The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  He seated himself again beside the cot, in no apparent hurry to depart. ‘The day brought no more attacks. Harradene’s division cleared the last debris under cover of canvas and shields. You can rest easy. The war host is intact and still in high heart, and the way through Valleygap lies open.’

  His stubbled cheek rough against the sheen of silk pillows, Pesquil tracked Lysaer’s presence with slitted eyes. He fastened unerringly on the single fact left out. ‘So my patrols found no sign of the archer. Tell Skannt to triple his sentries. When the supply train arrives, don’t trust the stores. Test the biscuit and cheese on my tracking dogs.’

  ‘I should have expected you’d not shirk for sick leave.’ Lysaer smiled with that grave arrogance that seemed inborn into old-blood princes. ‘Before you get wrapped up in duties that can wait, I thought you’d like the chance to study this.’ He bent, raised the limp, dry hand that trailed outside the bedclothes, and pressed a sharp object into the captain mayor’s palm.

  ‘The broadhead removed from your back,’ the prince said.

  ‘I see that.’ Pesquil turned the razor-sharp edges of the steel, nicked here and there from the healer’s probe that had grazed and slipped through the effort to draw it out. The lamplight skittered and flared across the flanges, which were not smooth, but gouged with lettering gummed black.

  ‘If that’s an inscription, I can’t focus just now.’ His flame of nervous energy quenched by lethargy and pain, Pesquil’s disgust emerged as a querulous snarl. ‘Too many drugs. I recall asking not to be dosed.’

  The healer would never have held himself steady through your screaming,’ Lysaer said in gentle censure. ‘He had to dissect half your backside. If you hadn’t worn silk beneath your gambeson, he’d never have cleaned the wound at all.’ The prince did not share the cold truth, that no soporific posset troubled Pesquil’s concentration. Despite every effort and a brutal round of cautery, Pesquil’s sunken flesh and fevered skin affirmed the healer’s prognosis: the wound was still bleeding inside. ‘Do you wish to know what that says?’

  ‘I can guess, sure enough.’ But Pesquil stirred in fretful effort to pass the broadhead back.

  Lysaer turned the steel blades. ‘The letters on the first blade say, “from the son of the Earl of the North”.’

  ‘Jieret s’Valerient, I thought so.’ Pesquil shut his eyes, his sallow complexion paled to rubbed ivory, but without the grace of patina. His skin hung paper dry under the flutter of the lantern. ‘Go on.’

  The next says, “for my lady mother, and four sisters”, and the next, “for the slaughtered innocents by Tal Quorin”.’ Lysaer trailed off into silence, his eyes, cold blue, on his injured officer, and his hands prepared to mete out a bracing restraint in case rage turned the wounded man distraught.

  Pesquil stirred, impatient, a hissed breath caught through his teeth as the agony in his back snapped him short. ‘The last engraving would show my name. You’ve never seen a clan vengeance arrow? Stay lucky, my liege. Few men survive them.’

  The hesitation which followed affirmed Pesquil’s suspicion, that the sucking black weakness which raked him boded no good: the prince’s long-faced healer had surely pronounced him to be dying.

  ‘A barbarous custom,’ Lysaer said in what seemed a disjointed interval later.

  Had Pesquil been hale, he would have laughed. ‘The clans weren’t first with that practice. Townsmen during the uprising assassinated the High King of Havish with a sword engraved with his lineage.’ Too close to his pass beneath the Wheel for tact, he ended on a wisp of scorching irony, ‘You should know well, Prince - since you carry a blade specially forged to kill a sorcerer.’

  The prick struck home: the sword in Lysaer’s scabbard since the hour of his march on Tal Quorin bore his enemy’s name in reverse runes.

  Whatever Lysaer replied, Pesquil did not hear. The throttling pull of dizziness had dragged him too deep to unriddle spoken conversation. Like a spark whirled in downdraught toward the nadir of night, the bullish, stubborn thread of his thoughts spiralled off into emptiness. He was too tired, too thirsty, too cold. A siren song of lassitude sapped away his will to wrench the world back to clear cognizance.

  And yet, one thing remained. Today’s arrow had proven that a lifelong antagonist had sired a worthy son to succeed himself; Pesquil pushed back against his shroud of fogged wits. He gathered breath against the dreadful gnaw of pain and said, ‘Lysaer s’Ilessid, fetch your scribe.’

