The Ships of Merior (8 page)

‘Pull aside then.’ The watch captain lounged in his niche, his breath plumed in flamelight. ‘The post courier’s overdue from Tharidor, and the gates’ll be opened when he’s in.’

‘There’s courtesy for you,’ Halliron said between sneezes. ‘I knew we should have made camp. If the courier hasn’t come to grief in the dark, well have our choice of three inns, all of them cavernously dim and dirty, and not a one of them honest.’

‘Which has the best ale?’ asked Dakar.

‘Who knows?’ The Masterbard sighed. ‘In Jaelot, they cut the brew with water.’

By chance, their wait became shortened. While Medlir fussed over his master, and Dakar communed with his mount, a barrel-chested wagonmaster in sheepskins rolled in, swearing at his team and unhappy to be missing his dinner. He brandished his whip at the gate house, while his sweated horses sidled and stamped and struck blue-edged sparks from the pavement. It’s that thrice-cursed shipment from the mill I’m carrying, the one with the mayor’s seal on it.’

The gates were opened very swiftly indeed, while something clicked in the brain of Dakar’s camel-necked chestnut that said stable, and comfort, and oats. It pinned back rabbity ears and lunged to harry the wagon team through.

The lead pair were blinkered. The first the near one knew of Faery-toes’ attentions was a nip of yellow teeth at its flanks.

It veered to a bounding grind of singletrees, while Dakar, howling mightily, sawed nerveless mouth with both reins and fell off. He had the aplomb to roll clear, while the carter whipcracked and cursed.

The lash caught the gelding on the nose. He wind-milled sideways on splayed feet, rat-tail flailing. Eyes rolled white, his nostrils expanded into a snort that blew steam, he half-reared and reversed to a thunderous clatter of hooves. His gaunt rump jammed the wheel horse in the shoulder. It staggered, squealing. The rest of the team careened sideways and jack-knifed the dray between the gate turrets with Faery-toes folded amidst them like a misguided log in a torrent.

Oaths became lost in the crack of shod hooves as a brief show of stamping coalesced to a five horse brawl amid the traces.

The carter clung to his swaying box like a man on a half-foundered vessel, plying his lash and a poisonous stream of threats upon his scuffling team to no avail. Leather parted; tenets burst from collar stuffing to a scream of splintering wood. Unnoticed atop the swaying wagon bed, lashings creaked and shifted loose. A springy bundle of cypress teetered, then tipped like an unfolding set of shears and swan-dived onto the pavement.

The splintering crack of impact raised stinging reverberations under the confines of the gate arch. The wheel pair parted sideways in a violent shy and the carter threw down his whip, crying murder, as eighty board feet of rare moulding custom-carved to please the mayor’s wife became milled to pale slivers beneath his wheels.

Through a small, stunned second, the torches dimmed in a swooping gust of wind. Under their demonic flicker, the carter turned red and tare at his sideburns with his fists. The draught team milled, netted in. slackened
traces and flighty as shoaling fish; while the mis-shapen cause of the disaster stood nonplussed, conversing in great sucking gusts with the wheel horses.

‘Curse of a fiend!’ The carter unfurled from his box in a frog-leap that landed him beside the russet-brown bundle that was Dakar. ‘What in Sithaer will you do about that misbegotten insult of a horse?’

‘Misbegotten? Insult?’ Dakar inspected the burly antagonist planted over him, fists cocked for mayhem, and his hair screwed free of an oiled felt cap like tufts of snarled wool on a shuttlecock. ‘You’re pretty ugly yourself, you know.’ Through the half-breath while the carter was stunned speechless, the Mad Prophet pushed past, retrieved trailing reins, and hauled Faery-toes out backwards from the tangle of shafts and shredded harness.

While Halliron and Medlir watched amazed, a safe distance removed in the pony cart, Dakar came back, towing horse. He poised before the irate carter, oblivious to the pounding from the adjacent gate houses, as the watch on duty pelted downstairs in armed readiness to forestall an altercation.

‘I suggest you forgive the old boy.’ When the nag butted a congenial head against the carter’s shoulder and knocked him a half-step back, Dakar added, ‘How could you not? He likes you.’

The carter purpled and swung. The suet-round face of his target vanished as Dakar ducked and fled beneath the saddle girth. Bunched knuckles smacked against the barrel-sprung ribs of the horse, who responded from both ends with a grunt and a fart like an explosion.

