“What did Kharllon have to say?” asked Quaeryt.
“He was most charming,” replied Vaelora. “He’s intelligent and knowledgeable. I did ask him what he thought of Rholan. He said that Rholan was likely a scoundrel who lacked golds and talent with anything other than words. So he turned to selling faith as a way to make his living.”
“Did you ask him what he thought of scholars, then?”
“I did.” Vaelora grinned. “He said the best were useful, the worst only misguided. I didn’t press him on that. I think he actually believes what he said.”
“Anything else? Of import?”
“He doesn’t much care for Skarpa, but respects his skills. He didn’t say it that way. It was more like, ‘Lord Bhayar needs the best commanders he can find in times like these.’”
“And the implication is that it’s unfortunate, but necessary.”
“Something like that … all unsaid.”
“Did he mention Deucalon or Myskyl?”
“No. He did say your forces would have had a more difficult time fighting your way up the Aluse if the Bovarians had had better marshals. For that, he was most grateful. He also conceded the same was true of the Bovarian leaders the Northern Army faced as well.”
“An interesting way of putting it,” mused Quaeryt.
“He did mention how strange it was that the Bovarians didn’t use cannon against you until you were close to Variana.”
“It only seems strange. Cannon are heavy. They’re hard to transport, and you’ve seen how bad the Bovarian roads are. Kharst doesn’t have much of a fleet, either, so the Bovarians haven’t that many cannoneers with experience. Kharst was saving those to defend Variana.” Quaeryt yawned.
“You’re tired.”
“Not that tired.”
“You…” Vaelora shook her head.
“A man who has a beautiful and loving wife likes to appreciate her.”
“You’ve made that quite clear … dearest.” But she did smile … warmly.
23
On Mardi morning Quaeryt rode south from Geusyn with Skarpa and the first battalion from Third Regiment. The two imager undercaptains who rode behind them and in front of the first squad of rankers were Voltyr and Threkhyl. Quaeryt had left the others in the town to practice imaging skills, but he wanted the two he planned to leave with Skarpa to see as much of the area as possible before he and the other imager undercaptains departed.
After seeing the dark circles under Vaelora’s eyes that morning, he’d also insisted that she remain at the inn and rest. The fact that she hadn’t protested showed how tired she was … and that worried Quaeryt. And you shouldn’t have kept her up so late. He winced at that thought and concentrated on studying the road and the terrain.
The road south from the town hugged the eastern shore of the river, close enough that Quaeryt could see the narrow towpath used to pull the flatboat ferries back to Geusyn. For the first mille or so, he saw no ferries, but several hundred yards later, they did pass a smaller craft drawn up on a mud flat adjoining the towpath. Two men were working on what Quaeryt thought was the tiller post. Neither looked up.
After riding another mille Quaeryt could see gray stone walls ahead, stretching for a good mille from the water’s edge to a rocky hill and partway up the hill. Across the river to the west, almost a mille away, there was a raised area, surrounded by reeds and swamp, on which perched an odd assortment of buildings and roofs. Below them was a harbor, but Quaeryt could only see two merchanters, both sloop-rigged, suggesting coastal traders … and no sign of either the Montagne or the Solis. Just ahead was a set of piers, most likely where ferries unloaded on the return trip from Ephra. A packed clay ramp led from the end of each empty pier up to the road.
“Battalion! Halt!” ordered Skarpa.
Quaeryt could see why. South of where they had halted the road turned into a narrow rutted track that looked not to have been traveled in years, although the lower growth flanking the track showed that at one time the road had been used more.
“Well … what do you think?” asked Skarpa, turning in the saddle toward Quaeryt.
“The walls ahead look to be some ten yards high, if not more, and solid. The Antiagons have fortifications back into the hills as far as I can see.”
“None of this makes sense.” Skarpa shook his head. “There’s never been a border wall you couldn’t march far enough to get around, except on an island. I can’t believe that wall extends all the way to the Sud Swamp. That’s some five hundred miles.”
“The ground isn’t that level, and it’s heavily wooded, at least near here. Do you want to cut a road more than a mille through it?”
“Isn’t that what imagers are for?” Skarpa grinned.
“Of course,” replied Quaeryt, “but Bovaria’s never had that many imagers.”
“Still…” Skarpa gestured to the west. “Ephra’s an island of solid land in the middle of a swamp. Why did the Bovarians build Ephra on the west side?”
“Where else could they have built it with access to the ocean that they wouldn’t have to worry about Antiago?” asked Quaeryt.
“But they have to get back upstream, some as far north as Laaryn.”
“Most of them don’t get back that way. They load the goods on ships at Ephra and sell the flatboats for lumber. Then they take the ferry to the east side, where they buy some horses. There are more than a few stables in Geusyn. They ride back north with small high value goods … probably in groups for safety.” Quaeryt gestured back upstream. “The piers down there are pretty solid, and the road toward Geusyn has been well traveled.”
“Do you really want to image a bridge across the river to Ephra?” asked Skarpa.
