The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Under the gliding sail of hawks, Pesquil regarded the saw-toothed rimwalls, holed by black caves and peppered with crannies for ambush. ‘Calves to the slaughter,’ he murmured to his prince. ‘You want to be quit of your dandybred captains? Let them all pass this gap decked out in their pretty blazoned surcoats.’ His bearded lips split into a cough, contempt choked just short of laughter.

  Lysaer looked aside, his eyes flat enamel while his horse pawed the gravel underneath him. ‘They will not dress plainly. My advice was ignored. Our troops from Avenor, and Harradene’s veterans, and your headhunters had best jump to compensate. My charge to all divisions who are wise to clan ways is to shoulder responsibility for this war host and get them through Valleygap safely.’

  ‘As well hand young Red-beard your royal life on a salver,’ Pesquil said, and spat, while cold gusts tapped the lacing against the scratched steel of his bracers.

  ‘My life rests in your hands, first, Captain Mayor.’ Lysaer s’Ilessid straightened before his officer’s surly mockery. Whetted to an icy, royal tone of command, he added, ‘If Jieret Red-beard would lay traps to ruin good men, your designated task is to forestall him. For I shall ride with our weakest link, the garrison companies out of Narms.’

  Pesquil uttered a volley of bitten oaths. While rude words slapped back in echoes off the forbidding ramparts of the rock, he glowered down the swale, mindful that his prince was no fool. All the same, the task ahead made his nerves crawl. A made haven for barbarians, perfect eyrie for spring-traps and stone falls, the scarps that notched the way promised dire trouble and murder, Irked to his bones, Pesquil reined round his scarred gelding and spurred off to issue harsh orders.

  Grouped into tight, defensive phalanxes, the war host paused in its tracks. Neither man nor beast would enter the defile until Valleygap’s heights were made safe. For that, Captain Mayor Pesquil dispatched his best trackers and scouts to scour the rimrocks on either side. The paired groups of two hundred advanced up the slope in fanned formation, three to lead each foray team, then a back-up band of six to a dozen trailing, to move in support if enemies were flushed, or point men ran into snares.

  The footing across the Skyshiel ridges was a fiendish mix of slate and black shale that splintered under boot soles and shot spinning, chinking fragments downslope. These sliced through the greenery and caused furtive rustles. Men would spin, hands gripped to their weapons, while the rattle of every descending ricochet slapped taut nerves to razor response. Stealth of any sort was impossible. The scout who eased his vigilance on presumption such disturbances were harmless would be the one downed first by covert archers.

  The sun blazed down like a scourge, bit glare off the rock faces and dazzled from every sluiced spring and puddle. Assaulted at each turn by the surfeit of light, the eyes struggled and ached to compensate; to unriddle the deep shadows blanketing the defiles and fir groves. Anything motionless could hide there, unseen. The summit ridges were exposed to the rake of the wind, scoured clean by the snow and weather, then chiselled to split edges by frost. To stand upright was to offer a target outlined in sky; to crawl or worm forward became torturous misery, over shale points that shredded the hands and the knees bloody, or through the low furze that stabbed prickles through mail and clothing.

  The terrain was of a stamp to make a man’s spine crawl in constant, uneasy shivers. Against a savage beauty that presented an unrelenting danger, the veteran teams searched through the caves and the crannies to smoke out any clansmen poised for ambush, or to disarm death traps set above the road. They advanced with their teeth clamped in silent prayer and fretted their nerves into knots.

  Barbarians would be ensconced and waiting to kill, not a scout among them ever questioned. The unnatural creatures were fiends at covert murder and Valleygap’s vicious, untrustworthy gullies presented opportunities too perfect to pass up.

  Hours passed. Sweating out wary impatience on the road at the horns of the gap, Pesquil received his reports. Nothing, and nothing; the rocks stayed empty of sign. He paced. He loosened his gelding’s girth, then tightened his bracers and swore. Perched on the tarps of a wagon nearby, a long-faced captain from Anglefen twisted his mustachio and questioned the Captain Mayor’s agitation.

  The headhunter commander spun on his heel, his face a contorted, black scowl. ‘Ath! Those rocks are rotten with bolt-holes. Clansmen lurk up there bent purely on massacre. I’ll stake my life on the certainty.’

