by David Keck
“But where have we fetched up?” wondered Berchard. “That could be the Fens of Merchion, or the Halls of Silence we hear lapping out there.”
“Lost Hesperand, more like,” said Odemar, “with all the sternway we were making.”
“Oh, Hells,” snarled Badan. “Freeze or Hesper-bloody-rand. Burrstone sons of whores.”
“That storm’ll have blown us leagues, and mostly west,” said Odemar.
Deorwen was still bailing. Water sloshed high around Durand’s calves, getting higher. The boat was riding low. His feet were numb.
“Thank you, Master Odemar,” said Lamoric. “We need to know.”
Odemar eyed his boat. “She’s worked a seam open—more than one by the look of this flood. Best if we could get her out. Best if it was quick.”
The invisible shoreline breathed in the fog, and Durand closed his eyes. Beyond the cold water smells, there was something else: wood smoke, and the sharp trickle of latrine pits. He held up his hand.
“What’re you up to?” Badan sneered.
“Men,” said Durand. Other smells joined the stronger traces: a baker’s ovens, fish in market heaps, rubbish pits, horse dung. Then they heard sanctuary bells.
“The boy’s right,” said Coensar, and Durand looked back over a boat full of grins.
Every man unlimbered his oar.
AS THEY ROWED in, the town became clear. A jumble of buildings and narrow alleys spread at the bottom of a slope. There were stone sanctuaries with squat towers. A river’s mouth opened. Piers reached toward them, dark across the still water.
And Durand knew the place. With every stroke, he could see farther up the slope above the city. He made out ring-works under the turf. He saw trees. This was the place he first came after the old Duke of Yrlac set him free. It was here he’d come, knowing Alwen must be dead behind him. It was here he joined Lamoric’s retainers. It was here he met Deorwen in a stream with thugs looking on from the bushes. This was Red Winding at the mouth of the river of the same name.
Durand shot Deorwen a look.
But Red Winding was also the road to Eldinor and Ragnal’s Mount of Eagles. If it weren’t for the oars in their fists, every man would have made the Eye of Heaven.
ONCE THEY’D BAILED and beached the Bittern, the huddled knot of them kissed the mud. Coensar had already found shelter, and Lamoric was already calling for steaming hippocras before his men could tumble into the low room after him. Horn-paned lanterns glowed as Coensar shook his head and smiled a crooked grin. Badan took a day’s worth of the tavern-keeper’s charcoal and tipped it into the grate.
Durand sat in the clammy grip of his sopping gear, but the warm prickle of the tumbler between his hands brought him to life. He drew steam deep into his lungs, feeling galingale and cinnamon steam in the stuffy passages of his skull. A hot pie appeared on the table, and he joined the others in shoveling up gobbets of mutton and grease and whatever else with his bare hands.
To the dismay of the gaunt tavern-keeper, the tavern room was soon hung with steaming cloaks and surcoats, hose and tunics—with the men, wearing nothing but their breeches, draped over every bench, groaning and cursing. Lamoric paced. Deorwen sat in the damp clouds at the fireside, shaking her head.
Someone gave Durand an elbow—Ouen. “Here, look.”
Guthred stood in the street door.
Lamoric spread his hands. “Good, Guthred. Good. If you could listen a moment, everyone. I’ve had Guthred . . . Well, I’ve had him go round to a proper inn. He’s got you all—knight and oarsmen both—warm rooms, tubs of hot bath-water, and food and drink enough to last a week.”
There were puzzled expressions around the room, and Durand looked to Coensar. The Sowing Moon would rise before a week was out. The captain raised an eyebrow.
“When you’re finished there, you can take the Bittern back across to Burrstone Walls or Yestreen or I’ll pay Master Odemar to take you to Acconel itself. By morning, I must find a boat to get me headed downriver once more, but I—”
At this, the men finally shouted him down.
“Is this your clever way of telling us we’ve got to leave tomorrow morning?” said Berchard.
“It’s no game. Guthred’s put silver in that innkeeper’s fist.”
“Well,” said Berchard. “That’s coin wasted. Can you get it back off him, Guthred?”
Coensar was smiling as Guthred rubbed his heavy nose. “No.”
