Legenda Maris (15 page)

And that was all the captain said. In
fact all the captain
was
to say for some while.

Obviously too this one showed no
interest in food or brandy, nor in any of
them
, only in the missing
Vendrei. Also obviously, Zeph had
not
discovered the one (or two) items
searched for. No swords,

The sun went down. Lavender flooded the
sky, swiftly chased away in turn by the indigo of night. Stars spangled. The
company feasted on grilled fish and roast meat, herbs and fruit, and passed the
little brandy barrel, and were glad. Only Zephyrin did not join in, ate only a
morsel of fish, one grape, went off again and drank sips of water from the
freshet pool. Then stayed up by the pool too, sitting there silhouetted against
the deep blue and bright silver of the sky.

“How he misses the prince. You’d think
he was in love with him,” said Crazt.

“He longs for Mhikal Vendrei’s death,”
said Dakos. “Hate is always worse than love, whatever the wise men say.”

“Oh,
love
is somewhat strong,”
said the merchant Frokash. “And sometimes begins unexpectedly.” (Ymil noted he
glanced at the widow when he said it).

Ymil was pleased to see that two people
might be made happy from this muddle, perhaps even three, for Jacenth appeared
to like the idea of the widow as a future addition to his father’s life.

Mostly though, with a sort of curious
dread, Ymil kept one of his observant eyes peeled for Vendrei, walking out of
the west like Death himself in the old pictures. Ymil had no doubts the prince
would return. None at all.

He
arrived about an hour before midnight.

Most of them were asleep. These he woke
up, for Vendrei was incandescent with fury, nearly insane it seemed, as he
lurched into the firelight.

“
God’s stars
—” he shouted.
“Damnable black foulness!”

He looked dampened more physically than
in optimism.

His hair was wet and dripping, the
remains of his shirt plastered to his body. Had he been for a swim?

He towered over the six seated or prone
persons, and then irresistibly raised his wide and flaming eyes to the figure
that now sprang towards him from the pool.

“Oh, can it be,” Zephyrin asked in a
silken voice, “the wondrously clever Prince Mhikal has
failed
to find a
sword?” Where there had been no energy to Zephyrin, now there was nothing but.
Zephyrin
glowed
in the darkness, galvanic, a lightning made flesh.

Vendrei snarled.

“There you’re wrong, you sty-rat. I
found a sword, by God’s might—”

And here indeed was the blade, flashing
fire and starlight as he flung it point down into the sand. Where it waited,
quivering also with energy,
readiness
.

“Then, Vendrei, tomorrow we shall
fight.”

“
Ha
!” bawled Vendrei. What a
splendid melodramatic the stage had lost in him, Ymil thought. But already he
had reasoned, and was not amazed, when Vendrei added, in a guttural hiss, “No.”

5

Soon
after he lit the taper, the tunnel had plunged unnervingly in a series of steep
and sloping steps.

At any rate, this scoured the last
tipsiness out of Vendrei.

With extreme care he descended, and
after about five minutes the tunnel floor levelled somewhat, and he heard,
instead of his own hurried pulse, the slow heartbeat of the sea.

A vague luminous quality began. Then the
taper became obsolete. He blew it out to save it for going back.

The rock curved, and next opened out
into a wide low cave, where Vendrei must first stoop double, and then get down
on his knees and crawl.

Full afternoon light now came in from
the cave mouth. It displayed for him a jumble of rocks and slabs, mossed due to
moisture, some clung with pallid ocean weeds. Shells were littered about, and
the tiny delicate bones of fish. There was a matured fishy smell, but no note
of human decay. For a burial vault it was, that way, an odourless place. Empty
also. No grave or tomb of any sort that Vendrei could see. All there was—

All there was were two heaps of broken
twigs and branches, small stones, sand, this strewn with wild flowers. The
heaps lay side by side right up against the opening in the cliff that showed
the sea. They were each about the size and length one might expect of an
average man’s body, lying flat.

Vendrei now, despite his former
superstitious unease, swore colourfully.

He had, he believed, heard of such
customs among some of the primal fisher communities of the region. Although
devoutly orthodox in religion, sometimes antique rites of conception, birth,
marriage or death were celebrated, that went back to the sunrise of time, and
the ancient gods who had then supposedly ruled the world. Just as a newborn
babe might be baptised by such people in the sea, before ever it felt holy
water, just so those the sea had drowned but then cast up on land, were blessed
in the names of saints before being returned into the waters. They were the sea
god’s, Neptune, Poseidon. He sent them home to say goodbye; thereafter they
must be restored to him.

It was true luck for Vendrei.
Meant
for him. Now he would not have to unearth some deep-dug grave, but need only
lift off the branches and the flowers, to find the pair of swords his destiny
demanded.

Carefully, being as respectful as he
could, he removed the covering of the first man.

Yes, he recalled the poor fellow from
the voyage. Wealthy and young, his sad face battered, bloated by the water. And
yes,
yes
—here in the spoiled scabbard, the blade of good steel, nearly
the right weight too, just a touch light, but that would not matter. Cursed
thin Zephyrin should have this one.

With less respect, for he was in haste
now, Vendrei pulled the piecemeal carapace from the second man.

And froze. Froze there, and let his arms
fall loose, leaning, staring, not crediting what he saw.

For the second dead man, one Vendrei did
not even recollect, was a drowned sailor, handsome and oddly unmarked, but most
of his clothes and accoutrements taken by the waves. Decidedly he had no blade
of any type, not even a knife to whittle sea-ivory.

Two men, two swords. But it was two men
and one sword. Only one.

Vendrei kneeled there like the fool he
had called himself, almost blind and half-dead himself with leaden disappointment
.

