The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Brushed and buffeted, harried by stall keepers who pressed her to buy pins and ribbons and braided loaves of sesame bread, Jinesse longed for sleepy Merior, with its palm-shaded beaches and its huckstering squabbles between the gulls that flocked and dipped above the women who sat salting the fish barrels.

  By the time they had crossed the dockside market and climbed the low, graded streets that led into the affluent upper town, Jinesse looked overset. Arithon sat her down beside the lip of a public spring, shaded by the stooped branches of a damson tree. A girl with a goose switch and three honking charges loaned her a jug for a drink. Inside a grilled mansion window, a caged bird trilled. A fat gander chuckled its bill in the water that ran, metallic with iron, over the jaws of a gryphon’s-head fitting.

  ‘The house isn’t far,’ Arithon said presently. While her head had been spinning, he must have asked for directions.

  Jinesse gave back his glove and looked up as he helped her to rise. She found his face shuttered like quartz. You dread this.’

  His step stayed deliberate on the cobbles. The polished buckles on his boot cuffs reflected trapped bits of sky as the leaf-filtered light flicked across them. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘But I do feel inadequate for the burden my master laid upon me.’ His hand tightened, unthinking, on the cover of his lyranthe, and she realized he had reached his destination.

  The painted little town cottage had once been a milking parlour, though the narrow, high windows were now graced with shutters, and the doubled door fastened with wrought brass. Nestled in a border of carob trees, walls of baked clay kept out the heat, and moss caked the barrel-tiled roof. Poised on the grained marble doorstep, Arithon gripped the knocker and tapped.

  The door snapped open, as if the raw-boned woman inside had been watching the street through a spy hole. She wore straw-coloured hair swept back in combs, and despite a cherry-round nose and full lips, her expression was pinched and unfriendly.

  ‘The sorcerer said we might expect you,’ said Halliron’s daughter in clipped greeting. Her gaze swept the bard and the woman in his company as if she hoped to find something to lend her the excuse to send them packing.

  Only Jinesse knew the man well enough to discern the tension in his shoulders; his voice as he spoke was civil. ‘My name is Arithon s’Ffalenn. As you have surmised, I was your father’s last apprentice.’

  ‘We were told. You’ve taken your time, have you not, to deliver his final bequest?’ The woman jerked the door wide. ‘By all means, come in and get this over with. I can’t imagine the experience will mean very much, though my mother may feel differently. I could ask that you not make her cry. She hasn’t been well, and further suffering will scarcely be a boon to her.’

  Arithon entered the gloom of a pretty, tiled foyer. Potted flowers in enamelled crockery mantled the air in perfumes that failed to cut the underlying astringency of herbal pastes dispensed for sore joints. The woman gave a self-conscious sniff, fingered a crock as she passed in an unconscious check for dust, then led onward, over floors of fired tiles that made civilized replacement for rows of wooden stanchions for cattle. In a quiet parlour, she bade her visitors to wait.

  ‘Let me see whether Mother’s awake.’ She did not look back as she spoke, but bustled in prim hurry through a door sleek with old copal varnish.

  Arithon glanced about, at the tasselled, stuffed hassocks, scattered footstools and cushioned chairs with their painstaking squares of embroidery; at walls tiered with shelves and glass cabinets jammed with alabaster ornaments, figurines twined out of jeweller’s wire, and cloisonné flasks too small to be other than bric-a-brac. He turned once, full circle. Small as he was, the room begrudged even his neat grace. The seats set waiting at every quarter were a bastion, a wall, that had failed to repel boredom and solitude. Pressed on all sides by collected clutter, mute evidence of empty lives crying out to be filled, Arithon bent his head, hands folded on the cord that hung his lyranthe.

  Jinesse bit her lip, half-suffocated. In this house, she recognized a trace of herself, and a fate but narrowly escaped; widowed, embittered, she had nearly done as this mother had, and hemmed in her children between tidy walls and old grief. Talliarthe had delivered her from far worse than fear, but she had no chance to share gratitude.

  The closed door whisked open and Halliron’s daughter beckoned the pair of them on.

  Arithon stepped through into a bedroom alcove deep and musty with shadows. Jinesse entered on his heels, into air that smelled of age and sickness and lye soap. An armoire held a clutter of creams and jars, prinked with hard glints off cut glass. The bed, made up in ivory linen, cradled a narrow-eyed crone, propped board-straight amid a froth of lace-edged pillows.

