The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Aye, well, you needn’t stay riled for my sake.’ The little man’s spirits stayed unshaken. ‘Yon fellow made demands of the shipwrights that were fair preposterous. They howled just as loudly. He still got everything he wanted. Are you going to take this, or spit on it?’

  Dhirken snatched up the offering as if it held poison. Back in the street, she fished out the notepaper nestled inside. The strong, concise hand that had first taught her letters requested her to offload two bullion chests at the shipwright’s mansion near the harbourmaster’s office.

  ‘Smoke his Grace out for a louse!’ Dhirken snapped through gritted teeth. ‘Let the Prince of Rathain pay his own debts.’

  But the shipwright had evidently received another letter, for when the captain reached her command, hot and distempered, a tender manned by a liveried lackey lay tied to the Black Drake’s anchor cable.

  The first man she met after off-loading coin chests was Earl Jieret, slouched with his boots braced in bald-faced insolence on her chart desk. ‘Daelion’s two-eyed vigilance, ‘ she swore. ‘Is your liege lord always as conniving in his ways as a thief?’

  Eyes underlit by jittered reflections as he whetted the blade of his longsword, Jieret shrugged.

  Too aware the selfsame steel would be turned against her in challenge should she balk at resuming the brig’s course, Dhirken gave a wicked, joyous laugh. ‘Oh, I’ll sail on to Innish, if only to deliver to Arithon’s royal face my word on his bloody-handed arrogance.’ She breathed deep and added in stringent offence, ‘But damn you, earl or no, if your loutish feet stay parked on my chart locker, we’ll not stir up sweat getting out of this port!’

  Black Drake made Innish by the spring equinox. Anchored out of smuggler’s habit in position for speedy departure, Dhirken needed no invective to see her sails stowed and longboats launched in a stream of seamless industry.

  ‘What did you promise them?’ Jieret asked from his armed stance by the portside companionway.

  Hard by the mainmast pinrail, shredding a leg of roast lamb with neat teeth, Dhirken tipped him a guileless glance. ‘What else but shore leave, to scour the taverns in search of yon mountebank prince?’

  ‘Ath forfend!’ Jieret threw back his bearded chin and laughed. ‘I wish I could go along, just to watch your mate break townborn heads.’

  ‘Just pray that’s all he dunts.’ Dhirken shut ale-dark eyes, mouthed a silent wish, and tossed her stripped bone landward in a sailor’s habit that kept the harbours infested with glossy rats. ‘My mate’s in a fair rotten temper, let me warn you. The tropics give him itches in places he’d rather use to tup doxies.’ Pitched to a sulky froth of tension herself, she licked grease off her fingers and grimaced. ‘Your prince, when we find him, had better show something more than a whim for veering off his course. Southcoast ports are too lax to charge tariffs. As a contraband runner in these waters, we’re wasting and useless as whore’s bells strung on a corpse.’

  ‘Don’t have me speak for my liege,’ Jieret said, too apprehensive himself to show sympathy. ‘It’s a likely guess his Grace won’t welcome the tidings I bear from the north.’

  ‘Don’t think to weep on my shoulder,’ Dhirken retorted. ‘A thousand times, I’ve wished I’d never met the man.’

  Packed with crewmen in ribald, high humour, the Drake’s longboats raked shoreward across waters pooled molten brass under sunset.

  Earl Jieret remained alone at the brig’s rail, too proud to shelter in the stem cabin despite full awareness that by city law, his clipped clanbred accent was enough to arraign him for execution. He leaned on damp wood, his cold-cast patience a mask for wound nerves and anxiety. Once again, he waited, fingering the worn quillon dagger, looted seven years past off the corpse of a headhunter killed for the murder of his family. The touch of whetted steel made him wonder whether Arithon s’Ffalenn still cherished the boy’s knife for whittling given that day for remembrance.

  A breeze frisked ripples on the harbour. Up the river delta, a fitful flash like turned mica, a millwheel revolved in lowered light. A cormorant flew, pursued by squabbling gulls. Jieret breathed in the tang of cinnamon from a spicer’s shed and watched the southern waters fade from rose to ice purple between the peaked rambades of the galleys. The daytime commerce of the dockfront wound down, chanting stevedores replaced by the fluting whistles used to summon lightermen. Dogs barked, and cliff swallows skimmed in the dying glow above shell-coloured towers. Vendors’ carts and ale drays rumbled to the clatter of muleteams while the working crowd dispersed homeward, to reappear, thicker, clad in festival ribbons and bearing a weaving swarm of brands. The massive brass fire pans on their pilings were lit, each one twelve spans apart, and crackling hot sparks across the quay. Lamps burned in the brothel galleries, on the decks of ships at anchor, to skein on black waters a serried, fire-dance of reflections.

