In a Time of Treason

by David Keck

  “I love a misty morning,” said Lamoric in a puff of fog. “It’s like Creation’s ours: a toy in our hands. We could be on islands with the rest of old Errest fallen away.”

  Bald Badan bared what teeth he had left, silently snarling from within a hairy twist of blanket. He looked like the wolf who had swallowed the old woman in the bedtime story.

  Berchard winced with his good eye. “You’ll have to tell us when morning comes so we don’t miss it, eh? Did you sleep?”

  Lamoric twitched a smile.

  “Did you sleep at all?” Berchard pressed. Coensar’s glance was like a glimpse of blade. None of them were too pleased about Lamoric’s mad rush.

  “Lads,” said Lamoric, “this summons couldn’t have come at a better time. When this moon’s waned, the fighting season will be upon us. And you’d have scattered to the four winds, don’t deny it. We’ve got a windfall. It doesn’t pay to complain.”

  Big Ouen reached round himself to scrub at fleabites between his shoulder blades, both hands meeting in the middle of his back. He had arms like an ape. The man’s gold teeth glinted. “There’s been little enough that pays lately.”

  “We’ll be led before the Hazelwood Throne,” said Lamoric. “I’ll kneel and place my hands between Ragnal’s. There will be a feast. People will remember you. Ouen, Badan, Coensar, Durand. I hope you’ve all got decent surcoats.”

  The tottering procession wound its way from the cliff top of Burrstone Walls to the hovels of Burrstone Landing. The livestock was still indoors, but they passed millstones. Of the thousands cut from the old pits, some slender fraction had fetched up along the roads each year, broken. Now, wheels like moldy cheese were heaped by the hundred. Some were cracked, some split, others were lost under carpets of moss and sod. This was Burrstone.

  “The blame for delay will not be laid at my feet. We must have a good look at this boat. This Bittern. Odric? Odmund? He’s told us she’s ready. And the river’s free of ice.”

  A few of the men passed an uneasy glance between them. Lamoric seemed more frayed than usual.

  Though there were stragglers all the way up the track to Burrstone Walls, Lamoric had reached the pier. A goodsized boat waited there, white and blue on a perfect mirror of still water. Durand guessed it might be forty feet from its high curling stem to the matching stern. The cliffs of Burrstone Walls cut a smooth backwater from the Maidensbier, though both cliffs and stronghold were little more than a dark suggestion in the clouds as they reached the pier.

  Lamoric strode out, rings shivering across the water from the dock pilings.

  “You all know how hard we worked last summer. You know what it cost us. We saved a king of the Atthias.” The men were nodding warily: everyone from steely Coensar to Badan the wolf. A gangplank bridged the gap to the Bittern’s gunnel. Lamoric stepped out. “And now we have a message to put in his own hands.”

  He made to step into the boat.

  And a storm of birds exploded.

  An impossible flock of starlings roared from the hollow belly of the Bittern, filling the sky with wings and shrill cries. Lamoric lurched on the narrow gangplank, and then he was falling into the frigid water.

  Like one man, Durand and Coensar sprang onto the pier, reaching into the spray. Panes of ice clattered and smashed. Durand caught a flailing wrist, and with a few firm jerks, he and the captain had their shuddering lord free.

  “She’ll be lighter without the passengers,” Lamoric spluttered. He hauled himself up, taking full advantage of hands and shoulders. There was a look in his eye, wary as a wild animal.

  “Coen,” said Lamoric, “get things started while I sort out this bloody mess. Find the ship’s master and make sure he’s got oarsmen. The bailiff’s meant to have got us provisions, the Host alone knows what he thinks that means. Frogs, maybe.” Durand tried to swing his cloak around the man’s shoulders. Lamoric scoffed. “Keep it. One of us deserves a dry cloak.”

  They turned to find ranks of villagers frozen. Scores and scores of men and women stood with their hands in the fist and spread fingers’ sign of Heaven’s Eye. They had seen omen heaped on omen. Lamoric stalked through them, giving them a showman’s wave.

  Durand watched him go, wondering what was in their master’s mind.

  AS DURAND AND the others fetched their gear, the village women set to smuggling iron charms aboard and wordlessly painting grease down the long curve of the stempost. Dock-hands swung provisions into the belly of the Bittern.

