot against the leeside locker and nursed his weight against the helm as water chuckled past the rudder. ‘No secret there. Dakar will spill anything, drunk.’

  Jinesse matched his evasion with flat truth. ‘He hasn’t, you know. He’s wary of you as the man who burned his tongue once too often at the feast.’

  Arithon flashed her a smile. ‘Well he should be. Did you dare ask him why?’

  Warned by a note like the slick draw of steel from its scabbard, Jinesse raised thin fingers to hook wind-ruffled hair from her lashes. ‘The cobbler’s wife tried. She said afterwards she’d take the simpler challenge and pry open an oyster barehanded.’

  Arithon gave a musical, soft laugh. ‘You know who I am. You’ll have heard the dire rumours. Since you never exposed me, I prefer the belief that my conduct has lent foothold for trust.’ A headsail whispered into a luff. He stretched, flicked a line off a cleat, and with the strength that was his most understated attribute, hardened a line with deft precision. The sloop quickened and sheared ahead to a clipped lisp of foam. Disturbed phosphorescence scattered like dropped sparks in the ploughed black waters of her wake.

  Jinesse bit her lip, uncertain. If the prince who had knitted a torn thread in her destiny seemed content to leave matters there, she owned no such depths of self-assurance. ‘If your purpose in bringing me is served,’ she pressed, ‘then why not put about and sail back?’

  That annoyed him; the line of his shoulders stiffened under the rippling play of his shirt. ‘It is night. There is quiet. Why pick at intangibles like a harridan?’

  Hers, now, the power of reticence. Her children were belowdecks, all their safety given into his hands. If he was not a criminal, she wished him to explain why the talk of the traders should malign him.

  An impatient moment later, Arithon answered, inflectionless and curt. ‘I have not deceived. I have business to attend in Southshire, and a personal pledge to meet at Innish.’

  A puff of wind dashed the sloop forward. The challenge Jinesse barely dared to utter fell eclipsed in the leap of white spray from the bow. ‘Why not return me to Merior first?’

  He heard anyway; over the work of the tiller, she met his blunt exasperation. ‘Because I am not free, lady. Time is the hunting pack set at my heels, and the future, the thorn in my conscience. Your dread of seafaring is assuaged. Your children are able to develop their given gifts as they mature. At Southshire, you need not go ashore.’

  ‘And at Innish?’

  A queer catch of grief half-strangled itself in his throat. He said in forced lightness that had everything to do with shedding defences he had no wish to lower, ‘Did you never think that I might need comfort or reassurance in return? What awaits me at Innish is a bereaved wife, and a grown daughter who never knew her father. Their loss is not beyond pity to encompass. But as a man raised in the absence of close family, I find myself disadvantaged. The ways of women’s hearts are written in no chart. I go as a dead friend’s emissary into a hostile home. Forgive my presumption, for asking the kindness of a stranger for my guide.’

  Shamed, Jinesse averted her face. But the damage was done, his veneer of contentment peeled away. Her questions had distressed his faith in her trust beyond her small powers to mend.

  ‘You wish a swift end to this passage, lady?’ Arithon prodded.

  With scarcely a pause, he bent, caught a line and lashed his tiller. Needled to sharp, restless energy, he leapt onto the foredeck to end a conversation she had no more heart to pursue. The topsail and flying jib were broken out and trimmed in merciless hard curves to slice the wind. Talliarthe responded. The heel of her deck became animated, then violent, in concert with her master’s mood. Arithon returned, soaking wet, to shoulder the pull of her tiller. He forced her painted bow three points nearer to the wind; and halyards and rigging thrummed to the plaintive keen of forced speed.

  To remain above deck was to become showered with spindrift raked up like blown ice off the bow.

  Stung by cruel salt and whipped by a dank lash of hair, Jinesse retired to her berth. A last glimpse through the hatchway before she fell asleep showed Arithon’s profile notched in silhouette against a frost-point backdrop of white spray. Withdrawn and determined, he pitched his sloop before the brute winds as though the triumph of his handiwork against the elements could vindicate her rejection of his integrity.

