Deverry #06 - The Westlands 02 - A Time of Omens

by Katharine Kerr

  “But still,” she remarked. “If you’d only put this much hard work into your studies—”

  He busied himself with slapping mosquitoes.

  “I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you,” she went on, relentless. “No doubt you’ve lost some ground lately, but now that you’re married and settled, there’s no reason that you couldn’t gain it back.”

  “No doubt you’re correct, O Princess of Powers Perilous, as well as accurate, precise, and just plain right, but the times are a bit troubled, not to say noisy, with all of us packed into this stinking inn together, for concentration. At the moment, the only dweomer I feel like working would be a bit of weather magic, to drive away this wretched storm, but I know that such would offend your fine-tuned sense of ethics.”

  “Things aren’t quite desperate enough for that, yet.”

  “True. It doubtless will clear soon enough on its own. The innkeep assures me that this much rain is most unseasonable.”

  Apparently the innkeep knew his weather, because they woke on the morrow to clearing skies. In a much improved mood the troupe set about cleaning and readying their equipment for the coming show.

  “I hope to every god that I was right about the profit to be made here,” Salamander remarked to Jill. “If I’m not, we are well and truly in the thick of battle without a sword, as the old saying would have it.”

  She said nothing, by a great effort of will.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on with theatrical gloom. “You might as well berate me and be done with it.”

  “I was merely wondering why anyone bothered to settle here in the first place, and then, in the second, why they bother to stay.”

  “Pearls.” All at once he grinned. “Pearls both black and white, mother of pearl and fine shells of all sorts, the best and the rarest for the jewelers of Bardek. And they quarry the black obsidian, too, to send home, and catch the parrots and other rare birds to delight the fine ladies of Surtinna. Merchant ships sail back and forth all the time, trading for their wares.”

  “Nothing but a lot of trinkets, if you ask me.”

  “Trinkets have made men rich before. Of course, a lot of men have died out here, too. The sea’s bounty demands its price.”

  “If it’s that dangerous, maybe you should just take the troupe home now.”

  “Not until I’ve put my scheme to the test, O Monarch of Might Mysterious. And tonight, here in the very market square of Myleton Noa, will the test come!”

  The market square in question was a big sprawl of mud in the center of town. All round the edge stood such civic buildings as the town could muster: a customs house, an archon’s residence, a barracks for the town guard, and a money changer, who supported a small guard of his own, according to the wine seller.

  “He’s a shrewd one, old Din-var-tano,” he remarked to Jill. “And as honest as the sea is deep, too. But a miser? Ye gods! He lives like a slave, and he won’t have a wife because of the expense of keeping one, you see. I’ll wager we won’t see him tonight at this here show. He’d feel obliged to part with one of his precious coppers! But it looks like everyone else in town is here, that’s for certain.”

  Jill and the wine seller were standing on the wooden steps of the archon’s palace, a little above the crowd swarming round the muddy square. The old man had set up his little booth on the top step, and as they talked, he was busily chaining wine cups to the rail. In the velvet twilight, the troupe was raising crossed pairs of standing torches round the stage while Salamander himself stood underneath the slack rope and pulled on it to make sure it was secure.

  “We’ve never had a show through here before,” the wine seller went on. “I wager I’ll do good business after it’s over.”

  “No doubt. I take it things are lonely in Anmurdio.”

  “As lonely as the sea is deep, that’s for certain. Sometimes I’m sorry I came, I tell you, but then, a man can live his life as he likes out here without a lot of city clerks laying down the law and grabbing his coin for taxes.”

  “Ah. I see. Tell me something. Do you ever hear of ships sailing south?”

  “South? What for? Nothing out there but sea and wind.”

  “You’re sure?” She paused to kill a particularly big mosquito that had landed on her wrist. “You’ve never heard of any islands lying far to the south?”

  He sucked his stumps of teeth while he considered.

  “Never,” he said at last. “But I can tell you who you want to ask about that. See over there, that great big fellow standing in the torchlight? The one with the red tunic—that’s right, him. Dekki’s his name, and he’s quite a sailing man, goes to all sorts of places, and not all of them are on maps, if you take my meaning.”

  Jill sighed, because she did see. A pirate, most likely, and not her favorite sort of person in the world. Before she could ask the wine seller more, on the stage drums boomed out and flutes sang. In a pleasurable shudder of applause, the crowd surged closer. The show had begun.

  From the very first moment, when the youngest and clumsiest acrobat cartwheeled across the stage, Jill could see that Salamander’s commercial instincts had delivered triumph. No matter whether a performer pulled off a difficult trick or fell in the middle of an easy one, the crowd clapped and cheered. At the end of each turn coins clinked and slithered on the stage. After all, these colonists were rich by the standards of the cities they’d left behind, but lacked luxuries to spend their wealth upon. When the heart of the show appeared, Keeta and her flaming torches, Marka dancing upon the slack rope, the crowd screamed and stamped their feet. Silver flashed like rain in the torchlight. When Jill turned to speak to the wine seller, she found him utterly entranced, smiling as he stared. Salamander himself performed the greatest trick of all, making the crowd fall silent again to catch his every word. It seemed to Jill that he luxuriated in their attention like a man drowsing in a hot and perfumed bath. She felt as if she should slap him awake before he drowned.

