by Janny Wurts
“Mending!” she shrilled, momentarily paused to burrow into her satchel. “A stitch in time spares an unlucky spill!” While she strung tags with the owners’ identities onto the leather-work, Dakar groaned, now yoked under a damaged chariot collar, winking with brass terrets. Tarens bided, uneasy, until a kick in the shin focused him on the label the enchantress slapped into his palm. “Knot that onto the bit ring! Quickly!”
Tarens complied. He ploughed after her wake, dodging a fractious war-horse, then warned away from the heels of the next by a switch-bearing, pimple-faced groom.
Dakar waddled, by then, weighted further by worn traces, a fringed horse-cloth with a ripped hem, and a saddle in need of restuffing.
Someone’s ribald query chaffed Elaira over the prowess of her paunch-bellied pack-mule.
She laughed and hollered a cheerful retort. “Can you studs not imagine a use for yourselves past a laggard’s roll in the blankets?” A prod at the spellbinder’s stiffened back wrangled his offended tread onwards. “Caught out, gutfull with a contraband flask? This pathetic fellow’s damned grateful I snatched him away from a justified whipping.”
More grooms bustled up, each with a fresh offering. Elaira walked jingling, shoulders regaled with bridles, and Tarens, conscripted, acquired a rowelled spur with a broken strap, two holed boots, and a baldric with a cracked buckle. The marginal advantage, that he went armed, became moot under the encumbrance.
He followed, knees whacked by the swing of the officer’s shanked bit, while Elaira threaded her way through the bedlam of lackeys and runners, flushed idlers, and cranky men fixated on breakfast. Under the dazzling flare of the sunrise, through an armourer’s industrious clangour, Tarens realized Elaira was speaking.
“You’ve scarcely an hour before this camp’s set on the march. Your mentor will steer you through your assignments. He’s already aware of the history he’s shielding. Find me with Liess the laundress, if needed. Any plausible errand will cover your visit.”
She paused, divested Tarens of his load, then elbowed him towards a petty officer’s tent more dingy and weathered than most. “Take the bridle inside. You’re expected.” Then she nodded to steady his pulverized nerves and abandoned him to her arrangement.
Tarens wrestled reluctance. Cursed out of the path of a hustling equerry, he firmed his step, clamped his delivery in clammy fingers, then bent his fair head and ducked through the flap entry.
Gloom enveloped him, tainted by mildewed canvas and the martial reek of rancid grease, rusted metal, and sweat-clogged fleeces. He paused, made aware through the prickle of goose bumps, of someone seated to his right.
Movement stirred. A sturdy man shoved off a creaking camp stool. “Light deliver!” he gasped, shaken gruff. “That snip of a mender spoke true!”
Tarens snatched the impression of height, spiked with short, greying hair. Then the outside light revealed a weathered face whose bearded, blunt features haunted him for an aged resemblance to his brother, Efflin. The next instant, the clasp of two massive arms crushed the stunned breath from his chest.
“Father?” he gasped, shaken by disbelief as the fierce embrace released his rocked balance.
Astonished, he surveyed a familiar grin, grown uneven with two broken teeth. Eyes as blue as his own crinkled with joy, spilling tears down leathery cheeks gouged crosswise by a battle scar. “You’re called Tethos, I’m told? A fine name from good family. Now, let’s pack down this tent. We’ll eat on the march if you’re hungry.”
While dust raised by The Hatchet’s southbound war host silted the arid downs of Daon Ramon, summer’s white haze lidded the low country and steamed off the scummed bogs and sinkpools that patched Silvermarsh like liquid glass splashed off a smelter’s rod. Beyond the thornbrakes that defeated the Ettinmen’s unbreached pursuit, the flat mire unrolled, clotted by tangles of hazel and bull grass, and stamped with crowned thickets of marsh maple. By night the air reeked like a sodden sponge, and by day, the welter of heavy humidity rippled like fumes off a vat.
Biting insects shimmered in swarms. Every patch of uncovered skin became welted to itching misery. Arithon kindled smudge torches only between dawn and dark to avoid visibility. What broken rest could be snatched after nightfall relied upon beds of cut bracken, tented under the stifling linen of Vivet’s tattered shift.
