The Ships of Merior (72 page)

‘Missteps and falls,’ said the scout, breathing in jerks from his run. ‘The men standing said nothing looked amiss. The casualties just stepped on solid rock that gave under them.’

Pesquil threw the reins of his gelding to the staff sergeant at his elbow. ‘Go back up,’ he told the scout. ‘And get another man to run relay to the south ridge. All teams are to stop where they are. These were no accidents, nor just bad luck. Let no one advance any farther until I’ve unearthed the reason.’ To Prince Lysaer, he added, ‘Tell your garrisons to make camp. We won’t be moving before sunset, that’s certainty. Warn the captains. Their divisions must be kept on a very tight leash. It could take days to clear this pass.’

Squat, and staid in his stride as quarried rock, Lord Commander Harradene of Etarra arrived in a sour chink of mail. Eyes of china-doll blue seemed at odds with his grizzled black eyebrows, pulled now into the scowl that his recruits nicknamed ‘the bear’s lair’. ‘Pesquil, your runner from the south face is down with a broken leg. Seventeen falls off the slope, from his side. He wished
you to hear his report before the bonesetters numb his wits with a posset.’

‘Tell him the matter’s already in hand.’ Pesquil rolled his shoulders, bent, and let the heavy mail shirt he preferred for mounted use slither off by its own weight. He heaved the limp mass over his saddlebow, unlashed a light brigandine from the roll behind the cantle, then dragged that over the rust-streaked leather of his gambeson. The sergeant led his gelding off unasked.

Corded like a grizzled old predator, Pesquil checked his weapons before Commander Harradene’s florid presence. ‘Hold the garrisons to order with an iron fist,’ he said in crisp haste. ‘No man leaves camp. Not even to forage for firewood. Believe this, I dread what I’ll find up there. The traps to welcome our army through this defile have been long months in the planning.’

Shadows painted the deep vale of Valleygap in virid, umber and purple. The cart ruts snaked between the louring slabs of slate, cut against a sky like lucent silk. Here and there setting sunlight licked a pinnacle to a lingering flame of red gold. On his knees in a thicket beneath the dank jut of an overhang, Pesquil jammed his knife into its sheath and crouched back on his heels. Always when his blood ran hottest, the curses stuck cold on his tongue.

The Ath-forsaken rock’s been trapped,’ he said. ‘I expected as much, but here’s proof.’ He sifted his fingers through a litter of stone crushed into the moss by his knee. ‘Litter left by a chisel. Steiven was bad, but Dharkaron avenge, Red-beard his son is a demon.’

A moan cut the gloom from a man sprawled downslope, pinned in place by the agony of broken bones. Whether his hurts included fatal bleeding, no one dared reach him to check. The hale scouts poised at their Captain Mayor’s shoulder were too bitterly experienced
to give way to the concern that tore at their hearts.

Pesquil stood up, his iron-grey hair at one with the gloaming in the fir thickets. ‘Pass my orders. Have teams make their way down to the wounded, but on ropes where the rock is laid bare. Check your footing. This ravine’s a natural death trap, a rock slide just screaming to happen. Let’s not be the fools to set one off.’

The scouts organized to depart.

‘One more thing,’ Pesquil called after them. ‘Any man not rescued by nightfall stays where he lies. All territory we’ve covered that’s clean stays guarded. I want no barbarian foray skulking in to foul our backtrail in the dark.’

Hand signals answered; his men were efficient, those few inclined to argue long since broken to sharp discipline. The scouts who served in the headhunters’ league knew very well: the ones who followed orders, stayed alive.

Yet even for scouts grown crafty through experience, Valleygap offered no respite. The spring-traps set waiting in the path of the teams who laboured to help the wounded were not set to kill, but to cripple.

‘The scrub is full riddled,’ a shaking veteran reported, arrived with the Utters into the safety of the camp. Behind him, borne gasping in a stupor of pain, came the fallen, the arms which had attempted to help their fallen comrades staked through with sharpened slivers of wood; or their legs, gashed white to the bone, if the bones themselves were not snapped.

Under full night, the moon scored the ridges like polish on ivory above the black swale of Valleygap. Hunched in a hellish flare of torch light, Pesquil counted the best of his scouts among this first round of casualties. Gripped by brittle patience, he regarded each one’s suffering, then cracked orders that made men leap to fetch garrison healers to attend them. ‘Let every town-coddled lancer see the cost of fighting Red-beard’s barbarians. Then let them hear ‘til they shake in their boots, for
when they face the Master of Shadow on the field, they will suffer a thousand times worse!’