  Finally, when the performers were exhausted beyond the power of cheers and coins to revive them, the show wound down. By then the moon was low on the horizon, and the wheel of stars turning toward dawn. In a cooler wind from the sea the crowd lingered, watching the troupe strike its stage or drifting over the various booths and peddlers selling food and drink. When Dekki came strolling up, the crowd round the wine booth parted like the sea beneath a prow to let him through, and the wine seller handed him a cup without waiting to be asked. The pirate paid twice its worth for it, though; Jill supposed that his high standing in the town depended on his generosity just as a Deverry lord’s respect among his folk depended on his. The wine seller made him a bob of a bow.

  “This lady here would like to speak with you, Dekki.” He jerked a thumb in Jill’s direction. “She’s a scholar and a map-maker.”

  “Indeed?” His voice was a rumble like distant thunder. “My honor, then. What do you want to know?”

  They moved away from the press of thirsty customers and stood by a pair of torches. Jill pulled her map out of her shirt and held it unrolled in the flaring light.

  “I got this over in Inderat Noa,” she said. “Do you see those islands far to the south? You wouldn’t happen to know if they really exist, would you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me they did. Let’s put it this way. There’s something out there.” He took the map and frowned at the dim markings. “Once me and my men, we were blown off course by a storm, and a bad one it was, too. We rode south before it for many a day, and we just barely pulled through, and we found wrack from a ship that wasn’t so lucky. We spotted what looked like a figurehead and hauled it on board. We were thinking, see, that it was an Anmurdio ship, and so we’d take it home for the owners’ reward. Huh. Never seen anything like it in my life.” He handed back the map. “It was a woman, and she was smiling and had all this long hair, a nice job of carving it was, you would have sworn you could have run
your fingers through it. But she had wings, or, I should say, what we found had stumps of wings. They must have folded back along the bow, like. But anyway, there were these letters carved round the belt she was wearing. Never seen anything like them. I call them letters, but they were magic marks for all I know.”

  “And what happened to this thing?”

  “Oh, we tossed it back. Wasn’t one of our ships.”

  “I see. So, then, it must have come from somewhere to the south?”

  “Most likely. And then there’s the bubbles, too. Down on the southern beaches, sometimes you find these glass bubbles after a storm.” He cupped his massive hands. “About so big. Bad luck to break one. The priests say there must be evil spirits trapped inside. But someone must have blown the glass and trapped the spirits.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in sailing south someday, just to find out what lies that way.”

  “Not on your life!”

  “Not even if someone paid you well?”

  “Not even then. You can’t spend coin down Hades way, can you? That storm took us about as far as a man can sail and still get himself home again, and we all came cursed near to starving to death before we made port.”

  The way he shook his head, and the edge of fear wedging into his voice, made it plain that not all the persuasion in the world was going to change his mind. Jill stood him to another cup of wine in thanks for the information, then bid him farewell and strolled over to join the troupe. They were laughing, tossing jests back and forth and all round the circle, dancing through their work, so happy—so relieved, really—that she couldn’t bear to spoil their celebration. She would wait to talk with Salamander on the morrow, she decided

  “Ebañy?” she called out. “I’m going back to the inn. This trip’s wrung me out.”

  He tossed a length of rope into a wagon and hurried over, peering at her in the flickering torchlight. He himself looked exhausted, streaming with sweat, his eyes pools of dark shadow.

  “Jill, are you well? Lately you’ve looked so pale.”

  “It’s the heat.” As she spoke, she realized the grim truth of it. “I’m not used to it, and I’m not as young as I used to be, you know. And it seems to be taking its toll on you, as well.”

  He nodded his agreement and ran both hands through his sweaty hair to slick it back from his face.

  “Don’t stay up too late yourself, my friend,” Jill said. “As for me, I think I’ll go have some of that watered wine or winy water or whatever it is, and then just go to bed.”

  She was so exhausted that once she lay down in her inn chamber, she fell straight asleep and never even heard the entire troupe clattering in, an hour or so later.

  In the middle of the night, though, Jill woke in a puddle of sweat. Since the window was a patch of black only slightly grayer than the room itself, she could assume that the moon had already set but the dawn was still hours away. Swearing under her breath she got up, rubbed herself dry with her dirty shirt, and put on her cleaner one to go outside for a breath of air. The compound was utterly silent, utterly dark except for the faint murmur of water in the fountain and a glimmer of stars far above. She made her careful way across the cracked tiles to the fountain, groped around, and found a safe seat on its edge. Here outside, with a trace of breeze brushing her face and the sound of water splashing nearby, she felt cool enough to think.