One. Only one.

Fate’s joke.

The greybeard had tried to explain the
method of burial, that was the giving back to the god. Vendrei had forgotten
the mention of the “tall sea”.

In the Mediterranean sink, as a rule
tides were mild and sluggish. Here and there, due to some eccentricity of rock
or sea-floor, another rogue tide might come to be, such as that, it seemed,
which had flushed the survivors of the wrecked ship out on to this coast, and
brought in too some of her dead.

At sunfall, here in the hidden bay, an
even more sprightly element of this rogue tide would, at certain seasons, leap
upward to the cliff, missing the village, but bursting into the cave. Swirling
then like a giant spoon, it would set down fish and weeds and shells, and
gather up in payment any unfastened thing left for it. Such as two dead men in
easily broken ‘graves’ of twigs.

The sun went, carmine red, and Vendrei
was still in the cave, nursing the single sword, stunned as a child promised a
horse and given only saddle and bridle.

And as the sun went, the sea came.

It crashed up and washed the cave from
end to end, poured out and came ploughing back, smashing off the remains of the
burial covers, picking up the two dead without difficulty, trying to pick up as
well a third, living man.

He
resisted, having woken to
himself at the last instant.

But by dint of youth, strength and
fright, Vendrei expelled himself from Poseidon’s hungry sea, which pursued him,
growling like green dogs, back along the tunnel to the awful steps. Even
up
the first steps the sea chased him. But perhaps it was simply chasing him off.

Only stars saw him finally drag himself
out of the tunnel above the village. He was again soaked through, demented,
clutching the useless uniqueness of the sword. Below, lamps were lighting in
the little houses. But Vendrei did not go there. He turned from the village as
from a cruel mocker, and getting down the cliff by another track, to the
interest of five or six goats stationed there, he regained the shore and
staggered away towards the survivors’ camp. And his enemy.

6

“Heaven
pardon me,” Vendrei would murmur, much later. “I should have begged their
forgiveness too. Should have prayed for them, those drowned men in the cave. Have
I lost my human heart? What have I become through all this?”

But
much later
was not yet,
certainly not that night.

Having heard of the village, and that
therefore some form of civilisation was near—food, shelter, a small boat that
might ferry them to larger settlements—Frokash and Jacenth, with the help of
Dakos and Crazt, had created a second smaller fire in the lea of the cliffs,
and settled there for the night, with the widow Maressa.

Vendrei and Zephyrin were left at the
larger fire, to their own devices, they and the single sword. Ymil also remained.
“Someone should stay,” Ymil answered the merchant quietly, when asked to the
second, calmer fireside.

“Not to leave them to their madness,
eh?”

“Merely to watch,” Ymil replied, with
abnormal truth.

Nevertheless, he sat back, some feet
away from them.

No one spoke. From the other fire
drifted faint talk, silences, presently the low snores of Crazt. The moon had
come and gone long before.

When the big fire sank, Vendrei or Ymil
replenished it from the store of driftwood and branches. Once Vendrei went up
to the pool, then came back and sat down again. He had eaten nothing and
refused the brandy. Although he was so quiet the smoulder of his rage was on
him. His hair had dried, shone like guineas in the firelight, and the sword
shone too, planted there, presiding, deriding the two unarmed men and their
mortal dream of a duel.

Ymil, watching, saw how Zeph watched
also only Ven. Those dark green eyes scarcely blinked, so fixed they were, But
Ven watched nothing, or else only the angry blank his thoughts had become.

Well past midnight, Ymil began quietly
but audibly to talk, almost as if to himself.

“How bizarre it is, that just the few of
us were saved. Is our rescue then for a purpose? I mean, some purpose we have
yet to fulfil? What can it be? Maybe, in my own life... I once did a cruel and
stupid thing. There was a young lady I was set to marry. But I changed my mind.
And—I abandoned her.” Under his watchful eyelids, (for Ymil sometimes watched
even with his eyes
shut
), he studied Zeph’s finely chiselled profile.
True to the aristocratic father’s embarrassed words, this young captain did
look delicate enough to be taken for a woman, if one ignored the clothes. But
that would be most unwise, for the core of Zephyrin, it seemed, was made of purest
steel. Did the invented story Ymil now told touch any nerve? (Admittedly, in
the father’s account, the genders were reversed, it was the son who had been
abandoned by a girl.) No reaction? It was impossible to be sure. “I regretted
my actions afterwards. I heard she had fallen very ill—my fault, I must assume.
I wonder if I can atone for my crime against her. Or am I too late?”

Vendrei said nothing, did not even look
up. Had he even heard? Why should he besides have any response to the tale,
either the father of Zephyrin’s tale, or Ymil’s altered one ?

But now Zephyrin turned that pale
wonderfully-wigged head and stared full at Ymil, so for an instant Ymil
reckoned his role as tracker and spy had been sussed.

Zephyrin however said, “She sounds a
spineless simpleton, your
lady
. Some dolt deserts her. She falls into a
sickness. You’re better, sir, well shot of the ninny.”

And that was that again. At least upon
the subject of desertion.

For about another hour after, as the stars
wheeled ever over and on into the west, Zephyrin announced:

“Well. Vendrei, it appears you’re
content to sulk and do nothing else to conclude our quarrel. Why am I not
astonished?” (Vendrei offered no word). “Yet as I said, quantities of stuff
from the doomed ship are scattered over the beaches further east. Where the
cliffs close down upon the sea there, I thought I saw too some wreckage far out
on the water. It seems to me now there’s a chance there could be weapons in
with it, if only the weapons of dead men that you, Vendrei, naturally, would
never mind thieving and employing.”

Vendrei spoke. “Tomorrow I shall go and
see.”