The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Erlien burst into deep-chested laughter, while the pearl at his neck danced on its tether of thong. ‘Dharkaron himself! I’ll admit we tested your presumptions. Since in fact you have none, you’re most welcome to the Kingdom of Shand.’ He drew a black-handled dirk from the back of his belt, kissed the reversed blade, then intoned in overdone courtesy, ‘As caithdein and this realm’s steward, my life’s pledge as surety for visiting princes. I beg for the sake of tradition that you leave my poor shanks intact.’

  ‘Dharkaron witness, I might.’ Arithon stretched his stride to fall in step as the chieftain and his scout led off through the undergrowth. Not about to seem cowed by the massive man looming beside him, he added, ‘Should my sloop be left anchored in plain sight?’

  ‘Don’t trouble.’ Erlien flashed back a bear’s lazy grin, hands flexed in a disquieting, powerful contrast as he sheathed his enormous knife. ‘Your boat’s a fine morsel of bait. Should a galley put in to investigate, we’ll lighten her cargo as forfeit. City captains well know to steer clear of these coves. We’ve sunk the keels from under the rash ones, or any who played cocky and forgot.’

  Affable, even easy, as the chieftain’s manner seemed, the stalking grace of his tread reflected resounding unease. He carried paired dirks in the cuffs of his boots, and he skirted his native thickets like quarry.

  Vexed to quick chills by his bardic intuition, Arithon offered, ‘I’ll surrender my sword, if that would reassure you.’

  Erlien slammed to a stop. Spattered with sun through the chinks in high pine trees, his shoulders stayed unrelaxed. The eyes turned to Arithon were narrowed and sullen amid a wind-lined mesh of crow’s feet. ‘And that would do me good with your full command of shadows at my back?’

  ‘It might.’ Arithon sustained that burning, light gaze, though his palms broke into a fine sweat. ‘The blade is the same one carried by my ancestors. She bears the name Alithiel.’

  ‘Paravian-wrought. I’d heard of her.’ As a thrush took wing in a whir of drab feathers, Erlien smothered a hair-trigger start. Then the legend is true, that your sword is enspelled to dazzle an attacker into blindness?’

  ‘Only if the defending cause is just,’ amended Arithon. ‘We’ll both keep our sight. I didn’t come here to force any favours through sorcery.’

  ‘Yet you’re a peril in our midst all the same.’ Erlien tapped his weapon hilt, the fringes on his buckskins the only ripple in resinous air. Cut off from the sea-breeze, the scrub forest was stifling, the sky through green and bronze needles cerulean as fired enamel. ‘If you’d give up your arms, what would you balk at? Being tied, or blindfolded, or dragged through the salt bogs at knife point? To put the issue baldly, does any means exist to disarm the dire powers of your birthright?’

  The scout drawn in as witness of a sudden looked jaggedly unsettled.

  Very still, his eyes wide open under spiked, dark lashes, Arithon forced his stance to stay easy despite the prickles that stabbed down his spine. ‘Dharkaron as my witness,’ he said at length. ‘If when you’re finished I can stop Lysaer’s headhunters from reiving through Shand after scalps, no paltry indignity you might name lies outside the reach of my patience.’

  ‘And if I prevented you leaving?’ Erlien pressed. ‘There’s a price on your head, in Alestron.’

  The scout momentarily forgot to breathe, as the bristling tension between the two men strained thinner and tighter and more deadly.

  ‘For that cause, I would certainly fight.’ In a blinding, smooth move, Arithon unsheathed his longsword. Paravian steel sang faintly at the kiss of the air to its edge. The black metal shimmered flint-sharp with highlights: scribed along its length, the interlaced angles of silver runes gleamed, rainbowed like chipped crystal, but raised to no pulse of ancient magic. Only the commonplace reflections of green pine and bright sunlight grazed its polish as Arithon held the tip at guard point.

  ‘Why fence with manners?’ invited the Prince of Rathain to Shand’s top-ranking chieftain. ‘Let’s settle this now, then talk like sane men afterward.’

  ‘To first blood, then,’ Erlien agreed in fierce pleasure. He shrugged off his bow and quiver and cleared his own steel to do battle.

  With no appointed arbiter and not a second’s breath of warning, he attacked with all the force of his muscular height and stature.