“I’m not sure that we could. You’d need a lot of piers, and trying to image them into water would be hard. If the river bottom is all mud, they’d just sink and keep on sinking. Ephra might be on solid ground and so is Kephria, but the channel between is pretty deep, and more than a mille wide. Besides, even if we could image that massive a bridge, we’d have to take Kephria to get that close to Ephra.”
“And I take it you don’t want to start another war right now.”
“I wouldn’t want to think about that, not until matters with Khel are settled.” One way or the other.
“You’d think about it … if it’s necessary. So would Bhayar,” said Skarpa.
“Any strong ruler considers everything,” temporized Quaeryt.
“Don’t see any sign of large ships over there, either.”
“No. They might be holding offshore, though. I’ll have to take a ferry later today and see if they already arrived and moved offshore. If I were captain of the Montagne, I wouldn’t want to be anchored for long that close to Kephria. Then, they might not have arrived yet.”
“I’d wager on that.”
“So would I, but I still need to find out.” Quaeryt gestured toward the walls ahead of them to the south. “Do you want to ride farther and get a better look at Aliaro’s defenses?”
“We might as well, but we need to be careful. I can’t believe that they don’t have cannon. Catapults with Antiagon Fire, too. No sign of either, though.” Skarpa raised his arm, then ordered, “Forward!”
Over the next quint, Quaeryt kept an eye out, looking for gouges in the ground, broken trees or limbs, or other signs of cannon having been fired, but even when Skarpa called a halt, what had been a road had become an overgrown wilderness, and Quaeryt had to strain to see such signs-and they were years old.
“No one’s even tried to come through here,” snorted Skarpa after they’d reined up a good three hundred yards short of the walls, where the underbrush effectively made the road impassable. “Not in years. Hard to believe.”
“Kharst didn’t want to deal with the walls. He attacked Aliaro the way the Bovarians prefer. He came down the river, probably in darkness, and used imagers to set fire to the port. That way, all he lost was the force that set the fire.” And got rid of the ima
gers as well, no doubt.
“Be a struggle to bring cannon down here, too,” said Skarpa.
“If you have to deal with Aliaro, it might just be easier to have Threkhyl punch a big gap in the walls here.”
“It might at that. Don’t know as it will come to that, though. Those walls would show that Aliaro just wants to be left alone.”
“So long as he can control the Gulf and the ports here,” replied Quaeryt. “I can see why Kharst wanted Ferravyl, though. And Khel.”
“His factors and traders couldn’t cart goods from Bovaria across the hills and the western coastal mountains to ship from places like Eshtora and Ouestan.”
“He could have cared less about that. He just wanted the tariff golds from the merchants shipping from those ports, and if he gained control of the Aluse all the way to Solis, then that would have made things easier for most of the merchants, traders, and High Holders in Bovaria.”
“You know … when you talk like that, I’m glad I’m just a soldier.”
“I’m glad you are, too, especially when I think about Deucalon and Myskyl. I hope Myskyl has a long hard winter in the north of Bovaria.”
“He’ll find a way not to get that far before the snows hit.”
“You’re probably right about that. Let’s hope it’s a ways from Variana, though.”
Skarpa looked back at the Antiagon walls. “Don’t even see anyone up there. There’s probably some poor ranker posted there who’s filled his britches seeing a battalion down here on the road. First one in years, I’d wager.” He shook his head. “Might as well head back.”
Quaeryt nodded, even as his eyes scanned the massive walls that stretched eastward to the rocky hill a good mille away, then turned his mount and accompanied Skarpa as the battalion reversed its order and began the ride back to Geusyn. He kept looking out at the river, and finally caught sight of a ferry angling its way toward Ephra, but that was the only craft he saw.
For a time, neither officer spoke.
“Have to say that, at times, I had my doubts about Chayar and then young Bhayar,” mused Skarpa.
Quaeryt didn’t mention that he’d had a few as well. “And now?”
“The more I see of other places in Lydar … well, let’s just say I’m glad to be serving under him.”
Quaeryt understood that, although he’d known it for years. He just hoped the Khellans would … and that he could convince them of that. If you can ever get there.
The road back to Geusyn was without riders until they were within a half mille of the dwellings on the south side of the town.
Vaelora was standing on the front porch of the River Inn when Quaeryt returned just after ninth glass. Even before he stepped up onto the porch he could see that the circles under her eyes were not so dark as they had been.
“You’re looking better. The rest helped.”
“What did you find out?”
“That things are worse than we thought…” He went on to explain, ending by, “That’s why I need to take the next ferry to Ephra.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Ephra isn’t a healthy place. Everyone I’ve talked to says so. It’s dirty and filled with sicknesses, and I intend to stay only long enough to find out what I need to know.”
“You’re going. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you’ll be safer here.”
“I’ll be safe with you.”
“I can’t protect you from sickness and flux. You know that.”
“You’re making me sound unreasonable! I’m not. I can ride as well as you can, and there’s no reason-”
“Vaelora … did you look in the mirror this morning? You have to be careful for two people, not just yourself … and your brother told me to remind you of that.”
Vaelora made a face. “You’d better not say that too often.”
“I hope I don’t have to. I don’t mind saying that I don’t want to go, and I don’t want to stay any longer than I have to.”
