by Brian Daley
This stretch of the river was rather deep; he could make out nothing of its bottom. The pirates’ trading platform was about five paces on a side, built of adzed logs, and had thick ropes rising from each corner to connect the hoisting line in a pyramid overhead. On it were piled casks, crates, and bags and baskets of various kinds. The day’s take, the knight supposed, plus whatever the bandits had purchased. The platform rested on piles set in the riverbed. Soiled, makeshift banners, executed with a childish lack of skill, moved sluggishly on short poles. They displayed John’s newly adopted heraldry of crossed quarterstaff and longbow, in grimy white on a field of black.
Two bowmen stood among the trade goods and cargo piled there. Others were stationed on the opposite bank, while more waited at the vantage point of the cave’s mouth. Their weapons were long, made of yew wood; the archers carried great goose-feathered shafts in their quivers. One of the platform archers took possession of a coin proffered by Roode from the dugout’s bow. Roode made a great show of resentment of this toll for the use of John’s part of the river. Then the canoe pushed off, and Crassmor watched it move downriver with a forlorn feeling.
I wish I were a tavernkeep. I wish I were a hermit. I wish I were a fishwife. I wish—
“You have business with us?” The toll collector broke into Crassmor’s fruitless regrets.
“If,” Crassmor replied with a grandiose flourish, assuming the role he must play, “your lord is of sufficient note to require a harper and poet. Surely no court, even here on the river, can be significant without its balladeer, its chronicler. And I, Morodo, offer my services to John of John’s Winch.”
“Lord John, is what you call him, strummer,” the archer corrected harshly. He and his mates were a disreputable-looking bunch, attired in frayed clothes of dark green and brown. Crassmor suspected that the man had known no recent concourse with soap and water. The guards’ single effort at military uniformity was the wearing of similar iron caps.
“Lord John, of course,” the knight amended promptly.
The honor of John’s Winch having been satisfied, the bowman admitted, “You’re barely in time; we’re taking ’er up for the night.” Which was just how Crassmor had wanted things.
The bowman blew on a bone whistle. The archers on the opposite bank began dragging a little cockleshell to the water; Alanna’s information that no guards were left outside at night was apparently correct. The other bowman on the platform gave his weapon a practice pull before unstringing it. He used a technique of draw that Crassmor had never seen before, holding the string by his jaw as if nocked, then pushing away the horns of the bow.
A moment later the platform began to rise slowly to the sound of creaking lines, lifting clear of the pilings. Crassmor shuffled for balance as it swung free, and had to lurch for a handhold among the mound of goods lashed to the platform. The guards chortled.
The knight ignored them, hoping that the thick hoisting line was sound and that the shear legs’ trapping was tightly lashed. The platform, rotating gently, began the ascent of fifty or so feet that would bring it level with the entrance to John’s cave. On the second leisurely rotation, Crassmor noted that a steep path in the cliffs face, formed by a split in the rock, had recently been hammered and chiseled away, exposing unweathered stone. John was manifestly a character who valued his security, a matter of no reassurance.
When the platform had been winched level with the cave’s mouth, men waiting there secured its edge with ropes passed through gaps in its timbers. It still felt precarious to the knight, though. Crassmor made preliminary contact with his baggage, hoping that the chief archer or one of his mates would lend a hand. The bowmen only smirked and enjoyed his discommodity as he was obliged to serve himself.
During that operation, though, he took note of details of the place for future reference. The two shear legs—fair sized tree trunks—were firmly set in hand-drilled holes in the cave floor, the hawserlike guys fastened to heavy spikes deep-driven into rock walls. The hoisting line passed through a simple pulley at the apex of the shears and ran overhead, back toward the rear of the cave. There, at a wider spot, was the windlass for which the place was named. It was set high, so that the hoisting line wouldn’t hamper loading and unloading, and well anchored, harnessed to its crankshaft by elaborate wooden gearing.
People gathered in the gloom of the cave’s farther reaches for this daily ritual. There were a few women of the place, drab and worn from drudgery and care; haggard men who’d left some task to help unload and to hear what news there might be; and a few children eager to see who the outsider was. The general populace was even more disreputable-looking than the archers; John’s predations on the river hadn’t made his people sleek or fat. The cargo was unloaded and the platform was freed for a final descent, to return with the last of the guards and their cockleshell.
