Lord of the Isles (28 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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T
he aqueduct's central arches had fallen away long years since; their bricks had been reused for the foundations of the houses and barns Garric had seen along the road ever since they'd halted at midday to allow the sheep to chew their cud. The concrete-cored pillars still remained, marching across the barley fields like giants of a former age.
“Our ancestors piped the water all the way from the headwaters of the Stroma,” Garric said. “Seventy miles, the route ran. Can you imagine that, Liane? Can you imagine a town needing so much water that you'd go that far to bring it?”
“Erdin has an aqueduct,” Liane said, “but that's because the local water is brackish, not that there's any lack of it. All heavy goods in the south of the island travel by canal barge. Our island—Sandrakkan.”
They stood at the end of the dock onto Talpin Lake. The sheep were in the paddock; the fishing boats whose catch would provide dinner for travelers here at the inn, the Lakeside Arms, were still out though the sun was casting long shadows onto the water.
Liane surveyed their surroundings. The flat countryside and the lake's smooth surface gave a broader vantage than Garric was used to. Even the sea was a series of hills and valleys no less real for constantly changing. “This reminds me of Erdin,” she said. “Of when I was growing up.”
Ilna was in the kitchen; Tenoctris wandered by the lake while Cashel sat with the flock—by choice; the sheep didn't need his presence at the moment. Benlo had gone off alone; his guards drank morosely in the common room. Garric didn't particularly want to know what the drover was about.
At another time Garric would probably have been with
Tenoctris, learning about these ancient structures that she could have seen new; or with Cashel, chatting as friends do about shared experiences and nothing in particular. But Liane had looked at him, and though she hadn't exactly asked Garric to walk with her out onto the dock the signals had been clear enough.
They were in plain sight of over a hundred people; the Lakeside Arms did a major trade, and this close to Carcosa there were numerous travelers deciding to push on to the city before dark or at least not long after. No one would look askance at a young man and a lovely woman standing together, even though they were well out of earshot of everyone else.
“The Grove of Tappa was on this side of the water,” Liane said. There was tension in her voice. Her hands were clasped on top of one of the support timbers; the dock didn't have a railing. “There aren't any trees now; I'd think it was too wet for trees to grow, except cypress.”
“Really!” Garric said in excitement. “I'd always thought Tappa was a myth! The dreaded goddess whose virgin priestesses sacrificed a male traveler every year on the first full moon until the hero Talamis, ah, ended the practice.”
“I don't swear Tappa was real,” Liane said with a faint smile. “Or that Talamis was either; even for a demigod his exploits seem … impressive. But there was a grove here and a cult, that much is true.”
Talamis was said to have impregnated the fifty priestesses all in the same night, changing the cult of Tappa from blood sacrifice to one of motherhood which had survived until the fall of the Old Kingdom. Historians in the reign of Carus had written of the site; there was no reason to doubt that it was real. Garric had never connected Tappa and her lakeside grove with Talpin Lake east of Carcosa, though.
“The countryside must have gotten a lot boggier in the past thousand years,” he said. “Well, that's a long time. I wonder if Tenoctris knows about the grove?”
“My father does,” Liane said, staring across the lake like a statue. “He's looking for it now.”
She turned and faced Garric with a grim expression as though daring him to respond. He cleared his throat. “Oh,” he said. “I suppose an old temple would be a place where there'd be a lot of what Tenoctris calls ‘forces.'”
“You mean a site of human sacrifices, don't you?” Liane said in a challenging tone.
“No,” said Garric calmly. “I still think the part about human sacrifice is just legend.”
Two winters before, he'd found Gizir weeping and shouting in the inn's stables. That was the night Laya had announced her betrothal to a wealthy widower named Hakkardi, whose farm was a mile north of the hamlet. Gizir was drunk, and he drew his knife when Garric walked in on him in all innocence.
Liane was as likely to go off explosively as Gizir had been. Garric wasn't worried about his personal safety, now or then; but he didn't want to hurt a person he liked and sympathized with.
Liane covered the top of the post with her palms. She laid her cheek on them and began sobbing her heart out.
Garric had worried that Liane would shout at him or maybe even try to claw his face in displaced anger—the sorts of things that living with his mother had falsely taught him to expect from women in general. Liane's tears took him completely by surprise. He blinked and turned so that he wasn't staring directly at the girl.
Liane reached a hand sideways, caught his wrist, and squeezed it. “May the Shepherd forgive me, Garric,” she wheezed through her snuffling.