  The towers blazed in necklaces of candles, and the cymbals of street singers chimed through the dusk. The feast of spring equinox, at Innish, was a mad, dizzy whirl of gaiety dressed out in lights.

  Aboard the darkened Drake, jumpy as a caged wildcat for the fact he lay surrounded by enemies, Jieret listened to the shrieks of the doxies, and the deeper rasp of male rejoinder; the frenetic laughter from the puppet theatres, and the thumps on the water as boats collided to slurred apologies from handlers too drunken to trifle over chipped paint or marred brightwork. Haunted by distant memories of the spring bonfires from his childhood, Jieret tried not to wonder how the feast might be celebrated, had his clans not been hunted by townsmen, and were his prince not accursed by Desh-thiere.

  An overloaded boat crammed with roisterers rocked under the stem. Screaming laughter, lit by a frenzy of lamps, the rowers banged their oars against the strakes at the load line and demanded feastday alms. ‘Call down a blessing for the night, good master! Toss us a copper. Or we come aboard to bring you joy.’

  Jieret jerked back from the rail, hand gripped to his dagger. He dared not reply, even to send the beggars packing; as a clanborn earl taken captive in a town, he would be publicly maimed before death.

  While the pranksters thrashed oars to manoeuvre their boat alongside, he gripped his knife and weighed hopeless odds, that he could stay alive long enough to deliver the news of Lysaer’s muster to his liege.

  Amidships, something banged in the galley. ‘Muckle plague o’ fiends!’ The heavyset cook came on deck, a kettle slung in meaty hands. He peered in harried temper at the straggle of dandies, who passed a wineskin as their fellows argued and drew lots to determine which man should lead the boarding party.

  Jieret flourished his blade in grim salute, while below, to a tempo of mistimed oars and obscenities, the pair of gallants who picked the short straws swayed upright and clawed to locate the strakes.

  ‘Look how they sparkle, the pansies. Mighty lot o’ jewels on a bunch come whining for largesse.’ The cook turned a soulful glance to Jieret. ‘No need for that hog sticker, man. This is the Drake they’re bothering, and our Dhirken, she don’t like visitors.’ His take on the matter neatly practical, he raised his pot and tipped out a scalding rain of broth.

  A scream, a shout, a fat splash, followed by a tangle of shrill curses; the boat rocked off, the occupants who remained less merry and reeking of chicken stock. The drunk one thrown overboard yelled and thrashed, half-gagged by the weeds of his finery. The cook gazed down at the fracas, intrigued. ‘Should we wager how long he tries to swim before he thinks to jettison that platter of a hat?’

  Wound taut as wire in a half-crouch, Jieret said nothing as the prow of a lighter eclipsed the swimmer.

  ‘Ah, pox! Well change terms,’ the cook coaxed, reasonable in the face of setback as the passing boatman offered the victim a grip on his thwart. ‘Let’s say five silvers on whether yon lighter makes the quay without fouling an anchor chain and capsizing.’

  But again Jieret Red-beard did not answer. Over the receding clamour of scalded revellers, amid the warp through weft racket of voices that
rebounded from the stews at the harbourside, his forest trained senses had picked out one whose singular timbre he recognized.

  Neither was the cook as engrossed in amusement as he seemed. ‘Look smart. Our captain’s back.’

  A longboat sliced across the weave of the lightermen’s lamps, rowed to the reach of timed oars. Her crew reversed stroke and backwatered, and the craft glided into the shadow beneath the Black Drake’s hull. The cook stowed his soup pot and tossed out a line. Seconds later, seamen scrambled up the battens, cursing skinned knuckles and bruises in scarcely suppressed tones of triumph.

  ‘Dear lady, a note sent ashore would have found me,’ retorted a firm voice, but animated now, its inflection reschooled to sound townbred, and vastly more carefree than Jieret’s past memories from his father’s lodge in Strakewood Forest.

