Lord of the Isles (27 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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T
he hedges lining this stretch of road chirped and cheeped with birds complaining at the familiar intrusion or gobbling insects stirred by the travelers' feet. Far back at the rear of the flock Cashel called, “Come along, Ginger, you've eaten all you'll be able to digest. Tsk tsk tsk!”
Liane turned to Ilna and said, “Your brother seems very cheerful this morning, mistress.”
She sounded friendly; she always did when speaking to Ilna. In Ilna's heart she felt as if Liane was secretly mocking her for being less beautiful, less wealthy, and less well educated; but Ilna also knew that others didn't read the sneer beneath the smile. She'd look a fool if she reacted openly to it.
“Yes, he is, isn't he?” Ilna said with a smile of her own. “Well, it's a lovely day, and maybe he's just happy to be alive after last night's attack. How about you, Garric?”
Garric walked beside the gelding which Tenoctris rode today in Liane's place. Benlo had started to protest, but his daughter's cold glance had silenced him. Tenoctris had protested also; Liane said simply that she needed the exercise and that the older woman needed the rest. It would be very easy, even for Ilna, to see only the kindly surface of Liane's behavior and miss the fact that underneath the rich girl was a scheming bitch.
“Well, I don't know about happy,” he said, grinning over his shoulder at the girls. There'd been no pretense of Garric driving the sheep this morning. The wonder was that he'd been able to walk unaided. “I'm sure I'm alive because dead men don't hurt this much.”
He stumbled and had to catch himself on Tenoctris' stirrup; he dabbed down with the bow he carried unstrung in his left hand. “You see?” he added in half-mocking despair. “I'm a cripple. Come on up with us so we can talk.”
The road from the Stroma River to Carcosa was paved, though a thousand years of use had worn ankle-deep ruts in the stone. Benlo's entourage shared the route with much other traffic: pedestrians, riders and pack animals, and even some wheeled traffic which would be unthinkable on the narrow tracks farther east. Ilna had seen a carriage for the first time. Its windows were shuttered, and the four black horses pulling it had plumes wobbling from their brow harness.
Benlo was at the head of the line with his four surviving
guards clustered close about him. Liane had with apparent deliberation kept Garric and Tenoctris between her and her father. Ilna had thought at first that this was the girl's clever ploy to walk with Garric, but Liane had remained several paces behind the boy for all the first hour of the journey.
Ilna marched along beside her watchfully nonetheless.
Cashel drove the flock from the rear, whistling and calling the sheep by their individual names. He
did
seem remarkably happy, happier than Ilna could remember him being while at home. Maybe he was just glad to have seen the world beyond Barca's Hamlet—and there was the wage he was earning besides, though she knew her brother didn't share her concern about money. Because Cashel had Ilna to take care of him, he didn't
need
to worry about finances himself.
“Well, come on,” Garric repeated. “I may need the pair of you to carry me the rest of the way.”
Liane looked a question at Ilna. Ilna suppressed a scowl. “Yes, we're coming,” she said. Liane lengthened her pace slightly to come abreast of Tenoctris on the right side, putting the gelding between her and Garric.
“Holding up well on the trip?” Garric said as Ilna reached him. He shifted the bow from his left shoulder to his right so that it wasn't a symbolic barrier between the two of them.
Ilna had known Garric all their lives; she could see that he winced every time his right leg took a step and that the skin was drawn close over the strong, high bones of his cheeks. For all that, Garric was in almost as bright a mood as Cashel. After the night's battle he'd been wrung out so completely that she'd been afraid he'd take days to recover.
“I hope I'll always be able to walk at the speed of a ewe, Garric,” Ilna said. “Washing sheets is more effort—and more excitement as well.”
Garric laughed merrily. His laughter was louder recently than she remembered it being in the past. He'd gained self-assurance. He seemed to have decided that being cheerful was nothing to be ashamed of and that if other people had a problem with it—so much the worse for them.
“I was just saying to Tenoctris,” he said, “that ancient poets didn't write about badgering sheep to market—or shearing them, for that matter. It's all about sitting under a holly oak watching the lambs gambol among the flowers. Isn't that so, Liane?”
He wasn't quite the boy Ilna had grown up with. Garric had always been intelligent, friendly, and as hard a worker as anyone in the hamlet. Now he had spine as well; something he certainly hadn't gotten from his father, and a very different thing to his mother's spiteful bitterness as well.
“I had the impression that shepherding involved more crystal springs and song contests than I've seen on Haft, yes,” Liane agreed. Deliberately changing the subject she went on, “Mistress Tenoctris, I apologize for mistaking you for a conjuror the other day. May I ask how you came to be a m-ma—”
She paused, obviously afraid that “magician” would be taken as an insult. Ilna wondered if the other girl was blushing; the horse and rider concealed her from those on Tenoctris' other side.
“To study the art?” Liane finished, apparently doubtful about the word “wizard” as well. Someone must have explained to her who Tenoctris really was.