Crassmor failed to spy anybody who answered the description of either of Alanna’s sisters. The crowd, elbowing one another, parted deferentially. The man who stepped by them had Crassmor’s instant attention; the badly embroidered quarterstaff and longbow on his breast proclaimed him lord of this sad little fief.
He was tall, with long, loose-dangling simian arms. His big, knobby hands showed a variety of scars and lumps, confirming that he was a quarter-staff man, as his adopted heraldry implied. He was just beginning to slump with middle age; his curl-kinked-brown hair, gray strands corkscrewing through it, looked as if it would defy any comb, but was in retreat from his crown. It could be seen through his bushy beard that John of John’s Winch had a prominent overbite. His close-set eyes were ringed with the creases of a habitual squint and held a hard-won shrewdness more the product, the knight guessed, of experience than of native intellect.
Crassmor made a deep bow with casual grace, taking off his cap and nearly sweeping his shoes with it, making an elegant swirl with, his fur-trimmed cape.
“Lord John, for so I see you to be, may I present myself? Morodo, harper and poet to nobility! Having heard of the glory of your, er, emergent realm, I am come to offer my humble talents. I would set forth and send abroad songs of the deeds and splendor of my Lord John of John’s Winch.”
John heard him out with boorishly unconcealed skepticism, but Crassmor didn’t miss the man’s grudging satisfaction at hearing himself styled a noble. The knight, nose filled with the stenches of animals and people—domesticated and otherwise—making their protracted encampment in the cave, had new respect for his own powers of persuasion.
John dug at one nostril with a thumbnail, still squinting at Crassmor suspiciously. “Harper? Your type’s more partial to fancy tables and soft beds, eh? What draws you here?”
The knight smiled engratiatingly. “Now, that is, m’lord—I was intemperate enough, while in my cups, to compose a rather unflattering ditty about the Duke of Ashlar, who rules somewhat farther upriver. The tune, and more to the point, the lyrics, were repeated. Just about the time the duke’s men began inquiring after me, I found myself with the undeniable impulse to go a-traveling.”
Some of the locals had gathered closer, studying Crassmor’s city clothes and urbane mannerisms. He permitted himself to preen just a little.
“Oh, yuh?” John. said. “Let’s hear that song.”
“Aha-ha, m’lord,” Crassmor parried a little embarrassedly, “I fear that my journeying has taken its toll on my strength.”
John nodded slyly. “You want a free feed to start with, hey? Well, bargain hard for what you’re after; that’s only right. You can play during dinner. As long as the songs are good, you eat. Fair enough? Done!”
He’d scarcely finished when two women worked their way through the crowd, followed by an elderly gentleman who was in a state of some agitation. The women could only be Arananth and Oorda, Crassmor concluded. Arananth, the younger, was the very image of the damsel in distress, a conformity to stereotype that was rather unusual in Crassmor’s experience. She was a pale-skinned girl with a youthful blush high on her cheeks
and a heart-shaped face framed by waves of light hair topped by a delicate circlet of pearl-encrusted gold. Her petite figure was nicely set off by the tightly corseted damask gown she wore; her wide, hazel eyes darted here and there with charming innocence.
The older sister, Oorda, was another case entirely. She was overendowed for Crassmor’s taste, the look in her eye putting him in mind of a horse that was best watched closely. Her ruddy face was probably pleasant enough in a round-cheeked way when she wasn’t glowering. Oorda’s brittle-looking hair, brushed back tightly against her skull, had been confined with near-violent severity. She wore a straight-lined, unflattering robe, sleeves pushed up to display respectable forearms and hands that had seen work.
“John!” Oorda said, expelling the name as she might a worm encountered in an apple. The river pirate’s face worked irritably as she came to confront him, hands on hips as if she were about to barter for charcoal. “Those idiot lackeys of yours just up and took most of the clothes we have! You lowborn, thieving rat-bastard!” She indicated two men who’d just come up from the depths of the cave. One’s jaw was beginning to turn red, promising a variety of colors, while the other’s face bore the parallel scratches of a vigorous clawing. John, waving his arms, interrupted with some lack of spirit.