  ‘Obsession, more like,’ groused a drover, but softly; the Captain Mayor’s temper was respected.

  Another hour passed, uneventful. Troops made to wait in formation under the blasting noon heat became irritable, then restless. Their sergeants sent increasing requests down the line, urging the decision to resume march.

  ‘Nobody moves!’ Pesquil cracked to Lord Diegan. ‘Are they deaf? When the road’s safe, I told them. Only then. Let them fret and rejoice to stay breathing!’ To the paired scouts who hovered at his elbow for fresh orders, he said, ‘You, take the north ridge; you, the south. Go topside and slow the teams down. I don’t want anybody getting slack and complacent.’

  A derisive hoot erupted from the garrison columns. Another voice carped on the Captain Mayor’s dwindling courage, to stall and delay, when Valleygap’s crags were so obviously untenanted.

  Pesquil stood his ground and ignored all the remarks, his black eyes stark as bog water and the sinews in his jaw cable-tight.

  Minutes later, the prince drew rein at his shoulder.

  From astride, dewed with sweat beneath the shadow of his visor, Lysaer regarded the headhunter captain’s corked back, fiery unease. ‘You’re worried,’ he said in careful inquiry.

  Pesquil snapped off a nod. ‘I don’t like this. Not one bit. I’d sleep better under rockfalls and log traps. My trackers say they have yet to find so much as a wretched bent fern.’

  ‘What do your hunches suggest?’ Lysaer tipped off his helm and shut his eyes as a breath of fir-scented wind ruffled the stuck ends of his hair.

  ‘My hunches? They’re screaming.’ Pesquil scanned the slow circle of a carrion bird above the cliffs, then cracked the knuckles of his sword hand in deliberate succession. ‘We’re not the cats in this game, your royal Grace. Count on my instinct, we’re the mice.’

  Lent no sign upon which to hang reason, after the next hour, he relented. His trackers could descend from the summits in stages, to quarter the slopes to the valley floor. Hard on the heels of his directive came report of twenty-six fatalities from the north face.

  ‘Missteps and falls,’ said the scout, breathing in jerks from his run. ‘The men standing said nothing looked amiss. The casualties just stepped on solid rock that gave under them.’

  Pesquil threw the reins of his gelding to the staff sergeant at his elbow. ‘Go back up,’ he told the scout. ‘And get another man to run relay to the south ridge. All teams are to stop where they are. These were no accidents, nor just bad luck. Let no one advance any farther until I’ve unearthed the reason.’ To Prince Lysaer, he added, ‘Tell your garrisons to make camp. We won’t be moving before sunset, that’s certainty. Warn the captains. Their divisions must be kept on a very tight leash. It could take days to clear this pass.’

  Squat, and staid in his stride as quarried rock, Lord Commander Harradene of Etarra arrived in a sour chink of mail. Eyes of china-doll blue seemed at odds with his grizzled black eyebrows, pulled now into the scowl that his recruits nicknamed ‘the bear’s lair’. ‘Pesquil, your runner from the south face is down with a broken leg. Seventeen falls off the slope, from his side. He wished you to hear his report before the bonesetters numb his wits with a posset.’

  ‘Tell him the matter’s already in hand.’ Pesquil rolled his shoulders, bent, and let the heavy mail shirt he preferred for mounted use slither off by its own weight. He heaved the limp mass over his saddlebow, unlashed a light brigandine from the roll behind the cantle, then dragged that over the rust-streaked leather of his gambeson. The sergeant led his ge
lding off unasked.

  Corded like a grizzled old predator, Pesquil checked his weapons before Commander Harradene’s florid presence. ‘Hold the garrisons to order with an iron fist,’ he said in crisp haste. ‘No man leaves camp. Not even to forage for firewood. Believe this, I dread what I’ll find up there. The traps to welcome our army through this defile have been long months in the planning.’

  Shadows painted the deep vale of Valleygap in virid, umber and purple. The cart ruts snaked between the louring slabs of slate, cut against a sky like lucent silk. Here and there setting sunlight licked a pinnacle to a lingering flame of red gold. On his knees in a thicket beneath the dank jut of an overhang, Pesquil jammed his knife into its sheath and crouched back on his heels. Always when his blood ran hottest, the curses stuck cold on his tongue.

