by Glenda Larke
“Lascars come to Ardronese ports from time to time, as crewmen on ships from Karradar, but they’re not common in Lowmeer. I asked around and found out there’d been one on board the Spice Dragon. A young man called Ardhi. I suspect my lascar was that man. The description fitted him.”
“And now the poor fellow is dead.”
“I … well, yes.” Perhaps. Something in the account of his death bothered him, and he hadn’t put his finger on it yet.
“Let’s move on to this meeting of traders. Why would Kesleer want to cooperate with his business rivals?”
“The fluyt he mentioned is a new design of ship, suitable for large cargoes and long journeys. I think this meeting was about raising more capital for shipbuilding.”
“Between rival trading companies?” She pondered that. “Just possible, I suppose. Shipbuilding is an expensive business. But then, would Regal Vilmar allow such an alliance? He raises money selling separate trading licences to all the different companies.”
“What if they cut him a percentage and sweetened the deal with a costly present?”
Once again she paused to consider, then said slowly, “The Regal is indeed a jackdaw hoarding pretty things, as Kesleer said. Vilmar Vollendorn loves baubles, especially ones no one else has. He’s a vain and acquisitive ruler. But there’s no value in feathers.”
“I think they were just the soft packing for something breakable.” And of course the gold feather-like strands in the dagger were something else entirely.
“So, something precious,” she was saying, “intended to buy the Regal’s support, was packed in feathers inside the – what did you call it? Bambu? And you saw the lascar steal it. So this valuable gift is now at the bottom of a port waterway, or floating out of the Ardmeer estuary on the tide?”
“I suspect Kesleer still has whatever was inside, and the lascar took the bambu not realising it was empty.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What could be so valuable that Kesleer thought it would buy the Regal’s support for a trade monopoly?” She tapped his written report, now on the table next to the sample of spices he’d stolen.
“A new spice is possible, I suppose,” he said. “Something with curative powers? Kesleer made some remark about Ardronese court women clamouring for something only Lowmeer would be able to supply. But a new spice doesn’t fit with the idea of baubles and pretty things.”
“Pity you didn’t hear more of the conversation.”
“At the time, I was rather more worried about my skin. Per your previous instructions, of course.”
Her eyes narrowed still further to indicate she was not amused. “What was the lascar doing in the warehouse?”
“Stealing,” he said promptly. “Obvious, surely.”
“I’m not so sure. Assuming he was this Ardhi from the Spice Dragon, he’d just been paid. Why would he steal?”
“Greed?”
She made an exasperated sound in her throat. “Put yourself in this sailor’s britches.” She stood to walk over to the window. With her back to him as she gazed out, she asked softly, “What sort of a man sails halfway around the world, under the command of people he doesn’t know, with men who speak a different tongue and follow a different faith, to arrive at a destination unknown to him?”
“A madman? A slave?”
She was silent, her back an eloquent rebuttal of his flippancy. “An adventurer,” he suggested, serious this time.
“I would have thought the word ‘hero’ might be closer to the truth. Or at least a very brave man.”
Pickle it, she was right. The man had indeed been brave. “Someone passionately in search of something. Enlightenment. Knowledge. Something precious to him.” At last he saw what she was ferreting out. “Ah. A man who thinks he’s been robbed of something precious.”
“Exactly. Perhaps he came to take back what had been stolen from him by Lowmian traders. Whatever was inside the bambu.” Her next words were said so quietly, he had to strain to hear them. “This spice trade will not be good for any of us.”
“You fear Lowmeer ascendancy.”
“Yes, but not because I’m Ardronese.”
“I never thought that was your motive,” he said hastily. “An overly rich and arrogant Lowmeer will mean a fearful Ardrone, and that’s a volatile combination that could lead to yet another war.”
“Possibly, but not even war motivates my concern. There are deeper evils in Lowmeer than that, and they may be exacerbated by an excess of trade wealth.”