  Getting an Anmurdio ship for the trip south was out of the question. She decided that straightaway. Even if the crew proved trustworthy, they and their passengers both would still likely die from the bad water and worse food on such a long journey. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she could never subject the troupe to the journey, not even if they had the best boat in the world to carry them. Not even Marka? She indulged herself with a few choice curses on Salamander’s head. They could neither take the lass along nor leave her behind, not now, unless of course Salamander stayed with her. But go alone? She was willing to admit that the idea of traveling alone across the southern sea frightened her, in spite of all her dweomer, but she also knew that if she had to, she would. When she looked up, the stars hung bright and cold, a vast indifferent sweep dwarfing even a dweomermaster and her concerns in a tide of light and darkness. In the spirit of an invalid demanding a lantern in her nighttime chamber, Jill snapped her fingers and called upon the Wildfolk of Aethyr. They came, clustering round the decayed stone nymph in the center of the fountain and shedding a faint but comforting glow.

  The silver light made her think of Dallandra, just idly at first, until an idea struck home like an arrow. Jill pointed at one of the spirits hovering nearby.

  “You know the lands of the Guardians. Fetch Dallandra for me.”

  The spirit winked out of manifestation, but whether it had truly understood the command, Jill couldn’t say. She waited for a long time, was, in fact, about to give it up and go back inside when she saw a wisp of silver light gathering above the fountain.

  “Dalla?” She breathed out the name.

  But it was only an undine, raising itself up as sleek as a water snake, to stare at her with enormous eyes before vanishing in a swirl of water. Dressed in her elven clothes, though the amethyst jewel no longer hung round her neck, Dallandra herself strolled across the courtyard, as solid as the cobblestones.

  “I can’t believe I managed it,” she remarked, grinning, and she spoke in Elvish. “But it worked, and here I am. Jill, I’ve got so much to tell you. Evandar’s found the islands, first off, and we can take you there.”

  “Take me there?” Jill felt as muddled as if someone had just struck her on the head. “You’ve got a ship?”

  “No, but we don’t need one. It’s Evandar’s dweomer. But I don’t know how many of you we can—”

  “I’ll be the only person making the trip. I’ve been dreading taking other people along with me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am! For all I knew, we could all drown out there.”

  “Most likely you would.” She paused, glancing over her shoulder at something that only she could see. “I’ve still got to be quick, even though it’s ever so much easier to talk like this. But Evandar said to tell you something else, that these people respect and honor the dweomer more than any other thing under the sun and moon, and so you’ll have a welcome there.”

  “And I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that, too! I’d been rather wondering about it.”

  “No doubt.” She flashed a grin. “When do you want to go? I imagine that you’ve got farewells to make.”

  “And some gear to get together. And, well, there’s somewhat I’ve got to do before I leave, not that Salamander’s going to thank me for it, I suppose. I don’t suppose we can set a time, anyway. If I say a fortnight, how will you know when that comes round?”

  “It’s difficult, yes. I do have a plan. There’s a place that I can wait, one that’s next to your world, you see, and so its Time runs a little closer to yours. Get yourself ready, and I’ll come to you as soon as I can. Send me one of the Wildfolk for a messenger.”

  “Splendid. And you have my thanks and a thousand times my thanks.”

  “Most welcome.” She paused again, staring down at the ground and frowning. “The child. She’s going to have to be born soon, because there’s trouble brewing in our lands. I can’t explain. I only half understand it myself. But it’s going to have to be soon.”

  All at once a thought struck Jill. It might well be that Salamander and his new wife would serve the dweomer whether he wanted to or no.

  “Tell me something. Could the child be born here? In the islands, I mean?”

  “No, not at all. All the omens, and what little logic there is in this thing, for that matter, say she has to be born into the Wesdands.”

  “That’s a pity.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, just that I know a new husband who might make a splendid father for such a child,”

  “Good, be
cause, you see, there’ll be other children born later, lots and lots—at least, if I can carry this thing off. Jill, at times I’m frightened.”

  “Well, for what my help is worth, you have it.”

  “It’s worth a very great deal.”

  They clasped hands and shared a smile. Jill was surprised at how warm and solid Dallandra’s hand felt; she’d been expecting some cool etheric touch.

  “If great things are on the move,” Jill said, “I’d best wrap up my affairs here and get on my way back to Deverry.”

  “When the time draws near, I’ll take you back to Deverry, have no fear about that. I’ve so many marvels to tell you about, to show you, once we’ve time to talk together for a while, but now—”

  “Yes, I understand. You’d best go. It’s almost dawn, and if other people find you here, they’ll ask questions.”

  Dallandra walked toward the inn-yard gates, turned once to wave, then vanished in a glimmer of gray dawn light. Marvels, indeed! Jill thought. All at once she laughed aloud, thinking what a wonderful jest it would be on Salamander, if indeed he ended up fathering the body for some dweomer-touched child. Even Nevyn, she supposed, would have been able to see the humor in this for all that the old man could be downright grim more often than not.

  When Dallandra mentioned trouble brewing, she meant nothing more than the ill will that Alshandra bore her, but as things turned out she’d spoken more truly than she knew. After she left Jill at the inn yard, she traveled back through the twisting roads and the mists to Evandar’s country. He was waiting for her on the hilltop, standing alone and looking down through the night to the meadow where his people danced by torchlight. The music drifted up to them on the wind, harp and drum and flute.

  “You’ve come back,” he said. “My heart ached the whole time you were gone.”