“I
thought that was what he was doing. I still think it is. Looking for the ground of old deaths to work his magic!”
She straightened and turned her back. She used a handkerchief from her sleeve to mop her eyes, then blow her nose. Garric continued to look at the boats out on the water; the
fishermen were beginning to row toward the dock with the slow stroke of strong, weary men.
“I don't really know my father anymore,” Liane said in a voice with only the vaguest hint of trembling. “He used to be so wonderful. The happiest time of my childhood was listening to him sing love songs he'd learned all over the Inner Sea on his travels and brought back to Mother and me.”
She looked at Garric and forced a smile, actually lifting the corners of her mouth with her thumbs and forefingers. The mimed humor made them both giggle in truth.
In a less strained tone Liane continued, “Our family name is bor-Benliman. I'm sorry to have lied to you.”
Garric shrugged. “You didn't lie,” he said. “If you didn't want to tell people you're noble, that's your business. Anyway, my mother said that's what you were. She, well, cares about that a lot. She was in service in the palace in Carcosa.”
Liane nodded, but her attention was clearly on what she was going to say rather than what she was hearing. She placed her hands on the post again and lowered her eyes toward them as she said, “It all changed when my mother died, five years ago. They were very much in love and when she died he didn't …”
Liane looked at Garric. “My father didn't accept that she was dead,” she resumed coolly. “I know that sounds silly; how can you not accept that somebody's dead? But he put everything into bringing her back. He'd always been a wizard, but his art wasn't important to him the way Mother was. Since her death he's concentrated on it, and on kinds of spells that he'd never have considered before.”
Garric nodded toward the fishing boat nearing them, its oarlocks creaking. “Ah,” he said. “Maybe we should go in?”
“We'll walk a ways along the margin of the lake,” Liane said, briefly again the imperious noble speaking to a commoner. “There's light enough for that.”
They left the dock together, her slippers hissing on the weathered boards while Garric's bare feet moved soundlessly.
“I was at Mistress Gudea's in Valles,” Liane said emotionlessly. “I don't know what happened. Armed men came to the headmistress. They moved me from the school dormitory to a locked cloister. Nobody would tell me anything, just that I couldn't leave but I wouldn't come to any harm if I kept quiet.”
Liane began to snuffle again. She dabbed at her nose with the handkerchief. Garric looked around, but it was too deep in the evening for anyone at a distance to see that the girl was crying. The path along the lakeshore had been paved with blocks from the nearby aqueduct, but that was a very long time ago. Some were tilted, and muddy water lapped broad stretches.
“They held me there for a week,” Liane said, ignoring the doubtful footing. “Then my father came. He never told me what had happened, only that we no longer owned any property except for the family tomb in Erdin. That's where my mother was buried. It would all be right again soon, though; he just had to do some business for someone else and we'd be back as before. Only for now he was Benlo or-Willet and I was to travel with him until he found what he'd been sent for. That was eight months ago.”
Garric placed her left hand in the crook of his right elbow and turned them around. It was just too dark to continue this way. He was uneasily aware that he'd have to explain not only to Benlo but to Ilna if he and Liane managed to fall into the lake together.
“At first we stayed in Valles,” Liane said, apparently oblivious of everything but the story she was telling for the first time to another person. “We stayed at various inns around the city. I hid in my room mostly. I was afraid I'd meet one of the other girls from my school. I felt like I had leprosy. My father poked around palaces and tombs. He was able to go most of the places he wanted to, but it was always in secret, at night or wearing a hooded cloak.”
“He seems, well,
rich
,” Garric said. He swung them wide to avoid the fisherman leaving the dock with a pair of wicker
baskets of fish on a yoke across his shoulders. A woman called to the man from the back door of the inn.
Liane nodded in the dimness. “Father never cared much about money,” she said. “Of course, we had plenty of it. Since he came and got me out of school he always carries a belt of gold coins and a chest of gold in our luggage. I thought that was why he hired the guards, but now I'm not sure. Not since what happened to … in your inn and last night. With the liches.”
“That wasn't his doing,” Garric said. “Even Tenoctris says that.” He didn't add—he didn't have to add—“and Tenoctris doesn't like your father at all.”
“Not that he made the attack,” Liane said, “but that someone else is trying to block whatever my father is doing. Someone else who won't stop at anything.”
It was really dark. Light came through the kitchen windows and glimmered from the inn yard where men with rushlights completed the business of the day. The ground at Garric's feet was pitch black; he knew the path straight back to the inn was clear, but there was nothing else that he was sure of. He stayed where he was with a hand over Liane's hand on his arm to hold her.