The tremor in her voice took him by surprise. Fear? The Pontifect was frightened? No, he must be mistaken. Nothing scared Fritillary Reedling.
“Tell me,” she said, “did anything odd catch your interest while you were in Lowmeer? Anything that seemed unusual?”
His hand dropped to his knife sheath, where he now kept the lascar’s dagger, intending to show it to her. He had tried to rid himself of it. He’d tried to leave it behind in the cloister. Later, he’d offered it to an itinerant knife-grinder he’d passed on the street, then he’d attempted to sell it to a blacksmith. Each time, at the last moment, he’d been unable to follow through the intention.
Now his fingers spasmed when he touched the handle, refusing to clasp it. He opened his mouth to tell her about it, but couldn’t form the words. And he couldn’t move his hand. A moment later, he was struggling to remember what he’d been about to say.
When he hesitated, his thoughts scrambling after something just out of reach, she added, “No matter how uncanny or inexplicable it may have seemed at the time?”
For a moment he saw again the way the lascar had smiled just before he’d thrown the dagger. Not a smile of malicious intent, or of enmity, but of … hope. The act of throwing the knife hadn’t been an attempt to divert attention, and the lascar was more than just a tar; he saw that now.
Once again he opened his mouth to tell her, but couldn’t remember the words.
He choked, stammering, then thought, Oh well, it couldn’t have been important, and relaxed. He said instead, “There’s the Horned Death. I’d heard of it before, vaguely, but this time I saw it. A man died in front of me, speaking of A’Va.”
“Oh? And what were your thoughts?” She came back to her chair and sat.
“You know the victims grow horns? Reverence, they change. They look more like animals – and not particularly nice animals, either. It was … horrible. Inhuman. Insane.”
“I’ve had it described to me.”
“One other odd thing. Twice people mentioned twins to me when talking about the Horned Death, hinting they were somehow to blame for the plague. Which seemed … weird, as well as ridiculous. I’ve been thinking about it and I recall Lowmian myths about twins being evil. They called them ‘devil-kin’ in the past, didn’t they?”
“Superstitions are tenacious things. I suppose any plague is so horrible that people feel it must have an origin outside of Va-Faith. Then of course, if A’Va the anti-Va exists, he must have his minions. Devil-kin, or whatever name one wants to bestow on them. Although I’ve no idea why they settled on twins to fill that role and I’m glad the rest of us had more sense. Anyway, no need to concern yourself about Lowmian twins. It’s just silly superstition.”
The back of his neck prickled. She was hiding something, and he decided to challenge her secrecy. “Scuffing leaves across a trail doesn’t eradicate the scent of prey. What’s worrying you? What’s wrong in Lowmeer?”
For a moment he thought she might avoid answering, but after a short pause, she said, “I don’t truly know. Something the Regal himself knows about and yet conceals. The Horned Death, twins, the Regal’s men – there is a link.”
“Do you want me to go back to Lowmeer and investigate?” Even as he asked the question, he remembered the death cart and had to stifle a shudder.
“No.” There was no hesitation in her answer, no hint that his return was negotiable. “I have others there working on this and I have other plans for you. I’m sending you to Ardro
ne. Specifically, to King Edwayn’s court in Throssel. Of course, if you hear of any outbreaks of Horned Death in Ardrone, I want to know about it, but I don’t expect that. So far, Ardrone has been spared.”
Saker blinked, taken aback. In his mind’s eye he remembered the misty, ethereal beauty of the vales of the Shenat Hills where he’d grown up. But the court? He suppressed a desire to sigh. Too much stone and too little forest or field. Besides, he’d have to behave himself.
Protocol. I hate protocol.
She continued, “King Edwayn has asked for a spiritual tutor for Prince Ryce and the Princess, Lady Mathilda.”
“Oh?”
“So I’m sending you.”
He gaped at her, now completely thrown. “Me? A spiritual tutor? To the King’s children?”
“And now you’re going to tell me you’re more oak-shrine inclined, so you’ll make a dreadful adviser to palace-dwelling, chapel-attending young who’ve never set foot in a shrine.”
