Wheel of the Winds

by M J Engh

  They were alone on board, and indeed alone at the pier; for it was a festival time (which put the Warden into a still gloomier frame of mind), so that there would be no loading for some hours, and Repnomar (having no taste for this particular festival) had chosen to stay on guard while all her crew joined the celebration, and the captains of the two other small vessels moored at this pier, trusting her to keep good watch (for the Mouse lay between them) had likewise gone off with their whole crews. All the waterfront was quiet, so far as human sounds went, with only the peaceful noises of wind and water, birds going about their business, and the occasional yap of a dog; but from inland, deep in the city, they could hear the cries and music of festival.

  “It's a good time,” said Repnomar, seeing that the Warden had no wish to speak further of the Exile at present, “for pilferers and sneak thieves.”

  Just then Broz set up the furious barking he reserved for those he took to be pirates, more urgent and threatening than his sneak-thief bark. The Captain sprang up to investigate, and the Warden followed, glad enough to have other troubles than his own to look to. It was not on board the Mouse that this trouble lay, but on the vessel moored at her landward side, a taller, lengthier ship, with a prayer against pirates painted along its bulwarks in green. Someone was in the act of climbing over these bulwarks, prayer and all, and in spite of Broz's objections. Repnomar hailed this intruder with a bellow that seemed to transfix him like an arrowshaft, for he jerked hard and hung quivering for a moment; but instead of falling back into the water, he heaved himself up and onto the deck with one last effort.

  By that time the Captain was already on the pier, and Broz, considering his duty nearly done, had subsided into a low growling; but Warden Lethgro had not moved from the Mouse's rail, which he clenched with a violent hand. His face was dark with anger and his back stiff with dignity, and when a tuft of the intruder's hair appeared above the gunwale, he uttered a bellow that put Repnomar's to shame. “Come here!” was what he shouted in his wrath.

  Repnomar paused for a scant moment, with her foot on her neighbor's gangplank. At first sight she had taken the intruder for some thieving or frolicking child of the town; but neither Broz nor the Warden would have raised such an outcry for such a cause. So she went on assured in mind, and as soon as she caught sight of the dodging figure among the ropes and barrels she shouted out, “The Warden is your only friend!” and the Warden chimed in with another “Come here!” (not so loud this time but no less firm) and Broz with a throatier growl.

  He came out then from his cover and stood before her, most forlorn to look at, bedraggled as he was, and ugly, and limping. But he nodded his head and essayed a smile, though his strange face under his tangled hair showed pinched and wild. The Captain gripped him by the arm and led him back to her ship, where she had to shout Broz into silence, and stood him like a naughty child before the Warden. When she let go his arm, he reeled, and sank wet and senseless to the deck, and “Poor Exile,” said the Warden; “there's blood on his shirt.”

  2

  Occupational Hazards of an Inspector for the Council of Beng

  When the festival was over, and the waterfront had begun to stir again with sailors and traders and wharf people, they were still arguing on board the Mouse. The Exile lay open-eyed and silent in the Captain's cabin, his hands and feet well bound and his wound well salved and bandaged, while the Captain and the Warden paced the deck outside, and frowned in at him now and again, and waved their hands in each other's faces and debated the question that was life or death for him. “For,” said the Warden, “the order is out to kill him at will (though that's not the order I gave my people), since he lacked patience to wait for judgement. And if he's judged now, while the Councils are hot against him and against me, his life will be as short as his stature. No, I'll take him up-river in secret. I can hire a canal boat and crew it with my own people, which will get us as far as the forest country—and from there on we can camp in the woods. And when his wound has healed, and the councilors have seen there's no war afoot because of him—” ("How do you know that?” demanded Repnomar) “—I'll send the news downstream that he's been found; and all can be done in calm and reason.”

  “But there's no point in it,” the Captain said, not for the first time. “If you mean to report him found, why not do it now—” ("I've just told you,” said Lethgro) “—instead of making yourself his accomplice? If the Councils are hot against you now, think what they'll be if you're found hiding him—you who were charged to hold him in the first place—”

  “And let him go while my back was turned—I know,” said the Warden gloomily. “But who's to find that I'm hiding him?”