  Arithon matched that killing thrust with a parry that staggered him backward. Small, compact, he moved like wind itself. But no feat of quick footwork could counter Erlien’s greater reach. The high earl pressed his advantage of size to the fullest. His weapon slapped back in riposte with a skill that whistled air; clanged into Arithon’s guard like a forge hammer.

  The dismayed scout jumped back in avoidance, while paired blades whined and clashed, flat ground to flat in a nerve-painful scream of separation.

  Whatever Erlien’s claim at the outset, the offensive he waged against a man not an enemy implied no possibility of quarter.

  Caged in caught sunlight, the whickered beat of steel was unsparing of life and limb. Before the clan lord’s bracing, fast offensive, Arithon was driven hither and yon like a wasp at the whim of a gale. The shocking clash of each parry left him no space for recovery. He required full strength to turn the battering blows, to deflect the chieftain’s larger blade away from a crippling strike.

  The ground itself offered hazard. Rotted trunks lay matted in creepers and thicket, any open space between laced with roots and littered in sticks and fallen pine cones. Too beset to mind his footing unable to glance behind to secure a clean path for retreat, Arithon ducked and twisted by cat’s reflex. Only the catch of greenbriars against a calf, or a poke of stemmed scrub, warned when his way lay impeded. Sand and matted needles offered dismal purchase, a sore disadvantage. He must meet each of Erlien’s strikes in perfect form, or risk a slipped step. To be jostled off-balance would bring disaster. He would be run through or cut before he fell, and time and again, the treacherous soil gave and parted under his light tread. Too hard pressed for speech, he pitched his body to the limits of speed and reflex in a stripped labour of self-defence.

  Inevitably, the strain told on Arithon first. Blade locked to blade in a screaming bind, his hands ran hot sweat, and his lips peeled back from his teeth as wrist and sinew resisted the twisting pressure that sought to disarm him. The spiked limbs of a deadfall hedged his back. He could not spring clear, but had to muscle his sword against Erlien’s, for agonized seconds bearing up under the levering brunt of the chieftain’s remorseless weight. A twist of his body unlimbered his sword from Erlien’s. He jumped left, the only way open to him.

  And ready for that saving step yet again was a whistling blue fence of steel.

  Taxed sinews this time could not respond soon enough. Arithon had his blade up, but not positioned. The blow whined into black steel and slid through, diverted from a chest strike, but not clear of his left upper arm. A line of scarlet opened through Arithon’s sleeve.

  ‘First blood!’ the scout cried in close to hysterical relief. ‘My lord, the match is yours.’

  But the same hair-trigger instinct that had saved Arithon from being mired in a thicket warned him now not to lower his guard.

  Erlien’s next riposte clanged into a solid parry, and the next and the next, the very same. Driven into a hollow bristled with saplings, the Shadow Master thrashed a near-fatal step into the grabbing twigs of the brush. Then, inspired perhaps by extremity, he leaped backward into the deep undergrowth. To reach him, Erlien must follow. Swords pinged and sheared through green sticks. Pruned bits of foliage took scything flight. Arithon burrowed backwards like a rabbit and emerged on clear ground, while Erlien smashed blundering after him. For the first time since the duel started, they were parted by more than a sword’s length.

  Arithon stood, desperate for respite, heaving painful, fast breaths, his sleeves plastered to lean limbs by running sweat and blood. He did not look like a mage or a prince. Beaten to graceless exhaustion, he had no breath for words, no v
itality left to frame expression. The sword still raised over an arched mesh of briars trembled in the struck fall of sunlight through the high crowns of the trees.

  No less tired, his buckskins patched dark on his shoulders and his fringes flecked in hacked leaves, Erlien lowered his blade, braced the pommel against his hip, and deliberately stripped to the waist. Then, without speech, he discarded his shed leathers, caught up his weapon and resumed.

  Every rule of mercy was abrogated. To the scout, watching agonized as blade met blade in a screech of choked-off vibration, disaster seemed unavoidable. The odds had been pushed too far. Cornered beyond recourse against an opponent who outmatched him, Arithon was going to be forced to use sorcery or shadows just to avoid getting butchered.

  The driving brilliance had gone from his speed. His steps in retreat were clumsy. Snatched off his rhythm by roots and dense brush, time and again he had to grasp his blade two-handed to stave off Erlien’s assault. Blood flew in shocked droplets from the marked arm that, even bracing, quivered from sapped strength.