  A horrid, fraught interval passed, while he clung to awareness and waited. Patchy vision showed him movement and a voice nearby said something urgent. A cup pressed his lips, filled with cold water and a bracing unpleasant sting of herbs.

  Pesquil sucked down a greedy swallow. ‘Is the man here?’ he gasped. ‘Tell him, get out his pens and his ink.’

  ‘He’s here,’ Lysaer answered from somewhere very close. ‘Say your peace, man. The words will be written as you wish.’

  But the surly old veteran wanted no letter to a loved one. Captain Mayor Pesquil pushed restlessly at his pillow. He poured the last breath in his body and the dregs of plundered strength into instructions to ensure Jieret Red-beard and his fourteen Companions would not be left an opening to obstruct the army’s passage on to Werpoint.

  The headhunter commander who despised rank and privilege delivered his last bequest with a prince in attendance at his bedside; the hour had been left too late for a scribe. His dark eyes unseeing in the spill of the lamplight, Pesquil never knew the hand that transcribed his racked lines was royal, and steady in its office. His last words came widely spaced, fought out with the same fanatical dedication that had enacted the bitter slaughter at Tal Quorin, and that even the act of dying could not unhinge.

  Captain Mayor Pesquil of the northern league of head-hunters passed the Wheel bound still to his duty.

  Whether he dreaded his reckoning with Daelion Fate-master, or felt remorse at the last for the clan lives he had claimed for paid bounty, no living man ever knew. Prince Lysaer laid aside his lapdesk and pen, closed the fixed eyes with their joyless fervour extinguished, then shrouded the gaunt, sunken architecture of the face in the colours of his own royal blazon.

  Shaken into a closer knit by the loss of their wiliest headhunter, the war host pressed eastward in the hands of Lord Commander Diegan. Lysaer s’Ilessid swore his intent to make Pesquil’s monument their safe arrival in Perlorn. To that end, he implored every garrison commander to allow a staff officer from Avenor to ride at their sides to lend advice.

  ‘The late captain mayor set the finishing edge on the training given to these men.’ The prince ended in earnest entreaty, ‘I offer their expertise to you in Pesquil’s late memory, to avoid another loss like the last.’

  The irony followed, that the dour captain’s death became the catalyst to end petty adversity. Since the absence of his abrasive bullying revealed how they had come to rely on his experience, the royal request was accepted. The officers from Avenor were supremely well-versed in their handling of men. From the moment their influence touched the garrison troops, the war host began to cohere from an unwieldy amalgamation of divisions and wagons into an order to surmount any odds.

  In a victory over shared hunger and uncertainty, the last companies cleared the pass of Valleygap under a cold, cloud-raked sky. Adversity met them, cruel enough to test their newfound unity. The wagons sent west to resupply their stores nestled amid grass salted grey under the season’s first killing frost. No one attended the pack-train. The beasts which had drawn the drays wandered loose, wild-eyed and skittish before the outriders who angled in to catch them. A sweeping patrol of the surrounding hills unearthed no traps and no sign. Barbarian marauders were not in evidence, nor the hired drovers, nor any of the men at arms appointed to safeguard the provisions.

  Of three tracking dogs culled from the pack to test the jerked beef, two died in snarling convulsions.

  ‘Fire the stores,’ Lord Diegan ordered in compliance with Pesquil’s last test
ament. The hounds were too valuable to waste trying to separate which casks were tainted, and which not. Despite the devastating hardship, the last forty leagues to Perlorn must be crossed by men with empty bellies.

  ‘They’ll get there thin, but living,’ Lord Harradene cracked, braced to forestall any dissidence. But his order raised no dispute; after Valleygap, the garrison divisions had learned when not to argue with experience.

  The vanguard completed the last leg to the walled city of Perlorn, a ten-day march that ended in cheerless disorder after dark. Camp was pitched under stone ramparts, while torches streamed in the gusts. The wind also hummed through the tent guy lines, and bit the skin red on men’s faces, and whirled the steam off supperpots filled for the first time since Valleygap. Its whine came interspersed with fitful, veering blasts from the east.

  ‘Weather’s changing do you feel it?’ announced the captain mayor’s successor as he barged into the royal command tent. A middle-aged, vigorous stick of a man with a boisterous sense of humour, blond whiskers and a squint, Captain Skannt sniffed air burdened with the smoke from filled ovens. ‘Autumn rains will soak us any time now. Best to shake up the sentries on the perimeter, your Grace. Tonight, mark my word, you’ll see the first wave of deserters.’