“You’d better not.”
“I won’t.” Quaeryt held back a sigh of relief.
24
In the end, when he boarded the ferry at two quints past noon, Quaeryt took just one squad from first company, as well as Khalis and Horan. The ferryman only grunted when Quaeryt paid the copper a head fee, perhaps because Quaeryt’s squad comprised the only passengers. The ferry was a modified flatboat, if deeper of draft and roughly seven yards wide and fifteen long, guided by a large sweep rudder. Quaeryt saw two lockers aft of the square prow, long enough to contain either oars or poles, but neither compartment looked to have been opened recently.
Once they were well away from the pier at Geusyn, Quaeryt noted that the ferry immediately headed toward the far shore. When the craft’s heading was established he eased over to the man at the tiller. “How many passengers can you take at once?”
“Maybe three score.”
“How many ferries are there this size?”
“We run two at a time when we need to. The factor has four.”
To transport just first company and one regiment meant eight trips with all four ferries, assuming the factor who owned them could be persuaded to use all-and that could take days.
The tillerman glanced at Quaeryt’s gold crescent moon collar insignia. “You a Telaryn marshal or something?”
“Commander.”
“You thinking of transporting some of your men to Ephra to board a ship?”
“That’s possible. I won’t know until I check with the portmaster in Ephra.” Quaeryt laughed. “Is there one?”
“Old Haasyn was, last time I heard. Mostly just posts what ships are tied up or moored to the south, out of range of the Antiagon long guns.”
“Can they reach the harbor?”
“Not quite. Any ship that gets within a half mille, though, and it’s another story.”
Quaeryt nodded. “At what glass will you be returning to Geusyn tonight?”
“Around midnight when the tide’s flooding. You be heading back then?”
“That’s what I plan, but it depends on what I find out in Ephra.”
The tillerman nodded. “Like that with a lot of folks.”
As the ferry neared the northern end of the harbor, more like a semicircular indentation in the swamp, Quaeryt could see a number of ships farther to the southwest, two of which looked large enough to be warships, possibly the Montagne and the Solis.
Even before the ferry reached the mossy timber piers, the mixed odors of dead fish, swamp, greasy burned cooking oil, and others even less definable oozed over him, creating the impression that the ostler’s description of Ephra might be generous. More than generous, he decided, as a cloud of green mosquitoes appeared from nowhere.
“These piers aren’t where the merchanters tied up, are they?” Quaeryt asked the tillerman.
“Nope. Those are on the south side, far as possible from Kephria. Deeper water there, too.”
Two men hurried toward the bow, where they pulled long poles from the lockers and used them to guide the ferry toward the nearer pier. The poles told Quaeryt just how shallow the water was. One of the men laid down his pole and leapt across a yard or so of water to the pier, holding a coil of line attached to a cleat on the ferry. Once on the pier, he ran the line around a bollard, then braced his feet, letting the bollard take the weight of the ferry and bring it to a halt, before removing one turn of line from the bollard and slowly bringing the ferry to rest in the slip.
“Here you are, Commander,” announced the tillerman.
“Thank you. Which way to the deepwater piers?”
“See the lane one in-not the one by the seawall-but the one by the public house there? Follow that as far as it goes, and you’ll end up on the south harbor square.”
With all twenty rankers, the squad leader, Quaeryt, and the two undercaptains on the pier, Quaeryt felt as though the timbers moved with every step any of them took, and he was more than happy to set foot on the lane heading south.
The weathered public house, with its sagging salt-grayed shutters and crooked windows overlooking the ferry slips and piers, made the meanest taproom in Solis look like a High Holder’s salon by comparison.
“This is a port?” murmured Horan from behind Quaeryt.
“What passes for one in old Bovaria,” replied Khalis.
“How did they ever…”
Whatever Horan might have said was lost as they walked past a pleasure house with open windows … behind each of which stood a woman barely clad, or wearing a shift of fabric so fine that she might have been wearing nothing at all. Quaeryt smiled wryly. Even had he not met Vaelora, he wouldn’t have been tempted. As a young seaman, he’d seen and heard too much.
After Quaeryt walked another block, slightly uphill, the lane flattened out, and several blocks ahead, down beyond the gently sloping lane, he could see grayish water, and a pair of masts above the low roofs of the harbor area. The shops were slightly less weathered and somewhat less run-down in the blocks closer to the harbor, but the lines of warehouses bordering the harbor made it clear that Ephra was a port of necessity, and little more.
Quaeryt walked up to the timbered building at the shore end of the second pier, a structure no more than four yards on a side, with a single door, open and tied back to the wall, with a frayed rope around a cleat that looked ready to pull out from the graying wood. He stepped inside and saw a burly man sitting on a high-backed stool looking out through an unglassed window at the harbor and the Gulf waters to the south.
The man turned his head, but did not speak.
“I’m looking for Haasyn, the portmaster.”
“You’ve found him.” The gray-bearded burly man studied Quaeryt. “You must be the commander the captain of that Telaryn ship’s been looking for.”
“Most likely. How long has he been here?”
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