“Oorda… Lady Oorda, half my people are in rags, and little good cloth comes our way. What choice do I have?”
“Villain!” she shrieked, and kicked his shin. He hopped back, holding it and cursing and, Crassmor noticed, moving very adroitly, for such a gangly man.
“You had but to ask politely!” she ranted on. “D’you think my poor sister and I enjoy seeing naked brats and tattered scarecrows all around us? But you show not a particle of consideration!”
She pursued him. He avoided her second kick and caught the fist she swung at his chin. The two men she’d pointed out jumped forward, eluding her blows with caution born of experience, to rescue their leader. As they dragged off the kicking, battling Oorda, her yells echoed back to them. “You’re lower than troll-flops, the whole bunch! Let me go! John, you mother-jinker!”
Rubbing his abused shin, the Lord of John’s Winch turned to the old man who’d arrived with the sisters. “Fanarion, didn’t I tell you to keep that shrew away from me?” Fanarion, John’s seer-mage, shuffled nervously, head downcast to study a big toe that was working its way through one of his worn purple velvet carpet slippers. He wore long, symbol-worked red robes, but they were soiled and threadbare. His pink skull gleamed through a few remaining strands of white hair. His nose bore a pair of spectacles, their lenses nearly as thick as Crassmor’s least finger.
At length, Fanarion looked up, blinking through his glasses like a woebegone owl. “N-now, Jackie,” he stammered, “I must say! I tried, but there’s just no deterring that one once she’s reared up on her hind legs! Just absolutely!”
“Next time cast a spell over her!” John roared. “Even your down-at-the-heels magic ought to suffice for that!” Fanarion winced, wounded.
“Why, John, shame!” Arananth chided. The pirate was suddenly and completely distracted, his pique forgotten, with no eye for anyone else. He gave her the look of a lapdog; she shook a slender white finger at him in a charming fit of displeasure.
“That’s insufferably wicked! The way you treat poor Fanarion and my dear sister, really! Nor should you be putting such ideas in this enchanter’s sweet old head. A spell on Oorda, indeed!”
Crassmor noted the look of profound gratitude that crossed Fanarion’s face and reflected that the magician himself was somewhat ensorcelled. John was contrition itself, fawning over her, towering ridiculously above her while slouching with awkward casualness to make less of his height.
“Uh, dearest Arananth, it was the moment’s anger. Forgive your, your servant; I have so much on my mind. I’ll replace your clothes later, I vow. Once we’ve wed, I’ll smother you in gowns and, um, scarves—combs—” He seemed at the limits of his knowledge of female attire.
“Never,” she pledged, turning up her adorable nose and facing away from him. She wore the hint of a smile, though, which, Crassmor saw contemptuously, John missed completely. Gods, this dullard doesn’t even know how the game’s played!
Arananth went off after her sister with Fanarion fussing along behind, leaving John devastated. Seeing his chance, Crassmor slid up to him and half-sang to the wretched outlaw, “M’lord, it’s sometimes an evening of merry music that gives wings to a young lady’s heart. Singing, dancing; these would raise a swain in a lass’ estimation!”
John brightened visibly. “Think you so?” He pressed Crassmor’s hand. “Whoa, that’s it! The very thing! Poor little darling, she deserves a bit o’ gaiety.”
He turned to the archer who’d spoken to Crassmor and had been of so little assistance in the matter of luggage transferral. “Hey, Borra; get your crap out of your quarters. My harper’s going to be using them. Then fetch Morodo’s stuff down there.”
He turned back to Crassmor-Morodo. “Harper, if you soften her heart toward me, anything I can give is yours.” He sniffled a bit; Crassmor told himself, If my sense of pity weren’t completely dormant…
John and crew fell into an exacting scrutiny of the day’s acquisitions. Permitting the resentful Borra to precede him, Crassmor went deeper into the cave, the luggage left behind in a conspicuous pile for now. All the while he wondered how a bold pirate chieftain could be such an unutterable mooncalf.