‘Oh my,’ cried Dakar, stifling a chortle. ‘Your wife’s nose must look like a pudding if that’s your reaction to her kisses.’

The carter dove under the gelding’s neck in a fit of killing fury while the horse, ears flat, parted gaunt jowls and snapped.

Teeth closed over greasy fleece, and the breeches of the carter burst a critical seam. The Mad Prophet sidestepped around the chestnut’s churning quarters, blithe in rebuke as he passed, ‘Leave him alone, Faery-toes. Your affection’s a wee bit misplaced. You know this fellow you’re undressing’s about as nice as a hawk-pecked snake.’

Arrived in a rush that packed the postern, Jaelot’s guardsmen cracked into laughter.

Faery-toes switched its nubby tail just as the carter began his rush. Caught a dizzying lash in the face, and howling falsetto invective, the man lunged with full intent to mangle just as the horse lost its poise. Its knurled spine humped. Enormous hooves battered for purchase as its hind end heaved up and cleared the ground. One hind leg hooked out in a cow-kick that demolished the front wheel of the dray. A descant of splintering spokes sounded above the crash as the hub hammered into the cobbles.

Set dancing in nervy refrain, the unattended team bit their collars. The crippled vehicle dragged in their wake with a blistering screech that harrowed up six yards of paving. Some fast-witted bystander caught their bits and muscled them to a standstill, all unnoticed in the ongoing tumult beneath the archway.

The carter expended one last volley of monosyllabic epithets. Fairy-toes, carried away in a careening sidle, lost the last of his questionable footing. He dropped belly-down in a splay-legged heap to a whistling grunt of astonishment.

Felled by peals of mirth, Dakar buckled to his knees not far off. With both eyes squeezed shut and leaking helpless tears, he failed to notice when the officer of the watch stopped sniggering. Jaelot’s men at arms snapped to in dutiful propriety as a four-in-hand bitch and black lacquered coach thundered up the thoroughfare. Gilded, lion-blazoned doors sparked in the torchlight as the
vehicle slowed and pulled up before the obstruction that clogged the city gate.

Stiffened as pokers, watch gate captain’s men saluted as boy grooms in velvet livery leapt down to catch the bridles of the lead horses, which were also black, and matched like images in mirror glass with smart blazes and white stockings. A footman dispatched from the driver’s box strolled over to the carter, even yet hopping back to escape the gelding’s thrashing first effort to rise.

There is some difficulty?’ the footman opened coldly. The gold braid and blazon of the authority he represented glittered through the smoke of the torches.

Speechless, the carter stabbed a skinned finger at the gelding, which gathered its fantastic assemblage of joints and surged, snorting, to its feet.

A woman’s voice called from the carriage. The footman nodded deference, then turned his chin stiffly over his pearl-buttoned collar and inquired, ‘May I ask, in the name of my Lord Mayor, what you have done with the new crown moulding?’

The carter straightened his ripped britches, sweat sliding slick down his temples. ‘I? Vengeance of Dharkaron, that horse!’

Faery-toes curled an insouciant lip and shook like a dog amid a tempest of flapping reins and stirrups. The footman’s regard turned sceptical before he swung back to the carter. ‘I doubt if that bundle of incompetence is able to move four feet in consecutive order.’

‘Well, that says it all in a nutshell,’ cried the carter in exasperation.

‘Who owns the beast?’ The glance of the mayor’s footman ranged loftily over the bystanders, flickered past the pony cart and its pair of frozen figures, then lowered inexorably to the last, still wheezing on the pavement. ‘Who?’

Dakar’s disordered features snapped sober. ‘I just donated him to the city almshouse.’

The carriage door opened and slammed. The footman gave way before a robed secretary with overbred hands. Mincing like a rooster with hackles raised for combat, the official bore down upon the unkempt fat man who, like his horse, belatedly scrambled upright.

‘You will be chained and held in custody until tomorrow, when this matter will be settled in the court hall of Jaelot to my Lord Mayor’s satisfaction. I suggest until then that somebody competent puts that creature away. At least have it removed from the streets before it can cause further mischief.’ To the carter, he added without sympathy, ‘The guard will help clear your debris. If you wish to claim settlement for damages, attend the hearing and make your plea to the mayor’s justice.’

While the watch captain’s men closed in armed force to take the Mad Prophet into custody, and the retinue of the Jaelot’s mayor retired back to the carriage and whisked off on gilded wheels, Halliron pressed mittened hands over streaming eyes and groaned through the muffling fur. ‘Ath, I knew, I just
knew!
We should never have come into Jaelot.’