“With no warning he chartered a ship and we sailed to Carcosa,” Liane said. “For me it was like falling off the edge of the world. Compared to Erdin and Valles, Carcosa is a menagerie of clowns dressed in cast-off clothing and monkeys with no culture. I was so alone. I wanted to
die
, Garric. I wanted to die.”
“And then you came to Barca's Hamlet and it was even worse,” Garric murmured. He could sympathize with Liane. His life had been dislocated badly enough that he could appreciate how what she was going through must feel.
Liane laughed. “No,” she said, “it wasn't. Because the folk in Barca's Hamlet don't think they're nobles when by civilized standards they're not. And because there's real learning in Barca's Hamlet.”
Garric laughed in turn. “There're real scholars in Carcosa, Liane,” he said. “I'm sure there are.”
“Do you think so?” Garric said in unintended mimicry. “He certainly wouldn't agree with you.”
Garric wasn't sure what he thought. It was hard to visualize Reise as a person rather than a fact of existence like the inn itself or a winter storm.
“I don't know my father anymore, Garric,” Liane repeated, her features hidden in shadow but her lips' faint tremble audible in her voice. “It's as though when he changed his name he became another person … but I know it's not that. The change came when my mother died. Before then I could hide at school and pretend I didn't know what my father was doing.”
“I guess we ought to go inside now,” Garric said uneasily.
“He must have done something very terrible to lose everything but his life,” Liane said, resisting the faint pressure Garric put on her hand. “I wonder who could have saved his life … and what the price of my father's life was.”
A whippoorwill began calling, using an ancient concrete pier as a sounding board to amplify its sound. After the tenth call in the series the bird paused.
“Yes, we should get in,” Liane said crisply. She walked toward the inn, her grip firm on Garric's arm.
A
t a distance from Carcosa, Ilna had wondered to see houses perched at the top of a sheer cliff. As she came houses she realized that she was seeing not cliffs but the walls of the ancient city, built upon by folk of the present day since there was no longer need to defend the provincial backwater Carcosa had become.
Ilna felt her self-confidence shrivel. She'd been thinking of Carcosa as a very much larger version of Barca's Hamlet—the same in everything but size. The truth was that a city was no more like a hamlet than a human was like a frog.
Ilna felt like a frog in all truth as she viewed the magnificent walls.
“‘Nothing can equal you, Carcosa!'” Garric declaimed loudly. “‘No one today could build the equal of the fragments of your walls which remain, nor restore that part which is fallen.'”
In a laughing voice he added, “You see, Liane? There
are
learned people in Carcosa.”
Liane, beside Tenoctris on the gelding two paces ahead of Liane, turned and called back, “There was one in the last century, you mean—and he was an exile from Sandrakkan, don't forget. Besides, ‘What a happy city if it could be rid of its residents, or if the residents could be rid of their cheating ways!'”
They both laughed. Ilna felt her heart freeze.
She didn't understand what they'd said or why anyone should think it was funny. She'd lived beside Garric or-Reise all her life; and here he was, joking with a stranger he'd just met and shutting Ilna out completely.
Because of traffic, the flock was closely bunched at the
right side of the road. Ilna had never seen so many people in one place before. There were pedestrians, riders, occasional carriages—and most noticeable and dangerous to others, the huge goods wagons drawn by teams of up to a dozen oxen or six horses. The wagons moved at their own pace, and their iron-shod wheels would crush anything that came between them and the stone roadway.
Some of the wagons returning from the city were empty and rattled along the road with small care for what was in their way; others carried the debris of tanyards and the cesspools to be spread on fields. A rural hamlet is a hard school and no one had ever mistaken Ilna for a squeamish girl; despite that, she found herself wondering if the risk of being run over by the empty wagons was worse than the stench of those laden with urban refuse.
Benlo's guards provided the flock with a right of way that other drovers must envy. Cashel was in the rear, an equally solid bulwark against riders who might have thought in their haste to drive straight through the sheep. Garric kept the flock together and eased it past tight places where buildings had encroached or the road had collapsed after a thousand years without repair.
Garric glanced at Ilna's face. Sobering slightly, he said, “There was a poet of the last century, Etter bor-Lavarman, a priest of the Shepherd from Erdin. He got into difficulties at home—”
“Difficulties regarding a woman of the court,” Liane said primly. “Though Daughter Rothi didn't explain it in quite those words.”