Anger brewed like live current around the campfires. Wood was too scarce for the cooks to bake bread; the brick ovens stayed dismantled, while men choked down dry chunks of biscuit and chewed leathery slabs of sour cheese. Over talk and the measured tread of sentries, above the soft snorts of horses who pawed in complaint for scant fodder and the low of disgruntled oxen, they heard the brisk concern of their officers. Then dulling as nightmare came the shattering screams as a deep gash was cauterized, or a bone set straight for the splint. The cliff scarps shredded every cry into echoes. Clean wood smoke laced through the sickening stink of charred flesh. The men mustered to bring war to the southern spit at Merior lay that night in their blankets, unsleeping and stifled by raw dread.

Two days prior to autumn equinox, the workers in the shipyard at Merior cut seasoned lengths of pitch pine to start the new brigantine’s decking. Arithon was not on hand to mark the occasion, nor would he be present as the keel was laid down to begin the construction of the second. Withdrawn from the company of his workers, he ferried the comatose person of Dakar aboard his painted little sloop. He had not returned to the Koriani herbalist’s cottage even for the hour when the last splints were removed from the boy’s wrist to show bone and muscle healed straight and smooth beneath a spider-laced mesh of pink scars. The same morning, remarked by the fishwives,
Talliarthe
slipped her mooring and set sail.

The course she steered through fair-weather swells was due northwest off the reefs; the passage she accomplished was brief. She made port in the harbour at Telzen to place orders at the mills for new lumber and to pick up a packet of dispatches. Bent to dark brooding by ill news from the north, and a recount of unmentionable tragedy, Arithon pressed on upcoast and dropped anchor in a forested cove twenty leagues distant from Elssine.
Alone in the blaze of a cloudless, calm morning, he rowed his dory to the beach.

At a time and place most carefully appointed, he grounded the boat in an exploding flock of terns and dragged her up beyond the tidemark. Wrapped in air that smelled of scrub pine and sea wrack, surrounded by the plaintive calls of fishing birds, he whistled a clear major triplet.

Then he perched on the trunk of a storm-toppled palm and waited, hopeful that his past request for a rendezvous had been received in good grace. In time, a lanky clansman clad in deerhide emerged from the brush to meet him.

No rustled foliage betrayed the presence of others, though such scouts were certainly there, crouched in concealment amid the vine-choked thickets and oat grass, and alert behind their strung bows. Well versed in his dealings with clansmen, Arithon understood the wrong move would see him skewered with a hail of broadheads at short range. Unprepossessing, a target limned in full sunlight, he showed no sign that he cared.

The clansman spoke, and was answered by prearranged words in Paravian. A carved wooden token changed hands.

His other lean fist never far from his knives, the scout fingered the incised falcon set against a shaved crescent moon, device of Shand’s past high kings. ‘Ath!’ He pulled a vexed frown. Beneath mottled streaks of stain to mask the line of his profile, he looked little older than Jieret. ‘It’s his Grace of Rathain? Our chieftain’s going to lose silver. He wagered on a galley flying banners and a retinue prinked with large emeralds. Is your vaunted prince still on board?’

A smile flicked Arithon’s lips as he rose. ‘My sloop holds a fat prophet with a belly ache. He was much too sick to come ashore.’

A pause ensued. When the visitor listed no further
passengers, the young scout recovered slack manners with a flush that left him dusky to the hairline. The unassuming figure before him was given a second, piercing study, though prior assessment had been accurate: the black-haired arrival carried no visible badge of rank. Small and neatly made, he wore the loose, shabby dress of a fisherman and carried no weapon beyond a longsword in black metal, the sleek line of its swept-back quillons half-buried in a fold of linen shut. ‘Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn? Your Grace?’

‘Just Arithon, if you please. As well, you can call off your hunting pack.’

The clan scout jerked up his chin. ‘Not so fast. Any man could carve out an old high king’s device or parrot a phrase in the old tongue. Show me proof. I’d be certain of your bloodline.’

‘None but a fool would lay claim to my name, with half of the north roused to arms.’ Turned brisk in distaste, Arithon yanked loose his right cuff tie. He peeled back the sleeve and bared for inspection the deep, welted scar seared into the length of his forearm. The brand had been left by the light bolt cast against him by his half-brother that had doomed him to Desh-thiere’s curse.