  A Burrstone man with a cap of sweat-burnished sheepskin knotted under his beard played overseer. This was Odemar the ship’s master, and he grumbled as knights looked on. He possessed the same outsized fists and squat frame as all his kin. “It’s early to make the passage,” he grumbled, “and the Maiden’s high.”

  “What were they doing at the prow there?” said Lamoric. The village women were just bustling from the dock.

  Odemar seemed taken aback that his would-be cargo could speak. “It’s the grease of nine wrens . . . Lordship.” His voice was like the grinding of stones.

  Berchard smiled broadly, scratching his grizzled beard. “Never drown, wrens. So they say, but you’re never meant to cause one harm, unless—”

  “Women’s business,” grumbled Odemar.

  “I suppose,” said Berchard. “But you don’t normally see them at their b—”

  “It’s no good thing to rush a sailing.”

  “Host Below! Is the river free of ice?” Lamoric asked. “Was there silver enough in the purse?”

  Odemar’s square beard twitched as his lip twisted. “Aye,” he allowed.

  Before Lamoric could say more, Coensar spoke up. The captain had a thumb on the pommel of Keening, his High Kingdom blade. “Then your Bittern’s first load will be men, not millstones, Master Odemar. And we will sail for Eldinor and not Yestreen down the river.” He never took his eyes from the boat.

  Odemar grunted assent and subsided into silence. And soon four of the men loading baggage abruptly piled into the boat, hunkering down along the gunnels.

  “We’re ready?” asked Lamoric.

  Odemar’s beard bobbed once. “Just in time, I think.” If the man hadn’t been looking to the sky, Durand would have thought he was talking about Lamoric’s mood. Without a further word, Odemar stalked over the gangplank and benches to the stern of his Bittern. Durand and the others followed warily, catching stays and sheets to keep upright. They had no horses, no serving men, and only Guthred to play shield-bearer to them all. Durand sat down behind Coensar and felt his world contract. As long as the Lambing Moon remained in the Heavens, the whole company must live in an open boat forty feet long and a dozen feet wide.

  Durand snugged his traveling chest against the thwarts to make a place for his heels. Lamoric was still pacing and alternately laughing or cursing.

  When Durand looked up, he found Deorwen standing above the cool water, pale and beautiful as the moon. Durand stared, he was sure, like an ox over a fence. She, Father Odwy, and a redheaded sexton had come down from the castle together. Old Guthred put his hands round her waist to lower her into the boat, and she took her place beside Lamoric.

  “Just in time, Father,” Master Odemar grunted.

  Across the blue Maidensbier, the Eye of Heaven cut a seam above the bank.

  “When have I not known my time, Master Odemar?” the priest said and thumped the massive Book of Moons on the sexton’s chest—as though the boy were a lectern—throwing its broad pages wide to find his place.

  While the priest started a Dawn Thanksgiving for voyagers under the Lambing Moon, Berchard turned to the ship’s master. “Last sailors I knew didn’t like priests before journeys.”

  “Seafaring men they must have been. A river’s another thing. You’ll ask the King of Heaven to keep the river-wights at bay, but there’s no power can check the Lord of the Deep at sea, only rile him. Lordship.”

  The priest climbed aboard, tottering stem to stern as the poor sexton struggled t
o walk backward and hold the great book where his master could read it. A censor slipped its own sanctuary scent into the mist.

  When the priest had finished, he handed the rattling censor to his sexton. “Come now, the oil, boy,” he pressed, and the sexton set to juggling hot brass and holy book to dig a glass vessel from under his tabard.

  The oarsmen, even the master, slid the caps from their heads.

  “And now?” Berchard asked.

  “Oil before water, under the Eye, Lordship,” muttered Odemar, and the priest daubed a gleaming Eye of Heaven on each oarsman’s forehead.

  Lamoric twisted on his bench. “It is not as though we are sailing for the Dreaming Land.” But Berchard had untied his cap for a dab of his own before the priest was back ashore.

  “Are we off?” Lamoric asked.

  The master squinted into the dawn.

  “Aye, Lordship.” The oarsmen hoisted their sweeps as Master Odemar took hold of the steering oar. “You lot on the pier, cast us off.” When the boat was drifting on the cove, and gaffed out to give the sweeps room, Durand saw Odemar nod to his small audience of oarsmen—all facing the stern while their master and his passengers faced the dawn. “All right.”