  “Who?” cried Repnomar. “Are you utterly mad, Lethgro? A hundred of your people will know of it, and likely all seven of my crew, for you'd have to bundle him out of here somehow—”

  “Not a hundred, nor half that,” Lethgro objected. “And if you'll drop us quietly up the Coast a little way—”

  Here the captain of the ship to landward of the Mouse hailed Repnomar to ask if all had been quiet. “Quiet enough,” she answered, after a moment. “Once I thought I saw some wharf child lurking about, but I was wrong.” And she and Lethgro lowered their voices and took their argument to the other side of the cabin, where presently she called out to the captain of the third vessel that all was well, and greeted her crew as they came merrily, and staggering a little, on board.

  Being here on the lee side of the cabin, they leaned against it cozily enough, while the Warden told the Captain that now she had no choice to speak of but to land him and the Exile at some unfrequented spot an hour or so along the Coast and let them make their own way thereafter, and the Captain assuring the Warden that she knew her choices better than he and that she did not mean to be a party to his foolishness, nor for that matter allow him to commit it.

  They were still at it when an inspector came onto the pier, supplied against objections with a certificate from the Council of Beng and a platoon of soldiers. Being on the wrong side of the cabin, they never noticed her till she had finished her inspection of the ship with the green prayer and stepped unceremoniously on board the Mouse. But at this, one of the crew, who was a little soberer than some, ran aft to warn the Captain, while others tried to discourage the inspector from advancing. For indeed all the Mouse's crew were well aware, from the tone of the discussion beside the cabin, that something was afoot, though they might not have rightly guessed what.

  Now the Captain and the Warden looked at each other hard, though not long, there being little time, and as though there were only one thought between them they turned and strode to the starboard bow, where the narrowness of the Mouse's gangplank more than the arguments of the crew was holding back the inspector's people.

  “What's all this about?” the Captain demanded threateningly, while the inspector did likewise in very nearly the same words and at the same moment. And when the inspector made it clear that she came to search for the Exile, on grounds of a report that he had been sighted near the waterfront, Repnomar, who had been crowding her all the while toward the head of the gangplank, suddenly pushed her down it and stooped and heaved the end of the gangplank into the Soll, while the crew joined in with a good will, some casting loose the mooring lines and shoving the Mouse free with poles, while others ran to set the sail for the offshore wind, and all without an order given.

  Three or four of the inspector's guards had been dumped with her on the gangplank, and the others mostly blinded by the splash, so that the sail had caught the wind before the first missiles struck the deck—arrows and a spear—and the Mouse, yawing wildly, scraped past the third ship at the pier and plunged headlong and staggering toward the open Soll. But very soon the Captain had her ship under control, and they were running straight before the wind, past the breakwater at the harbor mouth, with a good lead on whoever might follow.

  “What have you done now, Repnomar?” the Warden asked bitterly, and Repnomar answered,
“You had your chance to tell her you'd taken him already, and you said nothing. What was I to do?” And the Warden sighed and blinked his eyes, and laughed at last, there being little else for it.

  Presently they were out of sight of Beng, and no sign of pursuit yet, which did not surprise the Captain. “For,” she said, “when they've wrung the Soll-water out of that inspector, she'll have to go back to the Council for another certificate to commandeer a ship with—for I know there's no Council ship in Beng harbor right now—and then find the ship, and argue with the captain, and then with the crew, and pray to all the gods the Council will be counting on to find us for them, and by that time we'll be past finding.”

  Meanwhile the Warden had gone back to the cabin and undone the Exile's bonds, considering it not likely he would fly from the Mouse in mid-Soll as he had flown from Sollet Castle. The Exile had thanked him cheerfully and sat up bright-eyed and asked no questions for the present, seeming to understand enough from the roll of the Mouse under him and the singing of the rigging; and when Warden Lethgro looked in on him again a little later, he was lying flat again on Repnomar's bunk, his eyes closed and one crooked hand clasped over his chest where his wound was.