Chapter 11
REGALED
From the winch area, the cave’s main trunk descended at a considerable incline. The place was sooty and stuffy, lit here and there by candles, torches, and fish-oil lamps. Crassmor concluded that the air was circulating, albeit slowly. Whether this was by virtue of the layout of the place or some hidden apparatus, he had no idea.
The warren was only in part a natural formation, having been expanded by extensive labor, Crassmor saw, at a time he judged to have been generations earlier. The walls were gray, moist rock with occasional lichenous blotches on them. The floors, which had been carefully smoothed, were slick from ages of traffic. The knight wondered idly who the place’s original occupants had been.
Crassmor and his escort passed a pungent kitchen chamber reeking of garlic and onions. Through its entrance the knight saw an unwashed male, his back to them, ladling grease off the surface of a soup and emptying it into a barrel. A thick gyve was clamped around his ankle, chaining him to a hefty staple hammered into a crack in the center of the floor. Borra paused to yell, “You there, Bint!”
Crassmor instantly stepped to one side of the doorway so that his cousin wouldn’t see him and betray recognition. Borra didn’t notice, nor did he see the knight’s hand poised coincidentally by his dirk. Were Bint to give the game away somehow, Crassmor resolved, Borra would die and he and his cousin would make the best they could of their dilemma.
“We got a couple more casks of fish oil. John wants you to refill all the lamps in the place before dinner,” Borra finished.
The chain rattled abruptly, then stopped, as if Bint had been about to react violently, then reconsidered. The show of restraint made Crassmor wonder how much of Bint’s youthful temper had cooled in captivity. He heard his cousin mutter something unintelligible. It apparently satisfied Borra; the archer led the way on.
“The river traffic is light right now,” Crassmor remarked, “and your company numerous. Doesn’t that make slave keeping impractical?”
“No slave,” Borra replied, “but a bothersome fool of a knight from this Singularity we keep hearing about. He tried to steal back yon girlies from us and wounded two or three of our men before John broke a stool over his helm. I was all for giving him to the fish in pieces, but Jo—Lord John wants no trouble with this Ironwicca they talk about.” Borra shot a sidelong glance at him. “You’re no friend to this Singularity, are you, now?”
“I have scant cause to be,” Crassmor answered, with such force that it convinced the bowman.
“Any-road, John is content to keep the lad until the wedding’s over, then ransom him if he can or turn him loose if not, reckoning that it’ll be too late then for him to make trouble.”
They clomped downward, coming to a large chamber that had been a grand dining hall in times past. The table was hewn from a single piece of stone, half as wide again as Crassmor’s height, long enough to seat fifty people, wonderfully engraved with all manner of arabesques and etched with glyphs. The chairs were high-backed monoliths. Two of the crude fish-oil lamps and a few candles, guttering in their sconces, gave dim light. From there, five tributary tunnels led in various directions. Into one of these, Borra preceded the knight.
The quarters of the dispossessed archer turned out to be a tiny nook at the bottom of a side tunnel, partitioned off by a stiff leather curtain. Its primary claim to opulence was a short bed of woven saplings. There were wall niches for storage and a single lamp on an outcropping of wall. As the former occupant gathered his few belongings, Crassmor entertained himself by trying to analyze the assorted odors contributing to the general rankness of the place. He brought forth a pomander ball and held it to his nose. Borra noticed and gave a snort of derision at the effeteness of that, a reaction Crassmor welcomed.
When Borra had departed, the knight began to give some thought to the love song that would be required of him at dinner. Borra was some time returning with his luggage, as Crassmor had assumed he would be. The disgruntled outlaw, setting down the zither case, shoulder duffel, and bedroll, gave the knight a peculiar look, then left. The leather curtain rustled a little as Crassmor peered after, a moment later, to make certain that the oaf had gone.
Inspection of his belongings revealed that they had, as he’d hoped, been closely examined. Opening the zither case, he saw that the flecks of soot he’d dusted in one corner showed that its false wall had been disturbed. It was a piece of concealment that any pirate or highwayman might be expected to detect. Crassmor drew out the letter that had been carefully replaced there by whoever had done the searching.