Ouen filled his lungs. “Maybe someone else should give it a try, eh? What do you think?”
“Won’t do no good. I never gave the innkeeper a clipped penny.” Lamoric turned. “Got stopped by an old clothes man in the next lane. He’s got it all now. The stuff’s mostly patchwork, but there’s enough, and it’s dry.”
There was a great shout, and again Coensar smiled his crooked grin.
8. To Race the Moon
They followed the Red Winding down among the ruddy manors of the lowland lords. Hedgerows and towers, monasteries and mills passed beyond the gunnels while cottars stared, alien as their beasts. To nearly every soul on the river, Lamoric called, “How far to Eldinor?” and always the distance was a little farther than it must be. They must reach the city by First Sight of the Sowing Moon; they pulled hard.
Collapsed on one more meadow bank as nightfall drove them from the water, Durand heard Berchard and Guthred in anxious conversation. The two were peering at the horizon.
“No,” said Guthred. “That’s where she would rise.”
“But we have another night!” said Berchard.
Durand levered himself onto one elbow. Other bodies around the ring were rising from the grass.
Deorwen spoke for them all. “What is the matter?”
“The Lambing Moon’s gone,” said Berchard. “It’s calends now. This is the night with no moon.”
A few of the men around the ring swore. You didn’t camp between the moons.
“And we’re about to lose the last of the light,” Guthred added. “And here we are bedded down on a riverbank.”
The threat was real. On calends night, after one moon and before the next, the Banished were restless. The Daughters of the Hag poked their noses into cradles. Things lurked under blackthorn bushes. Washers lingered by the river.
“We set watchers through those nights,” said Deorwen. “The Burrstones lit hag fires. We will have to get everyone under shelter.”
“Wait!” said Lamoric. “If this is calends, the moon will rise tomorrow! We have leagues to travel yet. We cannot go scuttling under cover now. Why not get back on the river?”
Coensar spoke out, soberly. “There was a sanctuary tower up the hill, if there’s a sexton still about, we should get in.”
“I’m willing to find a way in, with or without a sexton,” said Badan.
“They will sight the Sowing Moon tomorrow,” Lamoric declared. “We must be in Eldinor at dawn the day after. There’s no time. We’ve no chance at all if we don’t reach the Mount of Eagles by then.”
The men were eyeing the darkness, imagining it populated with slinking things. “Lordship,” said Coensar, “we’re losing the light.”
“All right,” said Lamoric. “All right.”
They left the boat behind and darted for the hilltop sanctuary, stumbling through black hedgerows and rutted tracks. The small priest who appeared at the sanctuary door darted back in horror as a company of armed men stepped out of the night. He did, however, allow them inside. With a wary glance, the sexton closed the door on them and the sanctuary, allowing them only one smoky lamp—a dozen men in the wobbling pool of one little flame.
As the men sprawled on flagstones as cold as winter graves, Lamoric paced in and out of the darkness.
“The king will understand,” Deorwen tried.
Lamoric did not even glance up. “I ought to have told my brother to take the message himself. It seems I am doomed to be an object lesson to the kingdom. Mothers will point at my tarred skull: see, children, how vanity and pride drew Sir Lamoric f
rom the safety of his millstones to his shameful end.”
“We could go no farther,” said Deorwen. “The day was done.”
“Perhaps there will be a little pageant.” Lamoric clawed his hair. “They could work in my ‘Knight in Red’ business. I think I would like that.”
“Sit, Lamoric,” she said. “Rest while you have the chance.”
“Sorry to have made you wait, Majesty,” continued Lamoric. “But I have a few excellent notions about how you should king it here in Errest. I think you’ll find it’s just a few simple blunders you’re making. I’ve got a list.”
“Don’t worry, Lordship. We will get you to Eldinor in time, you watch us,” said Ouen. “Come dawn we’ll really put our backs in. I’m not sure Badan’s quite been pulling his weight yet.” Badan cursed the big man, showing the black gap of his missing teeth.
Lamoric crouched by the flame. “Birds will pick out my eyes.”
“We’ll set out again as soon as there is light,” said Deorwen, “and we’ll row straight through to the docks at Eldinor. That is what these men are saying, husband.” She reached for him, but he stood and paced again.