  By morning, Lord Harradene had twelve men arraigned and stripped for public whipping. The garrison divisions with less vigilant guards simply had gaps in their ranks.

  Clouds like layered slate masked the hills at the horizon when, reprovisioned at punishing expense by a city hoarding its harvest against the onset of winter, the columns reformed to continue their march eastward. They wound through hills and vales half-erased by a grey smoke of drizzle, then slogged beside laden carts, bespattered with mud thrown off mired wheels. The teams slipped and laboured over roads transformed to soaked ruts, or washed out by freshets swollen from the silvered rungs of water shed off the stone shoulders of the Skyshiels.

  Yet even as the wagons groaned and stuck fast in muck, or an axle broke, or someone sat to wad his boots with lint to ease the nip of raw blisters, Prince Lysaer was there on his caparisoned destrier to call encouragement, or share in rough jokes and commiseration.

  Tired men straightened their spines as he passed. Drovers took to polishing their harness buckles in sure pride that the prince would happen by.

  As the road steepened-through the north-facing spurs of the foothills, the rain changed to sleet. The hollows lay scabbed with grey ice. Cartwheels and oxen crunched through puddles snap-frozen, then ploughed by their passage to shards like white cullet, salted in heaps at a glassworks.

  Their forward progress was impeded just as cruelly without the added trials of clan raids. Hard cold already shackled the mountains. The peaks that fanged the southern horizon wore caps of new snow, and over the chink of bit rings and harness, the outriders heard the hunting song of wolf packs, moved down from the heights as the grazing game sought shelter in lower country. Advance scouts breasted the hills to the stoop of northland falcons, plumed now in their winter white. Thrashed by falling sleet, stung by the astringent, damp winds that howled off the wave-battered coast, men marched wrapped in blankets and slept bundled together for warmth. The stock grew thin on frost-killed fodder, and the crossing of each bouldered streamlet became a fresh ordeal, with leggings and boots slow to dry. Captains oversaw their troops, head-down in frozen misery, and yet morale did not flag. When the rank and file from the garrisons seemed too chilblained and dispirited to oil their weapons, the elite troops from Avenor shamed them to reach for new standards. A rivalry arose and flourished on that comfortless, hard road, until no company wished to appear less polished than the prince’s personal troops.

  After weeks in tenantless wilds, the last forty leagues became a trial of discipline and endurance. Across the flats, with their spindled stands of salt-scoured trees and weathered rocks painted with lichens, horses cast shoes. Officers’ tempers frayed to epithets. The proud columns that had marched from Etarra in splendour straggled at last into Werpoint three months later, ragged, bone-weary, but fused at last into seamless dedication.

  The divisions who formed up for camp assignment beneath the tall, limestone battlements might be trail-worn and hungry, but their spirits remained undaunted. Amid the petulant snap of banners and shouted directions from their officers, they crawled into tents to sleep, or hunkered down before the fanned flames of campfires and spoke of southern lands and warm doxies.

  The Master of Shadow was but one man before their armed thousands, and Merior was a village on a sandspit.

  ‘We’ll be home with our families for spring planting,’ men said, and made jokes, warmed to the belief that they were invincible under the steady blaze of Lysaer’s confidence. Against all adversity they had made the port of Werpoint before the winter storms closed the harbour. While the white crash of waves plumed and subsided against the shingle, the lanterns of the anchored vessels commissioned to transport them clustered and tossed on black waters, awaiting only full daylight to begin the process of loading.

  For the war host’s ranking officers, the outlook was less rosy. Inside city walls, dogged by strings of equerries sent with supply lists, and accosted by pedigree garrison captains who demanded to be billeted indoors, Lord Commander Diegan met harassed city ministers and strove to placate upset tempers. More a supply stop and a fishing port than a bustling centre for trade, Werpoint languished in a state of seething chaos, ill-prepared to offer succour to the encampment spread at its gates. Already burdened beyond capacity by the mixed fleet of merchant brigs, galleys, and fishing sloops packed into each south-facing cove, the harbour inlet was a cross-hatched forest of spars and tar-blacked rigging. The narrow gaps of open water between hulls seethed, busy as canals with lighters and oared boats bearing captains, crews, and supplies to and from the congested wharfside.