  And the oarsmen hauled, driving the boat across the cove, faster and faster, and, as they gathered speed, upstream.

  “Master Odemar,” said Lamoric, turning, “I thought Eldinor was north. Do you mean to say I’ve been mistaken? Did old Saerdan Voyager beach his ship in the mountains then?”

  The ship’s master hardly spared a glance, hauling the tiller in to switch the Bittern’s prow into the current as the big river caught the boat.

  “One turn sunwise,” he grunted, “Lordship, to show respect to him up there.” Odemar jutted his chin for Heaven’s Eye.

  But the boat was caught in the fast-moving Maidensbier. They managed a few strokes upstream, and then the master let the bow fall off. The whole vessel weathervaned around the master’s steering oar, and the oarsmen began to pull in the sweeps.

  Oars clattered as they slid home along the gunnels. “Now, what is this?” Lamoric demanded.

  “We never row downstream, Lordship,” said Odemar.

  Lamoric glanced to Coensar before pressing on. “Eldinor is not Yestreen, you realize. It’s some distance.”

  “No point rowing downstream, Lordship. Not on Maid-ensbier.” He had shoved the tiller away from himself, picking a course roughly midway between the stone banks.

  “You realize that the offense we might cause by arriving too late would be difficult to—”

  “Aye, Lordship.”

  As Lamoric settled back onto his bench, his wife’s hand on his arm, Durand took a last glance back: the villagers of the Burrstones looked on like boulders on a hillside. This was the second vessel most had seen leave that day.

  WHEN THE EYE of Heaven was high, Guthred passed around the bread and cheese, and the men fished for the wine. Master Odemar led his oarsmen, muttering, through the Noontide Lauds. Durand watched the blue and stony banks from his spot on the bench.

  “Puts me in mind of my youth, this does,” said Berchard, unwrapping a round, dark loaf. “Up and down the Gray Road we went, just like this—though the Gray Road’s a broader, calmer old river than this. This Maidensbier, she runs quick and cold. Puts me in mind of my poor wife, before she passed.”

  Berchard tore the loaf—tough as a knot of rags—while Badan waited.

  As Badan reached, Ouen’s long arm slithered the bread from Berchard’s fingers.

  “It like guarding a merchant’s asses?” Ouen wondered, grinning with every gold tooth as he tore a bite of bread.

  Berchard produced a leather bottle of claret, but stopped to dig in the puckered flesh of his bad eye. “Yes, aye,” he said. “That’s all it is really. Easier. Goggling up at the woods. Past that March of Skulls. Fellwood. Some nights, you hear drumming in the hills. Summers you stew in your hauberk.”

  As Berchard made to open the stopper, Badan twisted the bottle from his fingers. “Teach you to keep your good eye open.”

  After an hour’s silence, Lamoric spoke: “Host Below, you all put me in mind of dinner round my father’s table.”

  Every eye on the Bittern turned his direction, some quick, some slow.

  Ouen lifted his thatch-straw beard in the air and again the teeth winked. “Genteel, are we?” he ventured.

  “No. Not at all, in fact. It’s my brother you remind me of. Landast always had a longer arm than I. A good man, but I reached for a lot that he got first.”

  Durand smiled as the rest chuckled.

  “Likely explains more than it should,” Lamoric concluded. “You’re younger as well, aren’t you, Durand?”

  Durand nodded. “My brother’s got a head start.”

  Berchard pointed with his bit of bread. “You’re both younger brothers then?”

  Durand shrugged. “I’d still be in the mountains else.”

  “What about you?” Berchard asked Ouen. “You cannot tell me you have a big brother.”

  “I do. Eight foot if he’s an inch, the bastard.”

  Berchard held his hand up, calling for order. “A moment, please. Everyone before the mast. I ask you. Am I the only one here who’s eldest? Badan?”

  Badan scratched the long fringe at the back of his neck. “Aye. I’ve an older brother in Andagis.”

  “Host of Heaven, two of them!” Berchard gasped.

  “There’s one younger as well.”

  Half the men in the crew showed Badan the Eye of Heaven.

  “And you, Ladyship?” Berchard asked.