Va-damn, there she was again, reading his mind. “So why me?”
“Because, at nineteen and seventeen respectively, they’ll relate to a tutor not much older. And because I want the royals to understand the importance of shrines, of witchery, of field and forest, of the true Way of the Oak. They get far too little of that at court. The Prime of Ardrone, Valerian Fox, doesn’t favour close affinity with the natural. He’d like to replace shrines and shrine-keepers. Replace them with his town-based clergy and their rituals.”
“You want me to counter the influence of the Prime?” He was incredulous. The Prime was the most important cleric in any country, and in Ardrone, he or she was appointed to the post by the King, not the Pontifect.
She smiled. “You’re dying to ask why I have such faith in your abilities.”
Pox on her mind-reading! Was he really so – so transparent? He said carefully, “Young clerics are as common as daffodils here in Vavala. So why me? Come to think of it, I’ve never understood why me. Not from the time I was ten and you came to my father’s holdings and arranged to send me to university.” She’d been the Faith arbiter of the district at the time, but she’d had no connection to his family. At least, none that he knew about.
“Your courage. You lived in a house where your father ignored you and your stepmother actively worked to send you away because you were a threat to the inheritance of her own sons, yet you still managed to look them proudly in the eye.”
“Did I? I just remember feeling about as low as a mudworm all the time because I didn’t understand why I wasn’t loved.” He wanted to shiver, just thinking about it. “There has to be more to it than that.”
“Well, I did know your real mother.”
He stared at her in shock. In anger. Why did you never tell me that?
She shrugged. “I decided to look you up when I was in the district.”
He hesitated, searching for the right way to draw her out, to be polite and not show his rage at her secrecy. No one had ever spoken to him about his mother; his father had forbidden it. And now she was telling him she’d known her?
He was still framing his question when she added, “You impressed me. I could see you didn’t belong on that farm, so I bargained with your father. He allowed me to send you to university. In exchange I swore to him that I would never speak to you about your mother. I’ll keep that agreement while he lives. One day you’ll know all there is to know, I promise.”
He pushed aside the fury he felt towards his father for imposing such a condition, and thought instead of his mother. Only one memory remained: a dark-haired woman, kneeling on the floor beside him where he stood. No memory remained of her voice, or her face, or what she’d told him. He’d been upset because she was crying. He couldn’t have been more than two or three at the time.
“I didn’t send you to university out of sheer sentimentality,” she said. “I’m always on the lookout for acolytes who have a love of nature. People to whom worship at a shrine is more natural than adoration inside the stone walls of a chapel. Too many of the bright young clerics are more fond of doctrine and rituals than what is real. You’re true Shenat, like me. You know what I mean.”
He did, too.
“Our lands are in danger when the old beliefs are neglected,” she said. “Never, ever forget that. It’s easy for the nobility and rulers to lose sight of what is important. I have no faith in the Ardronese Prime to remind the King and court.”
“You think they’ll take any notice of me?”
“The court? No. The Prince and the Princess? I hope they’ll respond to your sincerity. There are bad times coming, and when they do, it is old ways and the witcheries that will save us.”
Bad times? He didn’t like the sound of that. “May I ask what your witchery is?” He was sure she had one. How else could a woman of no particular family or history come to be Pontifect? Va, via a shrine’s unseen guardian, must have gifted her.
“What do you think it is?” she asked, amused rather than offended by the question.
“You read minds?”
“Nothing so simple or so invasive, thank Va! I just have a talent for knowing the general essence of what someone is thinking, if those thoughts are important to me. I doubt I would have become Pontifect without it.”
Oh, fobbing grubbery. She can look inside my head. “A convenient talent, I imagine.”
“Not something I would wish on anyone.” She paused, then added softly, “A witchery lays a terrible burden on whoever possesses it.”