  Dhirken cracked into ripe laughter. ‘ ‘Twere fair reckoning, prince, after the Kittiwake. I gave my men full leave to roust you by any means they saw fit.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Arithon s’Ffalenn from a poised step on the side battens. Unaware of any listener above him, he added in laughing exuberance, ‘My Innish patrons didn’t fancy the Black Drake’s crew. I kept my bargain despite them and left not a second before midnight, but more than one tavern in the upper city will never again be the same for it.’ He reached the rail, arranged neat, ringless hands to vault over, and light from the half-shuttered lantern on deck washed black hair, then the spare, foxy angles of a face seven years had changed not at all.

  Jieret pressed through the crowding sail-hands, knelt, and bent his head to the man he had last seen over the grave cairn of his slaughtered parents. ‘My Liege of Rathain.’

  Time stopped.

  Arithon’s fingers locked on grained wood. The breath spun out of him as if impelled by a suffocating weight. The young man on the ship’s deck before him might have been a ghost restored to flesh, for the grief that marked his blanched features. For one numbed second, dread for returned obligations made Arithon recoil in pain.

  Then his unbearable apprehension by itself forced the moment to snap.

  The Shadow Master hurled himself over the rail in a welcome that burst all restraints. ‘Jieret!’ He caught the young man by the wrists and raised him, stunned all over again as the earl last seen as a twelve-year-old boy arose to full height and dwarfed him. Arithon fell back a step, his joy overwhelmed by amazement. ‘By Ath, man! Caolle must be proud. You’ve grown into the very image of your father.’

  Jieret blinked through a suspect brightness, flushed with pleasure and odd shock, that the neatly-made prince before him still fitted the mould of his memory. ‘Your Grace, I’ll come of age before winter. I ask your indulgence, that you accept my formal service now. The news that I carry won’t wait.’ In a doubled-hand grip, he offered the old quillon dagger carried off the bloody field in Strakewood.

  Exposed before Dhirken’s curiosity, jostled by the press of Drake’s crewmen, Arithon turned the blade over in recognition. Fine fingers still sensitized by the lyranthe string recorded the nicks of hard usage. As if the separate, belling vibrations of the blows the steel had staved off, and the life spilled from each opened wound stung his senses, he said, ‘Mine the honour, Earl of the North.’

  In complete disregard that the moment was not private, to the speechless amazement of hard-bitten sail-hands who knew nothing of customs kept by old high kings, blooded royalty knelt before his prospective vassal. With a clarity wiped to acid by his singer’s trained diction, Arithon swore the traditional oath of sovereign prince to liegeman that sealed a pact of guardianship, and ended with the lines, ‘For the gift of feal duty, Earl Jieret s’Valerient, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath. Dharkaron witness. Take back this blade as token of my trust, and with your true steel, my royal blessing.’

  Arithon arose, smiling and steady, unlike the past oath-taking to Jieret’s father, that had taxed him beyond reach of all peace. Unknown to any present watcher, a bloodpact sworn under the full influence of his mage power had already forged a life tie to the grown boy before him, that bound their two fates more strongly still.

  The Master of Shadow commandeered the chartroom for his meeting, and in words that asked only friendship, requested Dhirken to attend.

  ‘What about the fat prophet?’ the captain asked, cool as granite in the cramped companionway, despite her sharp desire to be away. ‘My crew ran across him in a brothel. My mate could be sent to fetch him out.’

  Seated before the stem window, featureless in outline against panes of glass starred by the glide of passing lanterns, Arithon gestured his refusal. ‘Let Dakar bide. I was to leave the port of Innish in the morning, in any case. Dawn is soon enough to roust him out.’

  Dhirken’s steward trimmed the gimballed lamps, then departed without sound and shut the door.

  His ambiguity banished with the shadows, Arithon looked not a whit older than in the hour he last left Strakewood. Haggard, then, beset as any of Deshir’s clan survivors, he contained himself now in tight-reined calm that implied an unbreakable composure. Elegant in a bard’s clothes trimmed in silver and onyx, his shirt of pale silk tailored close to narrow wrists, he folded hands that were callused only on the fingertips from an artistry confined to fret and string. The boy’s knife accepted by the grave cairn in Deshir would have been used to trim lyranthe pegs, if the gift was remembered at all.

  No detail of this masterbard’s mien suggested the unconscionable, merciless strategy once spun out of magecraft and shadow to spare the clans from decimation on the weapons of Etarra’s garrison.

