Dragon Heart (24 page)

*   *   *

Mervaly took the jewels from her hair, and laid them on the table; she moved forward, toward the man sitting on the bed before her. She had sent away the others. She needed no one but him for this. She stood before him, just out of his reach, and bent and took off her shoes.

He watched, intent. His face was livid green with the fading bruises; it was like marrying a corpse. She lifted her hands to her hair, and let free the bindings, and shook her head so that her hair tumbled around her.

His fingers curled. She cocked an eyebrow at him, and put her hands on her breasts, lifting them, her thumbs on the nipples beneath the thin cloth. He swallowed.

She moved her hands behind her, unclasped the top of the gown, and began to peel it away from her. As she did, she began to sway, slowly, back and forth. She let the dress hang a moment on her breasts, as the cloth slid like water down her sides, and on the bed he started up. She shut her eyes. With her thumbs she twitched the cloth away, baring her whole body to him, and he was on her, dragging her to the bed, bearing her down beneath him.

 

13

After he left Castle Ocean behind, Jeon let the horse carry him at its own pace up the beach. More than anything, he needed to get out of the thorny, overheated atmosphere in the castle so he could think.

He knew Oto and Broga had murdered his brother. Everything in him wanted to leap on them, kill them, too, even if it meant—as it likely did—that he would die. That was honorable, to die for justice, and Luka's wounds wept for justice. If Jeon stayed in the castle, he thought, the chance would come for his revenge, the opportunity overwhelming, and he would take it.

Part of him wanted to take it, to rise up with a sword like a flame and destroy them, whatever the outcome. Another part of him said, Wait.

Because he thought, now, there was something else. He thought now maybe he should be the King of Castle Ocean.

Which meant he should not die, even to avenge his brother.

He rode all the rest of the day along the shore, along the margin of the surf. The late sun blazed across the sea, but the seabirds were flocking by him, moving steadily inland, and on the horizon dark clouds piled up. The wind rose. At night he lay down in a fisherman's hut made of driftwood and slept on the sand.

In the morning the storm was coming toward him, trailing its veils of rain, the lifting sea dark green. The heavy waves smashed and swept along the beach. He went along into the east; since he had left the castle, he had seen no other human being, and he did not expect to see one this day, either.

The storm roared onshore, pelting rain, and wind like fists. Swallowed up in the enormous tumult, he bundled himself in his cloak, the world all gone. This felt good to him, even the cold. He remembered all he could of Luka, every moment. What Luka would want him to do. In the afternoon the rain slackened and the bright sun shone, which he took for a sign.

He slept under the overhang of the cliff, shivering all night. The next day blazed bright and clean, and around noon he rode into a little cove where the tide was well out and found several people digging in the wet sand.

He waited on the beach and, when they came in, traded them bread and cheese for their clams. Being with other people now made him feel prickly, close, invaded. They talked readily enough about themselves; they came from a village inland, where the harvest would be lean this year, and so they were digging up clams.

He said, “Have you had any trouble with wild pigs?”

They only blinked at him.

“What about pirates? I have heard,” he said, to jog them, “some place of soldiers was attacked, up the coast.”

At that they began to nod and talk. They had heard something of that. Pirates it was, then. They'd thought so. “Yes, remember, I said so from the first. Brave ones, too, going after all those soldiers.” The soldiers, it seemed, had thieved from the local people, raiding sometimes even as far as their village, and so the local people were on the side of the pirates.

Night came. He steamed his clams in seaweed with theirs and ate, and they fell quickly asleep. The wind laid the fire over. He sat staring into it, and Luka's face swam up into his memory again, vivid, laughing. He wept into his hands, hollow with loss.

Beyond the reach of the firelight the ceaseless wave rose up out of the sea and thumped onto the beach. His heart felt like a stone, dragging him down. Revenge. And yet that way they might lose everything. What use, if they all died? The wind blew the flames flat; the ocean roared, the voice of the world, too large for any human ear to hear.

He rode two more days, and in the next afternoon he came on the place where the new fort had been.