He glimpsed a bleakness in her as she spoke, even as she changed the subject. “But to business. Your real mission in Ardrone. As you must have guessed, it is not just to give spiritual advice. I thought you might be the person to give Prince Ryce a nudge in the right direction every now and then – and that he might listen to you.”
“On the false impression that such advice would be disinterested?”
She silenced him with a glare. “If Lowmeer dominates the spice trade, there’ll be huge disparity in wealth between Ardrone and Lowmeer. The price of spices will spiral to ridiculous amounts if there’s a bad outbreak of the Black Pestilence or the Rose-Spot Fever. You are aware that many people believe carrying a pomander of spices and hanging wreaths of them in the house will ward off pestilence?”
He nodded, remembering the men with the death cart.
“It’s nonsense. But the belief could result in outrageously rich merchants in Lowmeer. That would not be in the interests of peace or of Va-Faith. I hardly need to point out to you that townsfolk are the sector of the population that most ignores our sacred guardianship of nature. Especially very rich townsfolk.”
Ah. It was all about keeping the balance between the differences within the Faith, as well as between the two largest countries within the Va-cherished lands.
“Keep your wits about you, and let me know if you hear anything,” she added. “Prince Ryce won’t be nineteen for ever, and King Edwayn has already appointed him to take charge of the royal interests in the trade routes and the merchant navy.”
That sounded like a fine way to ensure disaster. What on earth would a young pleasure-loving prince – with a penchant for boar- and bear-hunting, or so he’d heard – know about trade and shipping? “Do you really think I’m the person for the task? I can’t say I know much about court manners. Or giving spiritual guidance, if it comes to that.”
“You’ll learn. The Ardronese merchant fleet should match that of Lowmeer, and that’s the way I’d like you to turn Prince Ryce’s thoughts.”
For the next hour, as they sat at her work table, she filled him in on all she knew about the Ardronese court, its royal family and the state of the kingdom’s finances, trade and politics.
She concluded the briefing with a warning. “Be careful with Prime Valerian Fox. I did not choose him for the post, remember. And I have never been able to sense his thoughts. Send your most private reports to me without going through his office and use code words where appropriate. I have a trusted cou
rier. His wife runs a tavern called the Three-Horned Ox. She sits at a cash desk just inside the tavern door. You address your letter to me, and give it to her. The courier – or one of his many sons – gets paid when it’s delivered here.”
He nodded thoughtfully. Things must be worse than he’d imagined, if she couldn’t trust the office of the Prime.
Picking up a handful of the spices he’d brought, she lifted them to her nose and inhaled. “I don’t trust anyone,” she said. “Not even you. I worry about your conceit, Saker. Remember that the cocksure rider falls harder. And I expect you to behave at court with all the decorum of a true witan. Keep your gambling and your whoring—”
“I beg your pardon, your reverence, I do not whore.”
“Your tupping of willing taproom serving girls, then. Keep any unwitan-like behaviour discreet, or better still, non-existent. Is that clear?”
He resisted the temptation to say he had no particular love of gambling either, and wondered what he was missing. Something. It was as if she was looking inside him for something she couldn’t find. He kept his reply devoid of expression. “As you wish, your reverence.”
“I wish I could believe you,” she muttered, exasperated. “You may go. On your way out, ask Secretary Barden for your letters of introduction to the King and Prime Valerian Fox. And see the counting house about your expenses.” She looked him up and down. “You need new clothes. A king’s court, witan. Priestly robes, good quality, not clothes for tavern crawling and brawling. Understand?”
He tried desperately hard not to think of anything at all.
The merchant in Gort cradled the spices in the palm of his hand. Twenty cloves, five anise stars and six candlenuts.
“Where did you steal these?” he asked, and the look he gave was as hard as the nutmegs and the cinnamon sticks Ardhi still had concealed in his pack.
“Not steal,” Ardhi said firmly, submerging his annoyance under a veneer of polite neutrality. If the man wanted a reason to justify his purchase, the truth would suffice. “Bring from island mine. Er, from my island.” Splinter it, I need to practise this pesky language more.