“Someone” was almost certainly Garric, at the times when Ilna worked her score at the inn because she didn't have a rich father to pay her way.
Liane lowered her voice as she asked the question, though her father and the guards were for the present well ahead. Then leaders moved faster than the flock and had to halt every ten or twenty minutes to wait. Garric was used to moving at a sheep's pace and held back those with him.
Tenoctris was an awkward rider; she kept one hand on the reins while clinging to the saddlehorn with the other. “There's little enough art in the way most in this age practice wizardry,” she said with a grim smile. “Just as it was in my own day, I suppose.”
She turned her head toward Garric and Ilna to clearly include
them in the conversation, then looked back at Liane and continued, “I had a talent for visualizing forces, Liane. My family had a title but very little money; I was the third daughter, and I think my father would have supported anything I proposed that didn't involve him finding a dowry for me. I studied in the university on Notisson, and after that I took positions all over the Isles in houses where there was a notable library. At the end I was in Yole; by coincidence, perhaps.”
“But were you taught by a wizard?” Garric asked. “Were you apprenticed, I mean?”
“There was a healer named Kaeri in Notisson—in the city, not the university—who had great power,” Tenoctris said. “I learned a great deal from her in one fashion, but …”
She was frowning, obviously bothered by what she was about to say. “Kaeri turned toward the sun, don't mistake me. She wanted nothing but to help others. But it frightened me to watch because she didn't begin to understand the forces she worked with. She was almost illiterate but that wasn't really the problem. The problem was her own strength.”
Tenoctris chuckled wryly. “Not a problem I had, I assure you.”
“Was the, the Hooded One,” Garric said. He paused to swallow and his eyes were on the ground in front of him. “That way too?”
“If you mean was he illiterate,” Tenoctris said in a decisive tone, “no, not at all. It was my assumption that he came from the same sort of family that I did—minor nobility, and very possibly not minor at all. I can't say that for sure because quite frankly I had almost no contact with him. Whatever his background, we had nothing that was important to either of us in common.”
She turned her head and looked down—at Liane, to Ilna's surprise, not Garric. “The other difference between the Hooded One and my friend Kaeri is that his whole focus was Malkar.”
“Evil,” Liane said in a clear, emotionless tone. “His focus was on evil.”
“In human terms,” Tenoctris said/agreed. “He even claimed to be Malkar, a transparent lie that proved he was a fool as well as a fool dedicated to darkness. But he was an extremely powerful wizard and it's that rather than the direction in which he turned his power that made him so dangerous. He destroyed our world, his world and mine, through a mistake rather than as an act of will.”
She smiled wistfully. “I'd thought he'd destroyed himself. as well, Garric,” she said, “until you told me about your dreams.”
“I haven't had that dream for, you know …” Garric said. “Since my father gave me the good-luck piece.”
“Yes, well,” Tenoctris said. “More may have survived of my age than one would assume. Persons of great power …”
She shook her head with another faint smile. “And myself as well, through the workings of what I suppose was chance.”
The old wizard's face changed—grew even more contemplative than usual. Tenoctris at her most animated projected an aura of detached calm; Ilna marveled at a mind so different from her own, where anger seethed under an icy surface, though an outsider might have mistaken the two of them for emotional sisters.
Tenoctris eyed Benlo and his companions, halted fifty feet ahead to wait. “Forces wax and wane, but knowledge takes the same amount of effort in every age,” she said in a slightly quieter voice. “My friend in Notisson was very powerful. The Hooded One was very powerful. And your father, Mistress Liane, I'm afraid that he's very powerful as well—and equally ungoverned.”
T
he southeast wind was gusty, fierce and dead against them. Nonnus had lowered the sail, but even so each spiteful puff drove the high-sided dugout farther into the Outer Sea.
Sharina sewed grommets into the leaches of the sail; Nonnus carefully split the pole she'd used to fend off Tegma's shore into brails to stiffen the canvas. The improvements would make only a minuscule difference in the vessel's ability to sail into the wind, but it was something to do besides fret.
Asera was in the bow looking grim. Meder faced forward with his back against the mast and his chest of paraphernalia open before him. Occasionally he looked toward the stern; Sharina studiously avoided meeting his eyes.
Asera stood. “This wind never changes!” she burst out. “It's a magical sending, isn't it? Meder, can't you do something about it?”
“No, because that peasant won't let me!” Meder said in a petulant voice. He didn't raise his eyes from the object he held; it looked to Sharina like a small mirror of polished lodestone.
“There's no magic to meeting a southeast wind in the Outer Sea at this time of the year,” Nonnus said calmly. “No need of magic to get back to where we want to be either. There'll be a norther in the next week or few weeks, likely enough. We've provisions enough to wait for it, and we'll be catching fish before long.”