  Fatigue had blunted the edge from Erlien’s style also. Pared to a bare framework of training, he was solid and methodically sure. The force of his body behind each attack wore and worried and hammered his slighter opponent past telling. Blade sheared on blade through a harried retreat that strained the nerves in suspension. Each riposte that threatened ending became snatched back and sustained by Arithon’s beleaguered guard, enjoined in dogged effort to defy his inevitable fate. He took a cut on the elbow, shallow, but distracting for the sting; then, in short succession, two more marks on his shoulder.

  Sawn to a tortured pitch of tension, the scout scrubbed sweat from his eyes. He watched Arithon crash into another thicket. Twigs whipped. Steel snicked through leaves and clanged in indignant embrace. Tattered greens fluttered down to the whistling grunt of effort through locked teeth as Arithon smashed sidewards through sticks to evade a lethal cut to the head.

  There came a screeling cry of steel on steel, blade raking blade from tip to crossguard. Borne backwards into a whippy mass of saplings, Arithon dropped, twisting, to one knee. The sword in his hand sang protest, locked still to Erlien’s crossguard.

  The chieftain found himself hampered in the narrowed press of the branches. Smaller, slighter, better able to move in close quarters, Arithon snatched his sole chance.

  In a flying, sun-caught arc, he wrested his blade clear and hooked the point. Metal bound to metal. The chieftain lost grasp on his weapon to a stinging clamour of stressed sound. Through a short, hampered flight through close brush, the sword tangled and sliced down, point first, to impale itself in dark earth.

  Erlien backstepped to recover, hooked a leg and crashed onto his rump. Head flung back, blue eyes of feral intensity wide open, he sprawled with his chin upturned to meet the black blade that descended in fine, ringing temper to lick the bared cords of his throat.

  Running blood, scuffed and nicked by briar and brush, Arithon glared through a soaked fall of hair. Sweat glued his hands to a sword that quivered in unsteady, light-caught spasms. ‘Why?’ he gasped, his voice husked out of true by his racking tremors of exhaustion.

  Erlien glared up that bared ribbon of steel and said nothing; and silence itself spoke as signal.

  A ring of clan archers rose from hiding. They gripped bows with nocked arrows and their aim was trained at short range upon Arithon s’Ffalenn.

  He greeted their presence with a wordless cry, spun on his heel, and cast his sword away. The black blade tumbled through the briar with a sharp, outraged ring, then thudded to rest at the feet of the scout, who dared make no move to recover it. Back turned, his arms braced between the trunks of two trees as though he begged help to stay upright, Arithon waited.

  The expression on his face was not relief, not fear, not impatience: it was anger, naked and hot enough to wrench through his body in spasms. When the command to loose was not given to the archers, he pulled in a screaming breath. With all of his masterbard’s diction, he demanded, imperious, ‘Why?’

  Erlien’s first word was to his bowmen, a curt command to stand down. His answer to Arithon came inflectionless and short. ‘As the clan chief responsible for this realm, I found it needful to test your mettle.’

  ‘With your very life?’ Fury overlaid with incredulity, his fine hands clamped into fists, the Shadow Master spun again to face the clan chief.

  ‘Did your man Steiven leave you in ignorance? That’s how it’s given to caithdeinen to test princes, if need provides no other way.’ Erlien mustered his will and arose, brush-scraped and weary, but unscorched by the royal ire bent upon him. ‘You heard how Lady Maenalle of Tysan came to die?’

  A wretched, prolonged shiver wrung Arithon from head to foot. ‘I heard two days ago, about Maenalle.’ Then he shut his lips, aggrieved and grim, not only for the fate the Lady s’Gannley had suffered at the hand of her prince, but for the goods which funded his ship-works, that laid guilt for her death at his feet. Erlien’s statement also forced him to reassess a past the more painful, for indeed, it had been with his life that Earl Jieret’s father, Lord Steiven, had compelled his prince to swear crown oath before the bloody battle at Strakewood.

  To this living steward who sought to try him to the bitter limits of integrity, Arithon said, ‘Your reason hasn’t answered my question.’

  ‘Because it’s obvious.’ Erlien brushed off the leaf mould that clung to his sweat-damp knuckles. ‘You’re living bait for a war host thirty-five thousand strong. If you come here to involve my clansmen, I would measure firsthand what took place on the banks of Tal Quorin. Did your sorcery and your shadows defend your feal following, or in fact, merely shield your own life? I was duty-bound to find out.’