  Deorwen smiled: a sighing thing. “You’ve met Moryn. I’m eldest daughter, if that discounts me.”

  “We shall have to take counsel upon the matter, Ladyship,” Berchard said before turning to Coensar the Captain. “And you, Captain?”

  All eyes turned to Coensar, who stood mum for a moment, then confessed, “My brother’s got a fine hall in Lannermoor. He often asks me up there. When I cannot refuse, I sit on a bench by the hearth fire while his wife hides the silver.”

  “To those afflicted with older brothers, then, poor bastards all,” Berchard said, snatching Badan’s bottle.

  But Lamoric was pointing across the fat, glassy water at the far bank.

  “There!” he said. “That’s a sanctuary tower. What village do you think?”

  There were shrugs, and a few of the others leaned for the gunnel.

  Odemar shot them all a stern look as the Bittern teetered.

  Lamoric was still peering. “Could it be Sallow Hythe?”

  “A score more towers, Lordship, and up river,” Guthred corrected carefully.

  The rest threw names around.

  “Rush Landing,” said Odemar, finally.

  There was silence down the length of the boat. “Just down the road?”

  “Rush Landing, aye.”

  “Then we’ve hardly moved.” Lamoric spread his hands over the speeding river. “How can that be?”

  “Maidensbier’s running quick but she bends . . . Lordship.”

  “You realize I’ve no desire to offend the king? That our goal is to do precisely the opposite? A lot of blood went into gaining us the king’s favor.”

  The ship’s master was silent.

  “Why don’t your oarsmen give a pull or two?”

  “Where the Maidensbier’s carrying us, we’d best not come rushing. The river’s as full and fast as I’ve seen her, Lordship.”

  Durand heard a strange noise: a moaning over the water. Coensar peered forward.

  “They’ll have to row when we reach the Silvermere,” Lamoric was saying.

  “Aye, Lordship. But there is little sense in—”

  Deorwen was on her feet in the prow, looking around the high curve of the stempost. Durand heard a peculiar sound: a wild chiming through the belly of the boat.

  “What is that sound?” said Lamoric.

  The oarsmen were unshipping their oars, all at once and
without any signal.

  “We should not have come,” growled Odemar.

  “What?”

  “The Sleepers’ Cave,” Odemar growled.

  “I don’t—”

  The Bittern lurched, sliding down a trough. There were high stone walls all around.

  “When Maidensbier’s high, she swallows the shrine in the rock at Sleepers’ Cave.”

  Now Berchard spoke. “What’re you saying? I’ve seen the Sleepers’. You couldn’t flood—” Sweeping past the gunnels went a row of rock-cut steps that might have led to a shrine’s riverbank door. You could only see the top few. “Host of Heaven,” Berchard said, astonished.

  “When the bells ring, the Maid leaves her bed,” said Odemar, “and takes another.”

  “I’ve seen those bells,” said Berchard. “They must be, what? Five fathoms from the floor.”

  A man at the oars must turn his back on the river and face the ship’s master. Only he can see the course ahead. It is an act of faith. There was an oar for every man, and Durand was not alone as he slid his long sweep out over the water and looked into the master’s face.

  “Pull with the others now,” said Odemar. The boat pitched, skidding two fathoms down in a heartbeat. Some of the knights looked round—they flailed with their sweeps—but not one of the oarsmen turned. “Easy,” was Odemar’s grated rebuke.

  Durand tried to reach and haul with the Burrstone men as the boat picked up speed, but half the time Durand’s oar beat at spray. The river thundered between high stone banks, faster every heartbeat.

  “Hold fast, all,” snarled Odemar, fists locked on the tiller as the boat stamped and soared through the rolling explosion of the river.

  Then Durand heard a greater roar, and the Bittern plunged.

  The master heaved upon the tiller. “Together! Hard and together. All you have. More if you’re on larboard.”

  Bittern lurched. Durand’s oar struck some immovable stone in the spray, kicking back into Durand’s chest like a horse. But before he could take a breath, the master was snarling, “Now, for your lives!” And those still with oars in their hands pulled. Durand hauled with the rest. Their blades clattered and flailed. “Together!” shouted Odemar, then Durand watched the man’s face twist. His eyes were fixed on something over Durand’s shoulder. “Together!” he screamed.