His Lordship the Mayor of Jaelot was not disposed to rise early. In his courts of law, appointments by hour were unheard of; the city alderman sent his list daily to the watch captain, who detailed men at arms to the dungeons. The accused were fetched out without breakfast and escorted to the annex chamber, a window-less, black-panelled vault with groined ceilings built into a cellar beneath the council hall. There, cuffed in manacles that made it difficult to scratch accumulated flea bites, Dakar the Mad Prophet was obliged to wait with two other men and a woman, whose crimes ranged from public brawling to theft and bloody murder.

Through the course of an uncomfortable night, he bad cursed his careless learning. A brass lock or latch, he could have opened with spells,- and had, many times, in egress from the bedchambers of willing wives whose husbands had come home untimely. But the fetters and bars of Jaelot’s dungeons were never fashioned for decor in castings of soft, refined metals. Chilled yet from lying huddled on dank straw, Dakar ground his teeth over dilatory habits that had let him drift through his centuries of
Fellowship apprenticeship without fully mastering the contrary properties of alloys bearing cold iron.

The dilemma bequeathed him by Faery-toes had long since ceased to seem funny.

In the beleaguered light shed by one candle, the mayor’s dais and desk loomed over the prisoner’s dock, a marble edifice of gothic carvings and fluted supports and grotesque, hunch-backed caryatids, whose suffering poses were painted in shadows like scenes from Sithaer’s bleak pits. The air smelled of wax, of parchment, of the dried citrus peel and Shandian spices used to overpower the stink of condemned men kept chained in straw acidified with rat urine. Behind the prisoners’ enclosure, board benches lined the rear wall. On these gathered complainants in clean shirts and scrubbed boots; also the wives, the relations and the long-suffering friends of the day’s accused, to wait in fidgeting silence. The curious came too, but unobtrusively. In Jaelot, a loquacious jailer told Dakar, a beggar who had taken illicit shelter in the Mayor’s courtroom had lost all his fingers as punishment.

In this chamber, a merciful sentence might be a swift beheading; a severe one, a dismemberment, or breaking on the wheel before burning. Dakar shifted from foot to foot in an attempt to ease the drag of the chain; the unending bite of fetters whose steel, to one of mage-trained sensitivity, scoured the awareness with the tang of past misery and old blood.

Self-contained in his distress, he noted little beyond the glowering arrival of the millwork’s wronged carter; still, the benches were not empty of friends.

Halliron Masterbard had come, dressed in all the splendour of his rank. From the depths of the gloom, his neat cloak and slashed doublet of black watered silk lined in saffron shimmered like flame with caught light. Topaz studs and gold ribbon sparked and flashed in wry and stabbing satire, perhaps, that the mayor’s state
colours were the same. Stationed at his side, Medlir wore brown broadcloth, a modest brooch at his collar.

The carillons that signalled the hour boomed faintly down from the bell tower. Aching and irritable, Dakar endured the arrival of Jaelot’s Lord Mayor with a dawning sense of the absurd. He had seen a high king’s ceremonial open with less pomp.

The hall doors boomed back, held by bowing servants in sable livery. Halberdiers in black armour marched in double files, followed by pageboys who unreeled gold-edged carpet, emblazoned each yard with Jaelot’s snake-bearing lions. A girl in a hooped farthingale fringed with jingling bullion chains strewed hothouse roses from a basket. She was trailed by two braces of secretaries in wool robes cuffed with marten, then their serving boys, bearing satchels and writing papers furled in yellow ribbon. Next, the judiciary, robed in black velvet and white ermine, and wearing a mitred felt cap edged with moth-eaten braid; the city alderman, burdened down like a moulting crane in layers of brocade and ruffled cuffs. After these, soft as pudding, the city’s vaunted mayor, who swayed at each step, his voluminous robe billowed off his padded shoulders like sails let free of their sheetlines.

Forced to duck as a rose struck his face, Dakar stared in amazement as the processional ended. Like trained bears, the players arrayed themselves on the dais. There should have been music, he thought, as the flower maid emptied her basket in the precinct of the mayor’s chair, and the boys unpacked the scribes’ satchels as if laying a cloth for a picnic. The halberdiers dressed weapons with a clang of gold gauntlets, and the tubby mayor berthed himself in his overstuffed throne of state.