No recourse availed when Valien’s fussing exploded to cantankerous tears. Cajoling him from his tantrums demanded a near-to-mystical patience and all of a Masterbard’s artful skill. Vivet battled the exhausted urge to abandon her bitter objective. Over and over, she stiffened her purpose with the cold-hearted reminder: the man striving beside her was not what he seemed, a mere criminal on the run, but a sorcerer steered by an inscrutable purpose. Altruism alone did not sustain such devotion under the hardship of their east-bound flight.
“What on this forsaken earth do you want from me?” Vivet demanded, knee deep in reeking muck, her scalp itching under a filthy kerchief.
Arithon turned in his tracks and regarded her, his tangled black hair clenched in Valien’s fists, and lean cheek-bones clamped between the boy’s grubby, skinned knees. Through the maddened drum of bare heels on his chest, he said, injured, “I thought I’d ceded the victor’s claimed forfeit.”
Vivet scrubbed her streaming brow, palms sliced raw from grasping at saw-grass tufts in slimy footing. “From the start, we’ve been a thankless burden. What incentive do you have to keep us?”
His smile split a face as worn as her own. “Not everyone styles their motive for gain. Tell me, what were you running away from when you left Deal?”
A slip off a tussock spared her reply. Vivet spat a splashed mouthful of grit, mauled by a suicidal urge to unburden. Whatever else the man might suspect, surely he guessed she had knifed the trapper before the luckless fellow refuted the falsehood that framed his assault.
Vivet sloshed through the sink-hole, swearing over the perilous bent of her candid self-examination.
Yet Arithon addressed only the obvious facet of her frustration. “You’ve been a game traveller. Perhaps a day more, and the marshes recede. The dry plain beyond will see us the rest of the way through West Halla.”
Vivet suppressed her alarm. His uncanny guidance had far outstripped her best estimate of their progress. Almost too late, she grasped the dilemma, that she must react quickly to slow him down.
“Story, story, story!” yelled Valien, bored by their conversation.
Arithon laughed. “Lad, have mercy! Stop drubbing me to a pulp, and I’ll surrender and spin you a tale.”
The boy quieted, lulled by the cadence of exquisite speech, while the sun sweltered down, scalding reflections off the stirred ripples. Vivet trudged, steps measured by the wet plop of frogs and the squawking flight of startled herons. Shoes hung by tied laces around her neck, and with the runnelled sweat stinging her eyes, she hiked her muddy skirt over her wrist. Bunched cloth masked her furtive snatch for the cooking knife sheathed at her waist. The blade left her hand with scarcely a splash, lost at once in the turbid mire.
Hours passed, and the low sun snuffed early, swallowed by flannel-grey cloud that chased icy gusts through the pale stands of marsh reed. Caught in the open when the squall struck, Arithon bundled Valien under his wet shirt, his own body the boy’s shelter from the frigid rain, and the pea-sized hail that pinged down and scourged exposed flesh. Thunder slammed through the battening murk, sizzled with actinic spears of close lightning. Valien keened with fear, unconsolable, his hiccuping sobs exhausted to whimpers as the maelstrom subsided to vertical rainfall. The aftermath melted into fallen dusk, gloomy under thinned drizzle that tapered off into steamy mist.
“Valien’s chilled,” Arithon observed through the patter of droplets off sodden reeds. “We have to risk a small fire to warm him.”
The need to shave sticks for dry kindling disclosed her disastrous loss of the knife. After a glance at Vivet’s aghast face, Arithon withheld comment, even to remark on her untoward shiver
. “We won’t go hungry,” he ventured through the discomfortable pause. “I’ll rake for snails and mussels while the light lasts. Afterward, with cat-tails for torches, we can scoop for crawdads with the pannikin.”
So the evening went, the drilling whine of mosquitoes momentarily suppressed by the violent weather. The small flame kindled to ease the child also boiled their noisome catch, the rubbery morsels picked from the shells with stems of plucked sedge. Valien raised objection to the clammy taste, until tearful fury wore him down, and he slept despite the pinch of his hollow belly. Vivet chewed through her share, her guilty apology smothered, while Arithon sat wakeful to watch. Between them lay silence like an accusation, while the frogs croaked in deafening chorus, and the humid night clung like spilled ink.
He spoke at last, while Vivet tossed, chafed to restlessness by wet clothes, upon ground that squelched to each movement.
“What were you promised if you brought me down?”