  ‘We know how he died,’ the former Masterbard’s good-wife opened in quavering, vitriolic rudeness. ‘We heard he lived like a wastrel, travelling between towns in a cart.’

  Arithon managed a smile with his bow. ‘Dame Deartha,’ he said in formal greeting. ‘I am sent at Halliron’s bequest. Have I leave?’

  The hag jerked a clawed wrist. ‘It was the music, he insisted. That’s what took him from us.’ Her mouth tucked into colourless pleats. ‘I much doubt his blankets stayed empty, all those years.’

  Discomfited by the beldame’s evil glance, Jinesse looked in vain for a place to sit down. The bedchamber’s single chair was already occupied by the daughter’s angular bulk, which left only a footstool for Arithon. He took it, uncomplaining. His ringless hands wasted no motion as he unstrung the cord and slipped the lyranthe from her wrappings.

  Jinesse found an unobtrusive corner by the clothes chest. The daughter tapped an impatient foot. The old lady jerked out a handkerchief and honked her nose while, nerveless in patience, the musician corrected the pitch of his strings.

  ‘We have no use for songs, you know,’ the daughter said in jaundiced scorn.

  A last harmonic speared the gloom, cut in mid-flight as Arithon stopped off the string. His regard swept the invalid in the bed, measured the uptilted chin of the daughter. Their insults seemed to prick him like a challenge as he said, ‘Ladies, let us see if you also have no use for pity.’ His study lingered on them through a moment of trying quiet. Then he set fingers to fret and string and tore the locked stillness into melody.

  One measure, two; the passion of his fingering arrested the air, and then remelted it into a cry. Notes winnowed free like leaves ripped on storm winds, blended into cascades that transfixed the heart with regret. The music wrung out under Arithon’s hands begged no forgiveness for an abandonment of home and ties, but appealed for understanding through an offering of a beauty too wild, too forcefully inspired to be held or shackled in promises.

  Arithon sat rapt, head bent to his playing. When he raised his voice in song, he did not see the elderly lady raise crabbed hands to her cheeks to brush off tears. Only Jinesse, herself half-paralysed by his spell, saw the mask of aggressive indifference crack from the face of the daughter. The woman hunched, still and dumb, while the denial and resentment known throughout life unravelled to bare the unanswered pain of a fatherless child’s yearning.

  The unsubtle, searching scald of verses gave back husband and father, not as his family wished him to be, but as he had lived, delineated in imperfections and grand strengths. This was not the eulogy Arithon had delivered for Halliron in Jaelot, but in fierce words and harmony the bard’s own statement, that given a mortal’s years to live and to love, the mastery of his calling had demanded to be shared in lands far removed from his hearthstone.

  By the time the last stanza was sung to its close, and the final chord rang thin and faded, the old lady sat dry-eyed. Her hands rested composed on the counterpane, while the young musician sent as emissary damped his lyranthe and looked up. Arithon waited, suspended in stillness, until she was ready for speech.

  ‘My husband taught you.’ Her desiccated voice had softened from censure. ‘Did he mention that he played that selfsame song on the very day he departed? But he did no
t style it your way.’

  Steady under interrogation, Arithon laced his lean fingers over the lyranthe’s silenced strings. ‘The notes and the lyrics were Halliron’s, as written. But by his straight bequest, the arrangement was to be my own.’ The daughter in her corner all but ceased to breathe. Too suddenly confronted by a Masterbard’s empathy that owned power to bind her into change, the beldame looked away. ‘My husband taught you,’ she murmured. ‘You, not his family, were his legacy.’

  As though pressed to sorrow, Arithon said, ‘I was his choice for the next link in a chain that extends back to Elshian’s time. I chose to reveal what Halliron bequeathed me. In truth, that is all I can answer for.’ His gaze on the crone’s averted face did not waver, though the room had grown close, its tied muslin curtains sealing in the reek of strong remedies.

  In an atmosphere thick enough to suffocate, Arithon gathered himself to finish. ‘You should know. Your goodman was on his way south to be with you both for his retirement. An obligation of mine caused his delay. Blame me, not him, for the untimely manner of his death.’