‘That will satisfy.’ Relieved to be spared a proving wrought of magecraft or shadows, the scout pursed his lips and shrilled the piping call of a plover into the thicket behind him.

A movement behind the pine branches revealed the form of a man, who unfolded from a crouch and emerged on a cat’s stride onto the sandy verge. He topped the seed tufts of the oat grass by a head. A black and tan laminate bow made of horn hung from his immensely broad shoulder. He had a beard like rooted wire, clipped short. A fat black pearl strung on a braided cord nested in the tanned hollow of his throat. His hair capped his skull, glossy as a sable’s pelt licked through with silver, and salted pure white at the temples. The bones of his
face were like fitted, stamped bronze, and imposing, coupled with straight brows and eyes of lucent turquoise.

‘As your Grace may see, the hunting party consisted of one,’ he addressed in a baritone flawed in the grain like burred oak.

He side-stepped to display the arrows in his shoulder quiver, fletched with grey heron quills and pointed for small game. The sword he carried was a masterwork of arms, figured with interlace that made its great size appear deceptively delicate.

Arithon tilted his head to measure the frame that towered over him. He did not repeat the error of the scout. ‘Lord Erlien s’Taleyn, High Earl of Alland?’

‘To a prince who wears rags, plain Erlien will do.’ Frost-crystal eyes swept the scion of Rathain and dismissed the whole man in fierce challenge. ‘Your mother descended from our own s’Ahelas royalty, it’s said. Well, I set no truth to the claim. The blood of the kings my forebears served was substantial, and you but a mouse with scarcely the growth to do more than bloody my kneecap.’

Arithon shrugged, grave-faced. ‘Be warned then, my lord. Since I favour my father, that should charge you to keep careful guard on your kneecap. What’s more, if you’ve lost any silver over galleys and flags, I shall pay off the debt myself.’

Erlien burst into deep-chested laughter, while the pearl at his neck danced on its tether of thong. ‘Dharkaron himself! I’ll admit we tested your presumptions. Since in fact you have none, you’re most welcome to the Kingdom of Shand.’ He drew a black-handled dirk from the back of his belt, kissed the reversed blade, then intoned in overdone courtesy, ‘As
caithdein
and this realm’s steward, my life’s pledge as surety for visiting princes. I beg for the sake of tradition that you leave my poor shanks intact.’

‘Dharkaron witness, I might.’ Arithon stretched his stride to fall in step as the chieftain and his scout led off through the undergrowth. Not about to seem cowed by the massive man looming beside him, he added, ‘Should my sloop be left anchored in plain sight?’

‘Don’t trouble.’ Erlien flashed back a bear’s lazy grin, hands flexed in a disquieting, powerful contrast as he sheathed his enormous knife. ‘Your boat’s a fine morsel of bait. Should a galley put in to investigate, we’ll lighten her cargo as forfeit. City captains well know to steer clear of these coves. We’ve sunk the keels from under the rash ones, or any who played cocky and forgot.’

Affable, even easy, as the chieftain’s manner seemed, the stalking grace of his tread reflected resounding unease. He carried paired dirks in the cuffs of his boots, and he skirted his native thickets like quarry.

Vexed to quick chills by his bardic intuition, Arithon offered, ‘I’ll surrender my sword, if that would reassure you.’

Erlien slammed to a stop. Spattered with sun through the chinks in high pine trees, his shoulders stayed unrelaxed. The eyes turned to Arithon were narrowed and sullen amid a wind-lined mesh of crow’s feet. ‘And that would do me good with your full command of shadows at my back?’

‘It might.’ Arithon sustained that burning, light gaze, though his palms broke into a fine sweat. ‘The blade is the same one carried by my ancestors. She bears the name Alithiel.’

‘Paravian-wrought. I’d heard of her.’ As a thrush took wing in a whir of drab feathers, Erlien smothered a hair-trigger start. Then the legend is true, that your sword is enspelled to dazzle an attacker into blindness?’

‘Only if the defending cause is just,’ amended Arithon. ‘We’ll both keep our sight. I didn’t come here to force any favours through sorcery.’

‘Yet you’re a peril in our midst all the same.’ Erlien
tapped his weapon hilt, the fringes on his buckskins the only ripple in resinous air. Cut off from the sea-breeze, the scrub forest was stifling, the sky through green and bronze needles cerulean as fired enamel. ‘If you’d give up your arms, what would you balk at? Being tied, or blindfolded, or dragged through the salt bogs at knife point? To put the issue baldly, does any means exist to disarm the dire powers of your birthright?’