Fist jammed against her clamped teeth, Vivet shrank, feigning sleep to avoid a confession. For the consequence of her sabotage once again had unravelled Arithon’s plan. Without steel, he could not skin snared game in the wild, or provide for a small child’s comfort. Confronted by two more fortnights of hard-scrabble foraging, he knew, exactly as she had: Valien’s welfare demanded a turn northward in pursuit of civilized amenities.
The set-back this time was not faced with complacency. Though he might have, Arithon did not wield sorcerous arts, or sing to melt her into pliant surrender. His bardic voice nuanced only by compassion, he appealed to evoke her free will.
“I know that your father was a kindly man who indulged you, among two other daughters. He sickened when you were eight, injured by a blow to the head while felling timber. Your mother nursed his infirmity for five terrible years, traumatized by his fits of irrational screaming. Tanuay and your brothers struggled to cope, forced to seek work while underage to sustain your family.”
Eyes shut, arms hugged to her breast while tears leaked through shut eyelids, Vivet dared not drown his recitation by muffling her ears. To move was to break, unstrung by sympathy fit to seal her destruction. Paralysed by threat, and stark fear for survival, she endured, while his onslaught continued.
“Your elder sisters married early to relieve the stress on the household. Older men wed them, a practical choice made to ease the additional obligations imposed by marital kinship. Duty forbade the girls their youthful sweethearts, since a husband not yet established risked the burden of further dependence. You were resented for keeping your freedom. No matter, to them, that you were alone, a child overfaced by an adult’s share of the household chores. You watched your mother suffer the brunt of your father’s violent insanity. Too small, you were helpless to do aught but cower, while she became battered and bruised.”
Vivet shivered, while the gentle delivery exposed the nightmare gist with pitiless clarity: of the terrified hours, spent huddled inside the chicken coop through her father’s bellowing rages; of sweeping up broken crockery, and washing the clothes caked with spilled food and excrement amid her mother’s listless depression. Vivet still flinched at shouts, marked deep by the trauma as arguments flared from her brothers’ frayed tempers; she ached still from the poisonous loneliness of her sisters’ sullen detachment.
Sobs stifled, Vivet relived the bad memories, while Arithon concluded her sorry history with eviscerating kindness.
“The day came when your father pinned you against the chopping block. Your mother doused him with boiling soup, almost scalding him blind to keep him from killing you. He died that night in his bed, perhaps by a desperate act of suffocation. Your mother was shunned for suspected murder, without a witness to claim otherwise. In harsh consequence, you were declared eligible, to be made handfast at fourteen years of age for the betterment of your lot.”
Vivet held, strangled breathless, but the sordid account cut off short of full closure. No reference was made of her flight from the settlement; no weighted conjecture implied the bargain struck with Koriathain for shelter when she had reached Deal, scared and starving.
“You alone must decide where your destiny leads,” Arithon finished. He never mentioned Valien’s fate, sharpest weapon of all in the battle between them.
The last of the night passed in brutal silence. Arithon kept his wakeful vigil, until dawn lit the world grey as misted pearl, and they broke their squalid camp to turn north. When sunrise flared like spilled blood from a wound, Arithon shared out their belongings as usual, but lashed the pannikin to his own belt for safekeeping.
Two days more brought them out of the swamp to the pebbled shore of Daenfal Lake. Valien by then was pinched sallow with hunger, his shrieks loud enough to startle the wading birds and perhaps, flag a passing trade barge bound downstream for Shipsport. Fortune’s back-handed favour instead gave their party a fishing boat, beached in the aftermath of the freak storm. She lay canted for repair on the strand, her sunburned crew sitting idle on casks, three dicing to quips of caustic humour, while a fourth with a squint toasted skewered bread and cheese over a drift-wood fire. Long since, they had patched her breached hull with sail canvas. A fished spar mended the split mast. They had lingered only because one of the crew languished in a sling with a broken collar-bone.
Arithon’s effort to barter his healer’s skills for a rigging knife became stonewalled by their bandy-legged captain.