  ‘The Fellowship sorcerer who returned my husband’s ashes claimed most emphatically otherwise.’ The old lady raised a crippled hand from the tight-laced breast of her bedrobe. ‘He said, prince, that you were not to be faulted. But my heart won’t heal for a sorcerer’s excuses. I ask a boon to discharge your debt. Since my husband died far from home, I would have you remain in this city through the rest of the season to play. It is fitting. Once Halliron earned mastery, he never returned. The people of Innish should be given their chance to share the fruits he has reaped through your talent.’

  ‘Mother, that’s hardly fair,’ the daughter broke in, but Arithon waved her silent.

  Suspended in silence, Jinesse watched the bard, and inwardly begged him to refuse. The tranquil retreat he had chosen at Merior held a purpose, perhaps key to his survival against the threat from the armies in the north. He was Teir’s’Ffalenn, and royal, and answerable to no soul in Shand.

  Never had the Master of Shadow revealed more of himself than at this moment, when he arose in compassion and bowed. In words unflawed by impatience, he answered the lonely, vengeful request of Halliron’s abandoned widow.

  ‘I will play the taverns of Innish, and gladly. But on condition that you and your daughter will agree to be present at every performance.’

  The irony dogged Jinesse, over and over, as a return trip was made to the harbour to engage a reliable merchant galley to carry herself and her twins home to Merior: that had Arithon’s playing been one whit less brilliant, the old crone would surely have refused him.

  Visions and Voyages

  A winter gale threads uneasy draughts through a taproom in Narms, while Captain Mayor Pesquil spills a moneybag over a tabletop and shouts down the balky argument of a merchant captain: ‘You will rig your damned vessel for a northern passage. The message I bear is urgent and I won’t stand idle for half measures. Better to risk delay iced into some benighted cove than be waylaid in the Thaldein passes by Maenalle’s barbarians. I’ll sail to north Camris and arrive in Avenor by springtide, whatever the price for your service …’

  In a dockside bordello, abovestairs from the taproom where a Masterbard plies his lyranthe, the Mad Prophet stirs from replete stupor, wrung sick by the tingle of impending prophecy; while the doxy who shares his bed giggles through his fit, he cries words of warning concerning a discorporate spirit away on a desperate errand that stirs Sethvir at Althain Tower to alarm …

  Sped by the last winter storms, the smuggler’s brig Black Drake ploughs bold passage between the grey whitecaps of Minderl Straits, and beside her lady captain on the quarterdeck, Jieret, Earl of the North, chafes in restlessness, bearing news of grave import for a sovereign prince he has not seen for seven years …

  XI. DISCLOSURE

  The trader brig Captain Mayor Pesquil engaged from Narms by main force made safe port at Miralt Head with her cargo of crystal and iron ore, her fine southern wines and dyed fabric, and her rigging rimed with dirty ice. She would shelter through the season and refit gale-torn sails, then return on the milder airs of spring, laden with furs and seal oil, to rich profits at each destination.

  For the headhunter captain and his hardened troop of scouts, the prospects ahead were less rosy. To cross the Plain of Karmak at midwinter meant a journey of commensurate discomfort. The inland roads had few inns. What farmsteads and village hostels would cater to travellers kept their custom for seasonal caravans. In the cold months, their guest beds were stripped bare behind locked shutters, their mattress ticking haven for mice. Once the roads lay hardened under drifts and white ice, and the trade traffic waned, fare for travellers sold at a premium, fuel and supplies could not be replenished before spring, and since storms off the gulf made each year’s thaws chancy and difficult to predict, proprietors were sparse with provender.

  The mobile, armed company en route from Etarra grew to hate the whine of the winds, and the slash of driven ice that clung in each fold of their cloaks. Helms lined with fleeces sang to the rattle of sleet. Nights were bitter and long, the ones spent unsheltered frosty with stars, while the howls of wolf packs rang through the frozen glens and made the horses drag, snorting, at their picket lines.

  The first thing Captain Mayor Pesquil desired upon his arrival at the crossroads town of Erdane was the bath he had done without since the night of his landfall in Miralt. As an officer of the headhunters’ league, he was entitled to take lodging at half-price; as an ally of Lysaer’s, and an accredited affiliate of Etarra’s armed garrison, the Mayor of Erdane extended due courtesy and offered him a minor guest suite in the palace.

  The scouts were given cots in the barracks, and silver to seek their pleasures in the wall district.