  As Arithon stiffened, Erlien raised a swift hand. ‘I wished to know, too, if you could fight. Before Ath, I’ve sworn! I’ll not offer my people as a shield for a weakling prince who lacks courage. And if you proved true to honour and seized no advantage through fell powers, though you died on my sword here and now, there’s a balance met. Shand would be spared from your nasty coil of contention.’

  ‘With my body sent off to Alestron for bounty?’ Arithon unbent his fists to peel back the hair slicked to his forehead and temples. The anger had gone out of him as water might spill from a sieve. He looked and moved as if his wounds stung, though his sarcasm bit as he added, ‘You made just one bitter mistake. I didn’t come here to ask any clansmen to stand in my defence.’

  Lord Erlien looked chagrined as a bear caught by bees while licking a muzzle glued with honey. ‘Fiends plague! Then why are you here?’

  Arithon gave a sour laugh. Touched to distaste by the widening stains on his shirt, surrounded by the avid band of scouts, he said, ‘When I’ve finished being the subject of a bleeding exhibition, I’ll recover my manners and tell you.’

  The council arranged by Lord Erlien at Arithon’s request had been called under open sky. Present were clan chiefs from Atwood in East Halla, and others from Orvandir’s hill country. Not a few had travelled an inconvenient distance to be present. Given the nature of the caithdein who ruled Shand, the smell of tired horseflesh, the dry rounds of whispers, and the poisonous curiosity that pervaded the encampment scarcely came as a surprise.

  Few of the elders called into attendance were inclined to share counsel with a stranger.

  Lent the afternoon to apply his insight into the character of Alland’s high earl, Arithon reviewed his conclusions. Erlien’s authority was trademarked by a quick, inquisitive mind. In love with talk, jocular in dismissal of his guarding ranks of archers, his strength was quirky humour and an unfailing eye for detail. He liked surprises, encouraged combative rivalries among his captains, and seemed to thrive on keeping light guidance on disordered, freewheeling enterprise.

  Gathered without ceremony at twilight beneath the sandstone ledges of an abandoned quarry, the inner circle of Shand’s old-blood clansmen waited around a communal fire.

  The introduction
Lord Erlien offered his guest came typically pointed in acid. ‘On my honour, I’ve determined this prince is not here to claim loyalty for the distaff side of his pedigree.’

  ‘Did he try, he would die here,’ a hook-nosed grand-dame in a snowy battle braid cracked through the gathering dusk.

  ‘My clan elders,’ Erlien presented. He jostled Arithon forward with an expansive, bold gesture toward the tight-gathered band who owed the realm of Shand feal allegiance. ‘As you see, your welcome won’t be tender.’ His broad, tanned palm clapped the slighter man’s shoulder in yet another boisterous round of challenge.

  Braced like still iron as the blow fell, his unbound scabs crusted to discomfort, Arithon gave way but one step.

  In vicious approval, Alland’s earl finished, ‘Master them, mage, if you can. For by Ath, they’re a bloodthirsty bunch. All week they’ve been vying for the chance to be first to stake out your carcass for the ravens.’

  ‘Despite your pledged life as my surety?’ Arithon’s bow answered cold as a slicked glint of steel. The rent and bloodied edges of his shirt fluttered, plucked by the pine-scented breeze which flowed over the quarry’s far rim. Above jumbled stones clothed over in creepers, the sky paled to lavender, stippled by faint early stars.

  Erlien assumed the high seat, a flat-topped boulder set apart by a woven red throw rug. Replete as a sun-warmed adder, he surveyed his disgruntled pack of clan chiefs and chuckled. ‘ ‘Ware Torbrand’s temper. I’ve tasted its sting. Rathain’s royal line might breed runt-sized, but there’s mettle enough for all that. His Grace has come here to bring warning. By right of arms, he’s earned his chance to speak.’

  Arithon did not sit, but strode into the cleared ground by the fire. His footfall made scarcely any sound, even over washed gravel tailings. Splashed in the copper play of firelight, he was a form rendered in planes and shadow, the hawk-sharp angles of cheekbone and chin seared into profile against the gloom. His glance raked over the hardbitten company who waited to hear him bearing weapons and bows, and no small measure of distrust. Arrogance bracketed one elder’s mouth; hard patience stiffened another’s back. A flaxen-haired woman near the sidelines stared in frank curiosity, while others projected unsettled hostility on faces lined like worn leather from lifelong exposure to southern sunlight.