  The Ath-forsaken rock’s been trapped,’ he said. ‘I expected as much, but here’s proof.’ He sifted his fingers through a litter of stone crushed into the moss by his knee. ‘Litter left by a chisel. Steiven was bad, but Dharkaron avenge, Red-beard his son is a demon.’

  A moan cut the gloom from a man sprawled downslope, pinned in place by the agony of broken bones. Whether his hurts included fatal bleeding, no one dared reach him to check. The hale scouts poised at their Captain Mayor’s shoulder were too bitterly experienced to give way to the concern that tore at their hearts.

  Pesquil stood up, his iron-grey hair at one with the gloaming in the fir thickets. ‘Pass my orders. Have teams make their way down to the wounded, but on ropes where the rock is laid bare. Check your footing. This ravine’s a natural death trap, a rock slide just screaming to happen. Let’s not be the fools to set one off.’

  The scouts organized to depart.

  ‘One more thing,’ Pesquil called after them. ‘Any man not rescued by nightfall stays where he lies. All territory we’ve covered that’s clean stays guarded. I want no barbarian foray skulking in to foul our backtrail in the dark.’

  Hand signals answered; his men were efficient, those few inclined to argue long since broken to sharp discipline. The scouts who served in the headhunters’ league knew very well: the ones who followed orders, stayed alive.

  Yet even for scouts grown crafty through experience, Valleygap offered no respite. The spring-traps set waiting in the path of the teams who laboured to help the wounded were not set to kill, but to cripple.

  ‘The scrub is full riddled,’ a shaking veteran reported, arrived with the Utters into the safety of the camp. Behind him, borne gasping in a stupor of pain, came the fallen, the arms which had attempted to help their fallen comrades staked through with sharpened slivers of wood; or their legs, gashed white to the bone, if the bones themselves were not snapped.

  Under full night, the moon scored the ridges like polish on ivory above the black swale of Valleygap. Hunched in a hellish flare of torch light, Pesquil counted the best of his scouts among this first round of casualties. Gripped by brittle patience, he regarded each one’s suffering, then cracked orders that made men leap to fetch garrison healers to attend them. ‘Let every town-coddled lancer see the cost of fighting Red-beard’s barbarians. Then let them hear ‘til they shake in their boots, for when they face the Master of Shadow on the field, they will suffer a thousand times worse!’

  Anger brewed like live current around the campfires. Wood was too scarce for the cooks to bake bread; the brick ovens stayed dismantled, while men choked down dry chunks of biscuit and chewed leathery slabs of sour cheese. Over talk and the measured tread of sentries, above the soft snorts of horses who pawed in complaint for scant fodder and the low of disgruntled oxen, they heard the brisk concern of their officers. Then dulling as nightmare came the shattering screams as a deep gash was cauterized, or a bone set straight for the splint. The cliff scarps shredded every cry into echoes. Clean wood smoke laced through the sickening stink of charred flesh. The men mustered to bring war to the southern spit at Merior lay that night in their blankets, unsleeping and stifled by raw dread.

  Caithdein of Shand

  Two days prior to autumn equinox, the workers in the shipyard at Merior cut seasoned lengths of pitch pine to start the new brigantine’s decking. Arithon was not on hand to mark the occasion, nor would he be present as the keel was laid down to begin the construction of the second. Withdrawn from the company of his workers, he ferried the comatose person of Dakar aboard his painted little sloop. He had not returned to the Koriani herbalist’s cottage even for the hour when the last splints were removed from the boy’s wrist to show bone and muscle healed straight and smooth beneath a spider-laced mesh of pink scars. The same morning, remarked by the fishwives, Talliarthe slipped her mooring and set sail.

  The course she steered through fair-weather swells was due northwest off the reefs; the passage she accomplished was brief. She made port in the harbour at Telzen to place orders at the mills for new lumber and to pick up a packet of dispatches. Bent to dark brooding by ill news from the north, and a recount of unmentionable tragedy, Arithon pressed on upcoast and dropped anchor in a forested cove twenty leagues distant from Elssine. Alone in the blaze of a cloudless, calm morning, he rowed his dory to the beach.

  At a time and place most carefully appointed, he grounded the boat in an exploding flock of terns and dragged her up beyond the tidemark. Wrapped in air that smelled of scrub pine and sea wrack, surrounded by the plaintive calls of fishing birds, he whistled a clear major triplet.