  Even had Jinesse been inclined to resume her appraisal of his conscience and character, Arithon s’Ffalenn gave her no chance. He drove his little sloop in a wreath of white wake to Southshire, made landfall in the dead of night, and rowed himself ashore before his passengers wakened at dawn.

  Left no tender at an anchorage outside the moorings used by the traders’ galleys, too distant to hail a shore-side lighterman, Dakar paced the decks and fumed. Like Jinesse, unless he wished to swim the broad mouth of the channel, he could do naught else but wait.

  Arithon returned before nightfall in a dory laden with fresh provisions. The sacks of flour and the casks could not account for the telltale scent of tarred rope and sawdust, or the madcap glint in his eyes. If he refused to confide in the joy of his success, neither did he keep overt secrets. The papers he cached in the sloop’s tiny chart-locker were contracts, ribboned with the seals of the shipwrights’ guild. His commerce had been with craftsmen and ropemakers; a blind half-wit could deduce his intent to found a shipyard. What use he would make of that asset, Jinesse balked to contemplate. She shared, where she could, the blooming, self-sufficient contentment of her children and left Dakar to muddle his wits with beer.

  As plainly as she might, she let the Prince of Rathain keep his peace with the secrets of his past. Her tolerance did little to win back his easy company; no ploy she tried stayed his drive to pitch himself and his sloop to the bleak, wilful limit of performance.

  Talliarthe made landfall at Innish a fortnight past the winter solstice.

  To her dying day, Jinesse would recall her first sight of the city; the spindled, coral towers meshed into sky, a gilt-edged silhouette that turned slowly rose against a fringe of dawn clouds. While Feylind and Fiark curled at her sides, she marvelled at the long, lean lighters that ferried the ships’ crews ashore, black shapes like cut paper, with talisman scrolls or carved heads of beasts snarling at bow and stem. The cries of fish sellers drifted over lavender water, then the riffling stir of wind, with its mud-soaked scent of green river delta skeined with incense from the balcony braziers lit in brothels and rich ladies’ boudoirs. Jinesse watched the light brighten the lace-roofed, pennoned towers; the scalloped merlons of the curtainwalls where Shand’s old-blond royalty had walked; the pastel drumtowers with their odd, paned windows where the high king’s council once held its yearly court, and in her cars rang sweet showers of harmonics as the living prince of quite another kingdom tuned a new set of strings on his lyranthe.

  Innish was famed as the jewel of Shand. As though spell-wrought, the moment held nothing mundane: no blackening smoke from a chimney fire, no wind-home taint of rot from the tanneries. Even the
catcalls the sailors flung at the whores who plied the dockside sounded lyric, slurred as they were in the broad-vowelled southcoast dialect.

  Then Arithon damped his last, ringing chord and arose, a groomed stranger in a black doublet corded with silver. He wore hose and boots with embroidery and buckles, and a silk shirt with points tipped with pearls, Jinesse slipped her grip on the twins, kissed them both, and, unasked, remained in position at the sloop’s rail.

  ‘If you desire my presence, I’m ready,’ she said.

  That won his most fleeting smile, ‘Dakar has been bludgeoned into sobriety. If he falls overboard, do you trust your twins to fish him out of the harbour?’

  Arithon waited until her nerves softened, then lashed the fleeces to protect the lyranthe, slipped thin, grey gloves over his fingers, and handed her down into the bobbing dory. He climbed in himself and settled to his rowing with wordless, defined concentration.

  Seen up close, the wharfside of Innish wore her decor like a tawdry, overdressed granddame fallen from wealth on hard times. The pilings were shagged green with weed, like harbour landings anywhere else. The air reeked of grease, decayed fish, and blood sausage, and the pretty pastel arches that reared above the crowd wore a pox of grey mildew and mould. The whores by city edict were required to wear bells. Their jingle chimed in sour descant over the oaths of the longshoremen bent under loads of boxes and bales. The gutters lay pooled with sewage dammed from egress down the culverts by thrown offal from the vendors, who cleaned hares for roasting over ramshackle portable braziers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Arithon said as Jinesse shrank from the stench. He peeled off a glove. ‘Here, cover your nose. The streets will be cleaner past the waterfront.’ He left the dory in the paid care of a street-child, took her arm, and drew her into turmoil like a carnival.