  Daunted by sudden uncertainty, that perhaps he did not know his prince at all, Earl Jieret assumed the seat opposite. By size and dress set apart, he wore his deerhide jerkin unadorned, laced with ties that would not catch stray sunlight, or betray him by chance-made noise. His flecked hazel eyes devoured the royal presence, while the red hair that matched his dead mother’s spilled in wind-caught tangles over shoulders grown broad in new manhood.

  Dhirken slouched against the bulkhead. Discomposed as a cat flicked by raindrops, prepared in her way to be obstructive, she watched in still malice as the earl launched his case to press his prince to reclaim an abandoned sovereignty.

  ‘Lysaer gathers forces to march a war host against you, even as we speak. Despite Caolle’s best effort, word of your doings in Jaelot broke through and reached Etarra’s mayor.’

  ‘No one could stop that,’ Arithon said. His green eyes stayed wide, almost black in the lamplight, and his concentration harrowed as he said, ‘Jieret, what price did you pay for those few months of silence? How many died?’

  He did not refer to fallen clansmen.

  Under that horrified, knife-point regard, Jieret remained as unflinching in the face of necessity as ever his father had before him. ‘My war captain knows. I left before Jaelot’s disaster became public, to seek your Grace and bring word. How many died is no issue, then or now. These armies mean death for my clans, and your liegemen. I would know whether to count on your help to see how many of our own we can save.’ He paused, the large fists clenched beneath the table top half-braced for an explosion that never came.

  Arithon said in stifled quiet, ‘You’ve come a long way for this audience. You have my attention. Go on.’

  Jieret swallowed, then forced a game shrug. ‘By my father’s memory, I should have guessed you wouldn’t welcome this. Lady Maenalle sends warning. The force in training at Avenor is highly skilled and designed for swift expansion with mercenaries. Caolle has figured the muster from Rathain’s allied cities could be thirty-five thousand strong.’

  Pale as if spun out of glass, Arithon threw off his impulse to give way to fury. ‘When the war host closes, Lord Jieret, you have my promise here and now. Your clansmen need stand no ground for my sake. What bloodshed cannot be avoided shall happen far from the soil of Rathain.’

  ‘You would inflict
your grand slaughter on the turf of uninvolved innocents?’ Dhirken interrupted, despite herself drawn in. ‘Merciful Ath, just to feed itself, a force of that size would strip the countryside like a howling plague of locusts!’

  Arithon scarcely glanced aside at her. ‘Can an army march upon the sea? Can a fleet pursue me while blinded with shadow? Lysaer’s backing comes from merchant trade. How long will the guilds pay him to waste their profits trying to chase and trap a fugitive who can elude them at will? If I can possibly arrange things, there shall be no pitched battle at all.’

  ‘You might escape, though not easily,’ the captain admitted. ‘The oceans can’t hide you forever and I won’t charter Black Drake to serve under Rathain’s royal banner.’

  ‘There even I draw the line,’ Arithon countered, whip-crack fast. The vessels at risk shall be mine, built in a temporary shipyard at Merior.’ A flick of amusement twitched his lips. ‘I will need the Drake at the outset, but only to run messages and timber. And I offer an exceptional rate of pay.’

  The grip of Dhirken’s fingers on her forearms warned of argument, if not an outright rejection. Arithon plunged ahead before she could speak and asked Jieret to detail all he knew of Etarra’s build-up in the north.

  Laid out in detached recitation, the facts were unrelenting. Lysaer’s skilled diplomacy had long since knit every city in Rathain into a unified alliance. The upset at Jaelot had renewed cause for fear and spurred old hatreds to a fresh fervour.

  ‘My liege,’ Earl Jieret ended in stripped candour, ‘your loyal clans have been hard pressed. To escape the summer forays by headhunters, chieftains as far south as Halwythwood have been forced to seek refuge deep in Daon Ramon Barrens. For fear of the old nuns and Paravian haunting, companies hesitate to track there. But such sanctuary cannot last.’

  A pause, while Jieret hooked his knuckles and waited. Dhirken used the interval to loosen the knots that tied her bracers, then pick out laced wires and draw them off. The uneasy spatter of lantern light traced long, shiny scars that marred the length of both wrists. As minutes marched by and Arithon s’Ffalenn withheld comment, the silence seemed to glaze the very air. The Drake swung at her anchorage, paired to the waltz of night winds, while the distant, happy roar of the festival crowds dinned in the background like a dream.