The sand had blown over a lot of the wreckage. There had been stones in rows, and some wooden walls above that, burnt down to the ground. The patrol that found the dead had done their work: on the higher ground lay mounds of sand in neat rows, each grave marked with rocks at head and foot. He counted fourteen. That did not seem enough.

The crabs and gulls and wolves had done their work also. Several of the graves were torn open, and bones spilled into the sand.

The pirates would have carried off anybody left alive, he thought. Maybe, therefore, they would have taken care to leave many alive. Dead bodies made bad slaves.

He went on past this graveyard. The fort had grown larger since he had last seen it; there had been three courses of stones at least, a square wall higher than his head. Now flat and blackened with fire. Burnt driftwood cluttered the beach. Higher, above the tide line, he left his horse and walked around kicking at the litter. He turned over helmets, scraps of black-and-white-striped fabric, more bones. The head of a pike. Dimples in the sand might have been footprints. He found, in the kelp strands, an odd little jewel, uncut and unpolished, a clear green stone.

Out of these pieces he could make no picture of what had happened. With the height of the cliff here nothing could have attacked from the land; whoever did this had to have come from the sea. He was exhausted now, but he could not bear to stay in this place, and he rode on.

*   *   *

He stopped, some way down the beach, where the cliff sagged down and grass grew on an old landslide. Turning out his weary horse to crop this graze, he found a place out of the wind and lay down. Sleep overtook him. He woke deep in the night, caught the horse, and rode on toward the dawn edge of the world, chewing on the last of his bread. The seam of the world began to lighten, and far ahead, against the red smear of the sunrise, he saw the steep headland where to keep on eastward he would have to climb up the cliff and go inland.

With the sun halfway to the top of the sky, he rode up on two skiffs drawn onto the sand. The fishermen camped in the shelter of the cliff welcomed him for his red hair, glad to give him shelter and food. They had a brew with them, which made his head spin. When he asked about the new fort, they laughed, cheerful.

“Ah! We did that!”

Jeon sat straight up, startled. The man before him, one of a blurry cloud of faces, beamed at him. “We did it! The soldiers—they beat up Benes, and grabbed two of the women—so we prayed, and God sent us help.”

Jeon grunted at him, almost relieved. “God didn't send any help anywhere else?”

They all shrugged, their eyes elsewhere. The jug came around again, fiery and sweet. He only took a sip of it, warned of the effects.

In the morning, when he saddled his horse, a young man came swiftly up to him.

“East,” he said. “They're bad people, too.” He thrust bread and a little jug into Jeon's hand, turned on his heel, and walked away.

*   *   *

So he went on toward the headland looming in the distance. Fresh from the rain, streams came down into the sea, carving trenches through the sand, and the horse balked at crossing and Jeon got off and led it by the bridle. Once he had to ride far inland to find a place to cross. He began thinking he could turn back soon, that he had seen enough. Thinking so carried his mind, again, to Castle Ocean, where Oto and Broga would be waiting to kill him. He thought of Luka's shredded body and his gut tightened.

Maybe he was just a coward. Maybe he was making all this up, an excuse not to do what he should do.

Then on the beach ahead of him something was sticking up out of the sand, a raw, blackened arc.

This was the broken keel of a ship, half-burnt, lodged in the tidal wrack. He looked all around, seeing no sign of people, and then his memory jogged and he recognized this place. A narrow little stream came down through a gorge here, with a grassland just above the beach. He thought there should have been huts on the grassland, but there weren't. Inland, though, he knew there was a tree. This was where he had found Tirza, with the people getting ready to burn her.

He rode up toward the little meadow, the dead grass laid over like a brown blanket. Now he could make out shapes under the grass, a sunken fire pit, and an overgrown heap of something. His hair stood on end. He thought, if he kicked that open, it would be all burnt. He would find bones.

“Hey!”

He jumped, his hand flying toward the dagger in his belt. On the bank of the little stream a naked man was watching him.

“Hey! Leave them alone!”