  By this time Lethgro had found a new cause of uneasiness; for the Captain, once out of sight of land and with no pursuing sail in view, had begun to cast her course first left, then right, sweeping a broad zigzag across the Soll's face, and keeping always a keen eye on the waves. “What are you up to, Repnomar?” he demanded at last, for just then he had seen a flush of satisfaction leap in her face, and a setting of her lips that, he suspected, boded ill.

  “There's no better time to try it than now,” said the Captain, and Lethgro groaned.

  “It's not your fantasy of the Soll Current you're talking about, is it?” he asked, hoping perhaps to undo with words what was already done in fact.

  “Does it feel like fantasy?” cried the Captain, who could never understand that not all feet and hands and ears could read the various throbbings and workings and sighings of the Mouse as hers did. And when Lethgro asked, to be quite sure of the depth of trouble, “You mean we're already in the Current?” she jerked her head for “yes” so vehemently that her hair flew against the wind.

  “I don't deny the Current,” Lethgro said with feeling. “But it's fantasy and foolishness to suppose it could carry us anywhere but sooner or later to the bottom of the Soll.”

  “If there is a bottom,” the Captain added mockingly.

  “I knew you were hasty and headstrong, Repnomar,” said the Warden; “but I thought you had better care for your crew and your ship (I don't speak of your passengers) than to set sail into uncharted waters on a moment's notice, without a plan, without supplies. Chances are we'll starve before we drown, if pirates or a storm don't finish us first.”

  Repnomar laughed, a sound which to Lethgro's ears had a hard ring to it. “Plans we'll make as we go,” she said. “And the Mouse is never without supplies, unless at the end of a longer voyage than any I've made yet. We have enough to feed us all till Windfall, if we're a little careful. Now,” she added more kindly, “think, Lethgro. All the Coast both ways from Beng will be full of inspectors and troops and councilors, and all the coastal boats and the Sollet shippers looking for us. I might, by good luck, find a spot to land you; but where would you be then, except in trouble and surrounded?”

  “That may be true now,” said the Warden bitterly, “since you've wasted so much time.” But, “We had to get clear,” said Repnomar; “and by then it was already too late.”

  So Warden Lethgro, when he had paced a turn around the deck and looked into the cabin once more (where the Exile slept, breathing hoarsely through his open mouth), settled himself beside the Captain where she sat at the tiller, saying as cheerfully as he could manage, “Well, then, Repnomar, what kind of a plan can we contrive?”

  And Repnomar said briskly, but with a deep crease between her brows as she squinted round at the blank circle of the horizon, midmost of which the Mouse seemed to sit like the one dry chip in a world of uneasy water, “We'll sail to the other side of the Soll, what else?”

  3

  Sailing

  The Warden of Sollet Castle was hungry, but he had no appetite. He lay uncomfortably (for he was a large man) on a bunk in the hold, and everywhere he looked in the half darkness of under-hatches he saw empty spaces around him, that might have been filled with food and were not. It was true that the Captain kept her little ship well stocked, as if she stood always in expectation of such encounters as the one with the inspector at the pier in Beng, and laid in new foodstuffs at every landing before she looked for paying cargo; but it was just as true that the Mouse was not stocked (if any ship could be) for a voyage across the Soll. There was no particular likelihood, so far as the Warden knew, that the Soll had another side. Every hour's sailing, with the wind on their stern and the Current rushing them headlong, took them a distance from the Coast that three or four hours might not suffice to struggle back across. The Captain had claimed from the beginning that they had food enough to last them till Windfall, and it seemed now (the Warden thought with a pang) that she had been more than right; for the wind was already failing, and the weather had turned rainy, though it should have been weeks yet before the Rains, and many weeks till Windfall. But who knew how the seasons might be perverted in this wilderness of waves? And if the winds of the year fell indeed, what hope would there be for the poor Mouse, becalmed in mid-Soll under the blazing light?