  Sunk in a brass tub of suds and hot water, his bristled face wreathed in white steam, Pesquil laced a sinewy, hard-knuckled hand over the knob of one knee; with the other, he sloughed off the flaked grey skin gnawed by frostbite between his splayed toes. His silt-coloured eyes were shut when the soft tap came at his door. Since he expected a servant with a razor, he raised a voice gruff as a cutler’s rasp and granted permission to enter.

  Instead of a liveried attendant, he received a rustle of damascened silk, a wafted assault of perfumed air, and a stifled explosion of giggles.

  A train of ladies invaded his chamber, not the painted, brazen hussies he frequented after hard campaigns, but ones of impeccable pedigree. These had fine skin and tiny ankles threaded with pearls, and kidskin slippers. Their hair lay piled in pinned loops, or dangled down in pert ringlets, and jewels winked from the ribbons of their gossamer gowns like fruit rind baked in a solstice cake.

  The two with dark hair and cheeks like new apricots were in fact the mayor’s cosseted daughters. But seen alongside the tawny-haired one in the lead, the pair might as well have been servants. Collared in ermine and lace-worked gold, swathed below in pearled silk and gold tissue spangled with a sea-foam glitter of aquamarines, the third lady had a complexion translucent as alabaster and lashes like the nadir of night. Even without the magnificent cut of her clothes, her presence seemed designed by Ath Creator to arrest a man’s breath in his throat.

  Flushed to the dewlap folds of his neck, Pesquil jammed his shanks straight. The wet-leather scrape of his buttocks made the brass tub give tongue like a horn, and soap suds and water slopped over the rim, to ring him, glistening, his naked flesh cupped like an embryo amid a flood of smashed egg.

  Proprietary as a hunting tigress, his visitor’s glance raked over the stringy, scarred muscles of his torso. Her coral-pale lips bent before an amusement whose withering sting left no impact, sheer force of beauty having long since anaesthetized reason. Called on by reflex, Pesquil plunged his hands beneath the scummed water.

  An ugly man possessed of an iron dedication, the head-hunter captain held his ground as a wolf might, nipped at by mastiffs.

  ‘Captain Mayor Pesquil,’ addressed Lady Talith
, the affianced bride of Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid. ‘I much doubt you would travel the breadth of the continent just to sample Erdane’s hospitality. Since barbarian scalps are not in season until spring, I trust you carry news of the Shadow Master?’

  Outside the window, grey clouds sheeted the sky. A sentry called, and a polearm clanged to signal the change of the watch. Beyond the open and violated inside doorway, a woman’s voice raised down the corridor, scolding a child for wet feet.

  Talith skirted the rim of the puddle, selected a bulky brocade chair, and slid it squarely in front of the wardrobe that contained the captain’s fresh clothes. There she settled herself, while the elder of the mayor’s tittering daughters produced a chatelaine’s keyring, spun about and locked the door. Her younger sister moved to the hearth, peered askance with a girlish blush, and snatched up the towels left out to warm.

  ‘I did not ask for bath attendants,’ Pesquil said with a grate like the rough scrape of chain mail.

  Talith laced slender fingers in her lap, her eyes direct and her smile, honey spread over poison. ‘You shall have two, if they can break the latch and escape from the linen closet where we impounded them. I suppose some drudge will eventually hear their noise and set them free. The gossip should be lively, once the mayor’s house steward finds we’re all here, quite cosy with his lowborn guest. Is your silence worth the displeasure of your host?’

  A sinew jumped in Pesquil’s lantern jaw. He had few illusions; his most guarded point of pride was his station, won through achievement and competence rather than the accident of pedigree. Lady Talith was Etarran, no stranger to sordid jokes played for intrigue. The Mayor of Erdane’s flighty daughters were scarcely in her league, though their nervous, darting glances showed them thoroughly intrigued with an escapade.

  Although Pesquil scorned the confined standards of morality the westland cities imposed on their women, the mayor’s hospitality implied a trust he misliked the principle of spurning. Uncomfortably aware of the youngest girl’s fascination with the cock’s comb whorls of hair that seamed the midline of his chest, forced on display before Talith’s dizzying charms, the headhunter willed his hard limbs to relax. A rebellious ache beneath the waterline, another bodily part of him cheerfully rejected self-control.