“Leave who alone?” he said, and cleared his throat. The man was thin as a fishbone, his hair and beard ragged, his body bruised and scratched.

“Them that was there.” The man began to sway back and forth on his widespread horny feet. “They was there, once. Leave 'em alone.”

“What happened?”

“The devil came out of the sea.” The man swaying, his eyes wild. “I saw it. I saw it.”

“The devil.” Jeon went closer. “What did he look like?”

“The devil. The terrible serpent, red as the fires of hell.” The man moaned.

Jeon stood beside him, put a hand on him, and the man jumped. Jeon said, “I have some bread. Tell me what you saw. One man? Two? A dozen? What kind of ship?”

“The devil! I'm telling you—no man—give me something to eat.”

“How did you escape?”

“I hid. Feed me.”

Jeon gave him bread, but he got no more sense out of him. The old man curled up in the sand and slept, twitched and cried in his sleep. Jeon went up the little stream and came to the tree where Tirza had tried to hide.

He sat there at the foot of the tree, trying to piece this together. Somehow this all fit together, these attacks: the burning of Santomalo, the new fort, this place. Something tugged at his memory, whatever had happened when he and Tirza were shipwrecked. He wondered if those ships had burnt.

He thought, In all these places, Tirza was there, before they were attacked. The other places he had passed, other people, when Tirza had not been there they had seen nothing.

He thought then of the little green stone he had found and took it from his wallet. It felt warm in his hand. He turned it over in his fingers. The dark was coming. He should build a fire, eat something. His mind roiled, something struggling to form into an idea. All he could remember of the shipwreck was the monstrous seas, the horrible flashes of light.

That had not been pirates. Maybe it hadn't even been a storm.

Tirza knew. He remembered how upset she had become when he spoke of it. He had taken for granted then that it was just that she had suffered from it.

Now he saw something else in her distress. As if he was getting something wrong.

He rolled the green stone in his fingers. Now, at last, he had to decide what to do. He could ride away forever, keep on into the east, go on and on until his red hair made no difference. Or he could go back and try to make himself King.

He could not think how to do that. He had none of Luka's Kingcraft; he had no followers. He saw a dozen ways he could fail and die.

After a moment, he put the green stone back into his wallet and looked up into the branches above him, where Tirza had sheltered. He had saved her, then, when no one thought he could. Without thinking, he stood up, dusted his hands off, and rode back down the stream to the beach. There was no sign of the madman. He turned west, back toward Castle Ocean.

 

14

“No,” Oto said. “You are Queen, a member of the Imperial Family now, and you must display yourself with the proper decorum. Obey me.”

Mervaly glared at him, her hands clenched at her sides. The soldiers who had brought her and Oto's breakfast retreated to the door, their eyes downcast. She said, “My lord, I only want to care for my birds. I mean no disobedience.” What she wanted was to pick up the ewer and smash it over his head.

He said, “And you must stop speaking up in council.”

“Ah,” she said, and paced two steps toward him, her back tingling. “That I will not do. I am Queen, as you said. I will have my rule here.”

“You'll do as I say!”

“I'll do as I see proper,” she said, and he lifted his hand and slapped her.

“Respect me!”

Her head had rocked under the blow; she straightened, coiled, and cocked her arm to hit him back, but then Broga came in. Outnumbered, she backed away, cooling down.

The King's brother stalked across the room, his coat disarranged, his hands dusty. His habitual look of scorn was on his face. He said, “The patrol we sent off yesterday to the south? Has not come back. That's two more men gone.”

Oto sat down on the chair at the table. “Are they yet overdue? We may wait another day.”

Mervaly stood back by the window, watching them. Broga, she knew, was more dangerous than Oto.

Broga said, “When will you waken to this? We are bleeding away our strength.” His gaze shifted toward her. “They”—he laid weight on the word, staring at her—“are attacking us, and you, you fool, do nothing.”

Oto glanced over his shoulder at her. His fingers tapped on his knee. “When the fleet comes we will have the men necessary to secure all the country. Until then—”