  For they ran always and always into the light. It glowed now not so much ahead of them as above, and the Warden groaned to notice how clearly he could see now even under hatches. There was one spot in the sky from which the light seemed to pour as from a lamp, making the clouds there too bright to look at. Also, the Warden noted, the air was warmer here in mid-Soll, and growing warmer still as they fled down the dying wind. It was true that the Exile blossomed in this warmth, and seemed for the first time comfortable in his clothes, for all the trouble of his wound and of a wrenched ankle that made his hobbling gait more awkward even than before; but the Warden was accustomed to the pleasant coolness of the Middle Sollet forests, and this ever-growing heat was like an ever-heavier weight that pressed upon his skin.

  “Why,” he had asked the Captain, “if you're determined to cut water that's never felt a plank before, why not at least follow the Coast? You can come to the end of the world that way as surely as this, and in the meantime we'd have food and supplies within reach, and coves where we could lie up in case of storms.”

  “And pirates, and shoals and rocks I don't know the marks of,” the Captain had answered, “and the Councils’ people dogging us afloat and ashore. A sure way to put your neck in a noose, Lethgro, or your head well salted in a bag beside the Exile's, for the Councils to make much of. Not to mention,” she added, “mine.” And went on at length concerning the foolishness of his idea, so that Lethgro suspected sadly that she was uneasy in her own mind about this wild voyage and had spent much time beating down the arguments that arose there.

  All these things had taken away the Warden's appetite, so that though he was always hungry he ate little and with no pleasure. Soll water, too, had a sharp taste he had never liked, and he fancied it did not quench thirst as well as the snow-fed streams that ran into the Sollet; but Repnomar told him this was nonsense. The Exile had refused at first to drink of it, when he saw it hauled up in buckets over the Mouse's side; but, there being nothing else to drink, he came to it soon enough, and seemed surprised (as so much else surprised him) that it was water indeed and not poison.

  It was an arrow of the Warden's guards that had struck him in his flight from Sollet Castle, and his ankle, as well as they could make out from his clumsy speech, had buckled under him when he came down awkwardly among the trees. Clearly it had been a hard journey for him since, and Lethgro thought it must have been in desperation that he decided to stow away on board one of the coastal boats at Beng. But with food
enough and rest enough and Repnomar's salves, and now with the warm air that he seemed to bask and bathe in, his wound was healing at last (though he still drew his breath with a harsh whistle) and the swelling of his ankle had melted away. Whether he understood at all what sort of voyage they were embarked on because of him, there was no knowing.

  And having run through all these thoughts again and come to no happier conclusion than before, the Warden rose cramped and unrested and hungry from his bunk, and made his way on deck where he could stretch and not be tormented by the sight of the empty spaces in the hold, though indeed there was enough to torment him here too—the shoreless swell of the Soll spreading beyond sight whichever way he turned, with a squall of rain off the right bow; and the hot, unwholesome light raining down from overhead, so that he bowed unwillingly under it and pulled his hat low over his eyes.

  The Captain was in the cabin, showing maps to the Exile. Lethgro went in to them, glad of a chance to speak to her out of the crew's hearing, for it was of the crew he wanted to speak, this being another item that troubled him. Broz moved himself from where he lay at the Exile's feet (not as in affection but as ready to set his teeth in him if the need arose) and came to stand at the Warden's side, for he liked old friends best. The Captain had out her great map of the whole Coast, and was showing the Exile (who throughout his escape, it seemed, had had little enough idea of where he was) how Beng and Rotl lay both on the right side of the Sollet, Beng just at its mouth and Rotl downcoast, while on the left bank and up the Coast from there the towns were smaller and more scattered; and when the Warden entered she looked up challengingly, ready to answer when he should ask again why she had not taken them up that empty shore. But instead he asked sharply, “What do you mean to do, Repnomar, when your crew refuse to sail farther?”