Crumpled features crested with a game-cock’s cow-lick, the fellow sized up the destitute woman and child, then measured Arithon’s able build with a gimlet stare. “You’ll pull an oar well enough to get by. Sail’s in tatters, and this tub needs four at the benches to limp back into Daenfal.” Terms declared, he puckered and spat, striking a gull into squalling flight. “It’s passage for your three selves across. Else go your own way, and bedamned. Coin’s paid for fair labour after we dock, and you’ll find knives aplenty for sale in the market.” Against Arithon’s cornered reluctance, he added with unforeseen kindness, “Get us launched straightaway, and I’ll throw in your board, if only to shut that wean’s pitiful noise.”
Summer 5925
Daenfal
The lake-side trade port piled against the gorge at the mouth of the Arwent carved a notched silhouette against the pellucid sky of imminent dawn. On approach, the crumbled necropolis promontory reared to the east, toothed by its skeletal spine of memorial spires. The town nestled beneath, buttressed by a crenellated sandstone wall, dusted in blown mist from the falls that reeled off the cliff rim of the Arwent Plateau. The pen-stroke of the rope ferry’s cables sliced across the roiling outflow beneath. Crammed between, peaked slate roofs and corniced abutments lay jammed in serried disorder, flagged with the banners streamed from the guild-halls and the turquoise pennant of the mayor.
Noise racketed off the busy wharf, the boom and rumble of rolling barrels sliced by the vendors’ tremolo patter. Down the steep, narrow alleys where night’s shadow lingered, lit windows and torches still glimmered orange, nicked like sequins between the mica-flash glitter, where glazed casements caught the flare of first sunrise.
Bells tolled. A flock of white shore-birds winged over the ripple of chop. Valien pointed and laughed, perched in Vivet’s embrace at the fishing-craft’s rail. She minded her child with protective dread, while the oars drove the prow through the gap in the breakwater. Arithon laboured with the crew at the bench, the current rib-splitting joke shared among them diverting his notice of her apprehension.
Long overdue and beyond turning back, her cold reckoning waited ashore.
Two men shipped their sweeps. One raced to the bow to hook the float mooring, while the other guided the tillerman’s course through a crowded anchorage scattered with buoys. Idle vessels bobbed like schooled fish, nosed to windward with furled sails. The captain’s barked orders saw his damaged craft shackled, and her tender launched from the transom. First away, the mate went to schedule repair and buy replacement tackle at the chandler’s. The remaining crew stowed t
he lines and swabbed decks, while the return pass delivered the injured man home to his family.
Too soon, Arithon arrived smiling at Vivet’s elbow, a faded waterman’s kerchief tied over his midnight hair. He took charge of Valien’s excitable bulk, nodded aft, and said gently, “Time we were away.”
His escort delivered her into the boat, with her fearless toddler passed into her arms by the sailhand remaining aboard. Then Arithon shouldered the oars with the captain. Their tandem strokes skimmed the craft to the wharf, where, unladen amid the water-front bustle, the vessel’s master clasped Arithon’s blistered palm and squared up his debt.
“Might be soft as a lubber, lad, but I ken the work of a blue-water rigger.” He bestowed a wash-leather bag, a generous twelve coinweight heftier than promised. “I’m still a man short. Once we’re refitted, be welcome aboard if yer wantin’ a berth.”
“That’s kindly,” said Arithon, his flushed pleasure sincere. “I’ll remember your name though the plight of the child and his mother comes first.”
The pair parted ways with genial regret, the captain to chase down the mate tasked with the list for the chandler’s, and Arithon to pursue resupply and a quality blade at the market.
Vivet all but flinched when his gaze focused on her, mindful as an intimate touch.
“You look tired.” Her evident strain explained by the rough passage and restless sleep, he steered a firm course down the dock, speaking through the boom of a caulker’s mallet and the jostling, bare-chested labour of the stevedores. “Let’s find lodging for you and the boy, with a meal. Take your ease for the day while I seek arrangements with an east-bound caravan. With luck, we’ll be on the road before nightfall.”
Vivet gestured her limp acquiescence. The bustle and noise forgave her reluctance to speak, and the warped boards underfoot excused her downcast glance. She wound through the mounds of wet fish-nets and stacked crates, the gunny-sacks and the roped barrels, while the hubbub of Daenfal’s trade crowded the ramped gangways. The taints of tarred hemp, strewn sawdust, and gutted fish aggravated her queasy nerves. A low stair connected the timber wharf with the barge ferry’s buttressed stone landing. There, Arithon’s panther stride checked beside her.