  Then he perched on the trunk of a storm-toppled palm and waited, hopeful that his past request for a rendezvous had been received in good grace. In time, a lanky clansman clad in deerhide emerged from the brush to meet him.

  No rustled foliage betrayed the presence of others, though such scouts were certainly there, crouched in concealment amid the vine-choked thickets and oat grass, and alert behind their strung bows. Well versed in his dealings with clansmen, Arithon understood the wrong move would see him skewered with a hail of broadheads at short range. Unprepossessing, a target limned in full sunlight, he showed no sign that he cared.

  The clansman spoke, and was answered by prearranged words in Paravian. A carved wooden token changed hands.

  His other lean fist never far from his knives, the scout fingered the incised falcon set against a shaved crescent moon, device of Shand’s past high kings. ‘Ath!’ He pulled a vexed frown. Beneath mottled streaks of stain to mask the line of his profile, he looked little older than Jieret. ‘It’s his Grace of Rathain? Our chieftain’s going to lose silver. He wagered on a galley flying banners and a retinue prinked with large emeralds. Is your vaunted prince still on board?’

  A smile flicked Arithon’s lips as he rose. ‘My sloop holds a fat prophet with a belly ache. He was much too sick to come ashore.’

  A pause ensued. When the visitor listed no further passengers, the young scout recovered slack manners with a flush that left him dusky to the hairline. The unassuming figure before him was given a second, piercing study, though prior assessment had been accurate: the black-haired arrival carried no visible badge of rank. Small and neatly made, he wore the loose, shabby dress of a fisherman and carried no weapon beyond a longsword in black metal, the sleek line of its swept-back quillons half-buried in a fold of linen shut. ‘Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn? Your Grace?’

  ‘Just Arithon, if you please. As well, you can call off your hunting pack.’

  The clan scout jerked up his chin. ‘Not so fast. Any man could carve out an old high king’s device or parrot a phrase in the old tongue. Show me proof. I’d be certain of your bloodline.’

  ‘None but a fool would lay claim to my name, with half of the north roused to arms.’ Turned brisk in distaste, Arithon yanked loose his right cuff tie. He peeled back the sleeve and bared for inspection the deep, welted scar seared into the length of his forearm. The brand had been left by the light bolt cast against him by his half-brother that had doomed him to Desh-thiere’s curse.

  ‘That will satisfy.’ Relieved to be spared a proving wrought of magecraf
t or shadows, the scout pursed his lips and shrilled the piping call of a plover into the thicket behind him.

  A movement behind the pine branches revealed the form of a man, who unfolded from a crouch and emerged on a cat’s stride onto the sandy verge. He topped the seed tufts of the oat grass by a head. A black and tan laminate bow made of horn hung from his immensely broad shoulder. He had a beard like rooted wire, clipped short. A fat black pearl strung on a braided cord nested in the tanned hollow of his throat. His hair capped his skull, glossy as a sable’s pelt licked through with silver, and salted pure white at the temples. The bones of his face were like fitted, stamped bronze, and imposing, coupled with straight brows and eyes of lucent turquoise.

  ‘As your Grace may see, the hunting party consisted of one,’ he addressed in a baritone flawed in the grain like burred oak.

  He side-stepped to display the arrows in his shoulder quiver, fletched with grey heron quills and pointed for small game. The sword he carried was a masterwork of arms, figured with interlace that made its great size appear deceptively delicate.

  Arithon tilted his head to measure the frame that towered over him. He did not repeat the error of the scout. ‘Lord Erlien s’Taleyn, High Earl of Alland?’

  ‘To a prince who wears rags, plain Erlien will do.’ Frost-crystal eyes swept the scion of Rathain and dismissed the whole man in fierce challenge. ‘Your mother descended from our own s’Ahelas royalty, it’s said. Well, I set no truth to the claim. The blood of the kings my forebears served was substantial, and you but a mouse with scarcely the growth to do more than bloody my kneecap.’

  Arithon shrugged, grave-faced. ‘Be warned then, my lord. Since I favour my father, that should charge you to keep careful guard on your kneecap. What’s more, if you’ve lost any silver over galleys and flags, I shall pay off the debt myself.’