The hermit didn't have a carpenter's froe and maul to split the brails. He'd trimmed a pair of wedges from what had been the oarloom, opened the grain with a stroke of his Pewle knife, and was using the back of the blade to tap the wedges
down the shaft. He stood while he fed the pole forward with one hand as the other struck with a jeweler's care. Nonnus might have been a part of the vessel's hull for all the difference its pitching in the wind-driven swell made.
“A norther?” the procurator repeated in disgust. “A storm, you mean. Gods! why was I such a fool as to volunteer for this mission? I should have just opened a vein and died in my own bed in Valles!”
“A storm,” Nonnus agreed mildly, “which we'll use to ride back to the Inner Sea or make landfall on one of the northern isles. I'm not proud of the workmanship of this pig we're sailing in, but she's sturdy and she wouldn't break up in a worse storm than I've seen yet in these seas.”
Sharina stopped sewing the grommet that would anchor a clew adjusting the foot of the sail. Jumping fish had caught her eye. What she'd thought was another great gray wave rising behind them instead flicked its tail as it went under the surface again.
“There's nothing wrong with a dugout,” the hermit went on in a musing voice. He was no longer speaking to Asera; perhaps he wasn't speaking to anyone at all. “A properly built twin-hull dugout will sail near as well as a planked ship—and swim in a storm better, too. But I didn't take the time to do the job properly.”
“How much time would that have taken, Nonnus?” Sharina asked, watching her friend's face.
He smiled. “Yes, there's that, child,” he agreed. “A year I'd say. To build her and work her up properly, aligning the hulls just right.”
“I didn't want to spend a year on Tegma, Nonnus,” she said, deliberately raising her voice so that the nobles would hear her clearly. “Even if we'd been allowed to by whoever put us there.”
Nonnus seated himself on the stern crossbar holding the outriggers to the main hull. His eyes were toward the horizon, but Sharina wasn't sure her friend was really looking at anything in the present world.
“Oh, we'll be all right, Mistress Asera,” he said. “The sea's bigger than any man or any ship, that's the first rule you learn on Pewle Island. A boy in a woodskin who gets too far north at this time of year is likely to just keep on going, blown all the way to the Ice Capes. But we've got plenty of provisions and we'll just ride the storm back.”
Sharina stuck her needle firmly through the canvas and stood. She'd made herself a leather belt and bandolier. From it hung the hand axe, the sewing case, her dagger—a fine steel one in a sheath of nielloed tin, owned by one of the Blood Eagles until every creature on Tegma died—and a satchel containing bread and a bottle of water. It was an awkward burden but she'd taken the hermit's advice to heart: so long as she was aboard the dugout, everything she'd need to live was attached to her body.
She moved a pace forward, trying not to wobble, and sat on the crossbar beside Nonnus. He smiled wanly at her and said, “When I was a boy, so young that I hadn't even made my first woodskin, I stole my brother's. I can't have been but seven years old then; seven sealing seasons and seven hungry seasons, as we call it on the island. It was weather like this.”
A gust made the dugout wallow, thrusting the port outrigger deep in the waves as the starboard one lifted briefly above the surface, to which it streamed back water in jeweled droplets. Spray flew from the wave tops, whacking like hail against the dugout's hull and the passengers. Asera glowered sternward; Meder closed his case of implements and materials.
“It took me north for three days,” Nonnus said. “I had no food, just a water bottle. A school of jellyfish was swept along in the same current; sea tigers, the big ones with orange-and-black air sacs. Their tentacles were thirty feet long and their touch burned like the whips of demons. They thumped against my hull day and night; I could feel them pressing the other side when I lay against the thin wood.”
He laughed, a bleak sound that might have come from a
gull's throat but should not have come from a man's. Sharina put her hand on his shoulder.
“And the weather changed,” Nonnus said to all the world around him. “Blew me in one night back the distance three days had carried me north, and the beating my brother gave me was a pleasure to take because so nearly I hadn't been there to get it. But sometimes I think about another boy in another … world I suppose. Who kept drifting north until he froze into the pack ice, seven years old, and nothing on his conscience except that he stole a woodskin from his brother.”
“He didn't save a girl from Tegma,” Sharina said.
Nonnus laughed again but this time a human sound. “No, he didn't, child,” he said. “And the wind will change because the wind always changes.”
“I can change the wind,” Meder said; looking over his shoulder with his case clutched against his chest.
Nonnus stood up. “And so you can, sir, I don't in the least doubt,” he said in a pleasant voice. He resumed tapping the wedges down the length of the pole he was splitting. “But if you do it ever on this boat that my friend and I built, I'll put you off into the sea. The fish have lower standards; they won't mind your presence.”
Meder blinked in shock. Sharina glared at the young wizard. She was seated beside the hermit though no longer quite touching him.
Sharina was with Nonnus; there could be no question of that. But in her heart of hearts, she felt the wind and thought of the Ice Capes; and thought of her long blond hair frozen into the ice.

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