  No matter that Rathain’s garrisons had arrived to eradicate the dreaded Master of Shadow; everywhere Lord Diegan presented his requisition orders, he was met with testy exasperation.

  ‘The supply trains are late, what else?’ snapped the beribboned city seneschal, cornered at last in a cramped office behind a granary guarded by pikemen. He raked nail-chewed fingers through the kinked hair at his temples. Eyes pouched and bloodshot from sleepless fretting swivelled sidewards as he talked. ‘Your troops want fresh bread and meat, well, that’s damned inconvenient. Yon thrice-damned fleet in the harbour has made itself felt like an infestation of rats. For each day your troops were delayed, their crews had to be fed and housed. Every captain and his purser thinks to bully our merchants for provisions they frankly haven’t got. Have you checked the taverns?’

  Unbathed, unshaven, heartily in need of mulled wine to cut the inhospitable northcoast chill, Lord Diegan drummed his gloved fingers on the hilts of his weapons and allowed that he had not.

  There’s neither room nor lodging to be had,’ the testy little seneschal ranted on. ‘Every taproom’s crammed to bursting with sailors, most of them passed out drunk. Our chief councilman’s daughter walked outside her garden gate two days ago and got solicited like a dockside bawd!’

  Lord Diegan uttered a showy apology, then finished with his nastiest smile. ‘Now get me an empty council chamber with a fire and a staff servant, and a board with hot food for my twenty officers. After that, I don’t care if you throw your mayor out of his personal bed suite! The Prince of the West will have quarters befitting his station.’

  The seneschal paused like a terrier outfaced by a mastiff, measured the threat in the Lord Commander’s stance, then dispatched a cringing underling to roust up the mayor’s house steward.

  Other setbacks could not be so easily bullied into correction. Lysaer returned from his waterfront consultation with the fleet captains in a towering, restless state of angst. ‘The wind’s blowing in from the wrong quarter,’ he announced, ripping a glove off with his teeth.

  Justifiably smug since his success at commandeering a room that overlooked the harbour, Lo
rd Commander Diegan glanced up in startlement. Perched astride the settle, and relaxed in sanguine comfort for the chance to shed his onerous shirt of mail, he watched his liege’s signs of temper with bland humour. ‘Be careful. You’ll swallow forty carats out of pique. Are you saying we can’t start the loading tomorrow?’ When the prince’s taut expression failed to ease, Diegan tossed his surcoat aside, the holes that wanted mending forgotten. ‘Better put off the staff meeting, then. The garrison here will rend your royal hide. Werpoint can’t support thirty thousand mouths. They’ve sold their stores from the harvest, and news just came in. Clansmen fired the standing grain in East Ward. Surplus can be bought to carry the city through, but only if we’ve freed up the trade galleys before the harbour closes for the winter.’

  Prince Lysaer tossed his gloves and his silk-lined storm cloak to his hovering equerry, then gestured the servant’s dismissal. A vexed stride brought him to the table, where he ripped off the end of the bread loaf pried away from the kitchen staff with threats. He stared at the steam that arose off the morsel, shot a glare at the darkened casement, then spun in barely-held fury. ‘This can’t happen. I didn’t raise and train a grand war host only to be stopped by a run of poor luck and the ridiculous misfortune that the winds choose to blow southeast!’

  ‘Oh?’ Lord Diegan lounged back against the stone beside the settle and crossed his ankles on a footstool. His rowelled spurs snagged cuts in the embroidery, a fact to provide a spurt of sour pleasure, since the mayor’s house steward had been niggardly about supplying clean towels, and no servant had come to replenish the wood in the firebox. While his prince paced the carpet, too distressed to eat, Avenor’s Lord Commander said in gentle satire, ‘You’d think the better of setbacks if we were frozen alive by some fell mix of sorcery and shadows?’

  Lysaer stabbed the air in a sign to avert malfortune. ‘Hold your tongue! It’s a fool’s move to invite an ill fate.’ Suspicion rode his thoughts, every hour, that the Master of Shadow must have some hand at play. Although the delays at Valleygap seemed exclusively targeted in revenge against Pesquil and his headhunters, Rathain’s clansmen were Arithon’s feal allies. No man acquainted with s’Ffalenn wiles could rule out the chance their strikes had been timed as one thread in some wider design.