Shaking heads, the rest subsided in the dark, the smoky lamplight picking out the shape of sanctuary idols standing round them: the Maiden, the Mother, the Warders of the Bright Gates where they bracketed the door, the Silent King of Heaven, the Champion with his empty helm. The flicker set shadows quivering in their blank-eyed stares.
Durand watched the others: Coensar gave him a quiet nod; Lamoric was restless; other men eyed the idols—Deorwen watching them all.
Watching him.
Soon the lamp gave out and exhaustion took the men.
Sounds reached Durand’s ears from beyond the shutters: feathery rustlings that might only have been night birds, whispers that might only have been willows. He remembered the various fanged and black-eyed things he’d seen. The others breathed invisibly all around him in the utter darkness.
A hand touched his shoulder. But, after a prickling instant, he knew the touch for Deorwen’s. And she had curled on the cold flagstones at his back before he could move or speak, knees folded with his knees. She clung, her small arms clutching him, and she breathed sobs of frustration against his shoulder. Anyone might be awake. With so many ears so near, he could not so much as whisper his understanding.
Still, he caught her hands and squeezed as though he could crush the wall between them.
DURAND WOKE ALONE on that stone floor, friends within inches, and Deorwen watching him across the circle of men.
Shaken, he was glad to join the others, as, from dawn, they rowed like the slaves of the Inner Seas, finding within a few strokes an iron rhythm that did a fine job of pounding thought from Durand’s skull. One hamlet ran into the next, the berms and hedges of one village knotting with those of its neighbor. They rowed as the Eye of Heaven rose to noontide and rowed as it blazed low among the chalk hills of Saerdana. The black glass of the river slithered with sunset, and soon the moon must rise.
The men stole glances eastward, searching for the first sliver of the Sowing Moon hooking from the hedges. Finally, the Bittern and the eastern horizon, the moon’s slender crescent, winked over the shoulder of some shore-baron’s tower.
“That’s it,” said Odemar. “Maybe, Captain, you can get your men back to rowing. It’s leagues yet to Eldinor, and not so many hours from dawn.”
As Coensar nodded to them all, a fire blazed out over the water. A bonfire as big as a hay wagon roared atop the shore tower they had just left behind.
Lamoric rose from his bench, catching the mainstay for balance. Durand flinched, just seeing the man.
“The beacon fires,” Lamoric said. “You can see them up and down the river. That Osbald will be lighting Burrstone Walls. What a sight the Powers must have: the whole of Er-rest the Old crowned with fire.”
The light glowed in Lamoric’s face, and glittered in Deorwen’s eyes as she stared down the boat at him—desperate.
“Row,” said Coensar. “Or none of it matters.”
Durand squeezed his eyes shut and rowed.
FOR HOURS AFTER nightfall, it seemed as though they rowed through the Heavens, bare stars glittering in the sky above and the black river below. Their wake set the sky shivering to its banks.
Through the haze of exhaustion, great black buildings appeared along the banks. Once in a great while, Durand saw a window glowing. He heard men and animals alive between wooden walls: dogs barked, babies wailed. A door thumped as someone stumbled out to find the latrine trench.
“We must be getting close,” Ouen whispered. The sliver moon barely glinted in the man’s teeth. “We could be sloshing past the bugger now, for all we know. Mount of Eagles. The King’s Walk. The High Patriarch’s whatever he has. Maybe that’s Ragnal himself, pissing in that ditch back there. We might be rowing right out to sea. Imagine: past Eldinor, past old Tern Gyre, past the Barbican and out on the wide ocean with nothing but the Shattered Isle somewhere there before us, eh?”
“Would we use the sail then?” Durand wondered.
“I’ve got used to the rowing, me.”
“Hells,” spat Badan. “Bad enough rowing all bloody night. You don’t know how far we’ve come any more than I do.”
From the high stern of the boat, Odemar interrupted, croaking, “I haven’t been up this way as often as some, but I’d say pull harder.”
“Do as the man says, gentlemen,” said Coensar, and they did.
TOWARD MORNING, FOG boiled over the bows. Durand and the others kept up their rowing, but the long sweeps clunked and rocked, heavier and heavier with each stroke.