She giggled. The grin returned to Garric's lips, the chill to Ilna's heart.
“Anyway,” Garric said, “Etter came to Carcosa for a few years. The city impressed him, its past at any rate. The people didn't impress him at all. Liane and I were trading quotes from Etter's poems.”
“I see,” Ilna said, shifting the staff with her bundles from her right shoulder to her left.
She saw, all right. She could no more compare herself to this clever rich girl than she could compare Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa. But Ilna hadn't given up before and she wasn't going to start now.
At the foot of the looming walls was a way station with stock pens and a large corral for coach horses. A drove of cattle filled one of the stone pens; the other held a few score sheep of a short-legged breed with white fleece—to Ilna's eyes, as alien as if they each had two heads.
Benlo turned in his saddle and pointed. “Head them into the paddock, Garric,” he called. “I'll hire a town badger at the inn.”
He kneed his bay mare to a hitching rail where already a dozen horses were tethered. Benlo didn't bother to tie the animal; rather, he dismounted and let one of his guards attend to the business while he and the three others entered the straggling one-story building.
Garric turned the bellwether, a grizzled ram with wooden clackers around his neck. Ilna trotted ahead of the ram and lifted the pen's three gate bars with a cool glance back at Liane.
Poetry isn't the only thing of use to a countryman's wife, is it, rich girl?
Garric gave Ilna a quick smile of appreciation. He began counting the flock into the paddock aloud rather than using a physical tally as Cashel, chivying the flock from the rear, would have had to do.
A countryman's wife … but would Garric stay a countryman? He didn't belong in Barca's Hamlet, and Ilna didn't belong anywhere else.
The inn's only lodgers would be folk who'd gotten this far in a blinding storm and weren't up to chancing the city's narrow streets in darkness. The trade in ale and hard cider more than made up for it, however, especially on a hot sunny day like this.
Wines too, Ilna supposed. She remembered the soldiers billeted with her drinking wine. They were from Valles, like the drover's fine daughter … .
Benlo came out of the inn almost immediately, accompanied by a weedy-looking youth of no more than twenty who wore a broad yellow cummerbund and a bandanna of paler yellow over his head. He had a ginger mustache and wisps of what he probably flattered himself was a beard.
The youth bowed deeply to the drover, then swaggered over toward the sheep pen. He stopped beside Ilna and gestured toward the sheep with his thumb. “Scraggly lot, aren't they?” he said. “Well, not a wonder seeings they come from the back of beyond.”
Ilna thought of turning away from him. Instead she asked, “What's wrong with the sheep? Besides five days of travel, of course.”
The youth sniffed. “All leg and no meat, that's the first thing,” he said. “And look at that wool! All different colors. How are you to dye
that
, I ask you? Isn't good for anything but stuffing pillows, that trash!”
His tunic was a dull green, but the dye had faded to gray in several patches. That was probably a result of poor preparation of the wool, but Ilna had never trusted artificial colors anyway. With the two shades of yellow and the fact that his leather shoes weren't quite the same shade of red either, the fellow looked to her like a mummer in costume.
“Well, time for me to take over from these hicks,” the youth said with an ostentatious yawn. “Really, I think the sheep are usually smarter than the locals who badger them here.”
He turned toward Ilna as if becoming aware of her for the first time. “You know,” he said, “you're not a bad-looking wench. If you'd care to see the city with a real gentleman—”
He took Ilna's chin between a thumb and forefinger, turning her face to view her profile and then turning it back.
“—I could take time out of my schedule to arrange that.”
Ilna smiled pleasantly at him. “I've wrung the necks of chickens I fancied more than I do you, you little weasel,” she said. She struck his hand away with a
crack
like a branch breaking.
“What?” the youth said. He drew his arm back for a punch.
Garric laid the tip of his bowstaff across the youth's throat. “A word of advice, fellow,” he said in a voice that could be heard all the way to the inn despite the traffic noise. ‘Mistress Ilna doesn't need her friend and brother to handle a worm like you; but she has us nonetheless, do you see?”
Cashel put the fingers of one hand on Ilna's shoulder. The other held his quarterstaff.
Garric was smiling; Cashel was not. It was hard to judge which expression the local youth found the more deservedly terrifying. “No disrespect meant, masters,” he croaked.
“That's good,” Garric said. The last ewe was entering the paddock. He patted her flank and counted “Fifty!” aloud.
Offering Ilna his arm, Garric walked over to join Tenoctris and Liane as Cashel dropped the bars in place.

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