Somewhere some monastery bell tolled First Twilight. If the city wasn’t near now, they would arrive too late.
“Come on, boys,” said Ouen and, with a haul, nearly lifted the Bittern from the river. Durand heaved, feeling the collective strength of the crew drive the boat downriver, picking up speed.
And suddenly—as if by sorcery—they were passing under a bridge, Creation alive with watery echoes. Soon buildings pressed close along the banks—warehouses, mills, tanneries—water echoed from stone and hairy plaster.
“This’ll be one of the spans between Scrivensands and Turnstone Moss,” said Lamoric, again out of his seat. “We’re right across the gulf from the Island of Eldinor.” They heard people already awake in the wooden buildings over the Red Winding. There was light glowing in the eastern fog.
Soon, they felt the Bittern buck in the collision of currents on the broad face of the Gulf of Eldinor. Ships slept in the mist: dromond warships of a hundred oarsmen, merchantman cogs as tall as towers. Wooden walls rose up and vanished.
It was strange backing into a new place, as you must when rowing. Durand imagined the hidden city over his shoulder. For the first fifteen generations of their rule, the Sons of Atthi had governed their High Kingdom from this island, striking bargains with wild chieftains, conquering the powers of the forest wastes, and forging covenants with Stranger kings. In the days of her glory, wealth poured through the treasure houses of Eldinor’s openhanded kings and Eldinor stood like a diadem on the brow of Creation. Now, hundreds of hard winters had passed. The Sons of Heshtar had twice raged over Creation, the heart of the Atthias had gone to Parthanor, so-called Jewel of the Winter Sea, and the High Kingdom had broken.
Forty generations lay in the earth, and Eldinor was a widow city of a lost kingdom.
Durand twisted. In the bows, Deorwen peered up among the vast shapes around them. And Durand managed to follow her eye. Towers shimmered into being from the mist like frost knitting in the clouds, city upon city rising into the air. He had never been to Parthanor the Jewel, but he could not imagine a place to surpass dowager Eldinor. Here were crown upon mitered crown, shining on the cusp of dawn.
Something loomed from the fog.
“You’d best wake up, all of you,” said Odemar. He was working the tiller. “I’ve seen men hurt.”
Granit
e wharves seemed to reach for them, each under a blank-eyed idol.
Lamoric climbed to his feet.
“Mind me!” said Odemar, snapping every man’s attention back to him. They were coming in very fast and pulling hard. The Bittern shuddered into the slick shelter of the ancient quay. “All hands, hold water!” The oarsmen jammed their oars flat against a hundred leagues’ momentum. The grip of water wrenched Durand’s hard against his ribs, nearly hoisting him from his bench.
“Toss oars!” Odemar snarled, and the men heaved blades from the water, Lamoric already leaping as the boat skidded home.
A trio of tall men stalked up the wharf as men handed Deorwen down. Ouen had the gangplank ready and bowed to Durand. “After you, my rescuer.”
Durand smiled and stepped onto the pier as Coensar climbed onto the plank.
“Milord, Milady,” said one of three strangers. The speaker was a head taller than Durand—more. But the shoulders under his black cassock were hardly wider than a man’s spread fingers. His long skull sported a very few hanks of blond hair. “No. No one ashore. Not now.” Each of the armored giants behind him wore a masked and polished helm, and carried both an ornate broadaxe and a long, teardrop shield. Durand had never seen city watchmen like these.
“We’ve been ordered to attend the king,” said Lamoric.
“Yes? Have you? And you are?”
“I am Lord Lamoric, son of Duke Abravanal of Gireth.”
Now the strange figure nodded from somewhere between his shoulder blades. “Of Burrstone Walls. Second son of the duke by his late wife Truda. One of three surviving. This would be your wife, Deorwen, daughter of Duke Severin of Mornaway by—”
“It is beginning!” Lamoric said.
“And you must go, by all means.” A wan smile flickered. “But we are not having armed retinues in Eldinor. No. Not today.”
Durand took a deep breath. There was no time for argument. He would climb back in the boat.
“No no,” said the official, now nearly leering into Durand’s face. “No, indeed. You may come. Yes. Certainly you may come. But three is a sufficiency, I think.”