Lord of the Isles (40 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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The broker and the sprite on Cashel's shoulder laughed together in perfect harmony.
N
onnus adjusted the sail with the same precise care Sharina had seen him use in cleaning a wound before he sewed it up. The breeze was fretful and varied, a fitting counterpart to the gray skies above.
The hermit let go of the shrouds and sank back to his squat beside the tiller. Sharina smiled at him; not too desperately, she hoped.
“It's possible,” Nonnus said with jagged calm, “that this air will take us in a direction that I'd be willing to go if asked. But I wouldn't stake my life on it.”
His expression grew bleaker. He added, “I wouldn't stake my soul. I've already staked all our lives, I'm afraid.”
“You didn't hold a knife to any of our throats to get us aboard,” Sharina said. She wasn't just trying to cheer up a
friend: it was the truth. “And we had to get off Tegma.”
“That we did,” Nonnus agreed as he scanned the overcast. Sharina knew the winds driving the high clouds weren't the same as those here on the surface that would fill the sail, but there might be connections between the two.
Of course, many folks thought there was a connection between the stars and human lives. Likely there was: it was all one cosmos. But it was a very complex cosmos, it seemed to Sharina, and certainly beyond the capacity of a human mind to chart all its interactions.
Asera and Meder huddled in the bow looking as bedraggled and angry as cats caught in a downpour. When things settled down after the turtle dived, Meder had made an attempt to explain to Sharina why she'd been wrong to dispose of his chest of paraphernalia.
Memory of that last conversation made Sharina glare toward the wizard afresh.
She
hadn't needed to pitch her voice low to prevent Nonnus from hearing her words.
Nobody likes to be called a fool and a skulking liar while everybody in the present circumscribed community listens. Meder hadn't spoken to her since.
“There's rocks well north of the Isles where seals breed,” Nonnus said, shifting his attention back to the empty horizon. “If we made landfall on one of them, there's a chance we'd meet some Pewle hunters. Of course, it's the wrong season for that now.”
“We have fish and even if it doesn't rain our water—” Sharina began.
Nonnus leaped up and sprang to the mast in three strides along the port gunwale. He snatched the lifting tackle free of the bitt to which it was tied; for a moment Sharina thought he was going to cut through the line instead of taking the few extra seconds to unlash it.
Instead of releasing the fall to drop the spar, Nonnus sagged and wrapped it back around the horns of the bitt. “Too late,” he said as he straightened. “They'll have seen us by now.”
“Land!” the procurator cried. She stood with the creaking awkwardness of an old woman, pointing off the port bow. “Look! Look! There's land on the horizon!”
“It's not land,” Nonnus said as Meder wobbled to his feet also. Sharina wondered if either of the pair could swim well enough to be saved if they went overboard. “It's a colony of the Floating Folk.”
Sharina saw a brownish blur that looked like land to her; it was certainly too big for a ship. Flecks left the main mass, bobbing in the direction of the dugout.
Nonnus sighed. “Catcher boats,” he said. “Well, they had to have seen us.”
He returned to the tiller with a cold tension very different from the flaring activity of a moment before. “Maybe it's just as well. We're farther into the Outer Sea than I ever wanted to be on a floating log.”
The nobles were coming sternward with a care that their clumsiness fully justified. “Are these your own people, my man?” Asera demanded. “Or friends of yours?”
Nonnus his head slightly. “Pewlemen and the Floating Folk know each other,” he said. “We're about the only ones who do know the Folk, since there's nothing in these seas to bring settled people out. But friends, no. The Folk don't have any friends except others of their own sort.”
Half of his mouth quirked in a grin. “And not really even of their own sort.”
He hauled on the sheets, furling the sail instead of dropping it and the spar in a tangle as he'd started to do. “We don't want them to think we're trying to get away from them,” he explained. “Since we can't. Not with the breeze as it is.”
The two boats approaching the dugout had no masts or sails; they were being paddled by a dozen men apiece. The vessels rode much higher than any boat Sharina had seen previously, and their hulls writhed over the waves like swimming snakes.
“When they reach us …” Nonnus said. His eyes were on the boats; his three companions watched him with an unease
Sharina hoped she hid better than the nobles did theirs. “Let me do the talking, if you please.”
“Yes,” the procurator said. “Yes, of course.”
“If I had my …” Meder murmured. He broke off when his eyes turned reflexively toward Sharina and realized that she was almost tense enough and angry enough to throw him into the sea.
“They never come ashore,” Nonnus explained quietly. “Oh, they'll set up hunting camps on the Ice Capes and they comb the rocks beyond the Isles for driftwood, but except for that they spend their whole lives in their boats.”
“Boats like those?” Meder said, staring at the vessels squirming nearer. The hulls were made of skin: where the sunlight slanted onto the inside, Sharina could see the shadows of the vessels' ribs and the kneeling crew.
“These are catcher boats,” Nonnus said, watching the Folk with an appearance of utter calm. “They use them to hunt. The houseboats are much bigger and they lash them together.”
He paused and almost smiled. “Though I don't think you'll find them comfortable,” he added.
The skin boats had come close enough that Sharina could see some of the paddlers were women: all the Folk were naked to the waist. They had red hair and very white skins gleaming with grease. Straps, bone jewelry, and either tattoos or paint adorned their bodies.
“There'll be fifty or a hundred houseboats in a tribe,” Nonnus said. His javelin lay across the gunwales before him; the fingers of his right hand rested on the shaft as if merely to keep the weapon from rolling away. “That's what we're seeing on the horizon. In these latitudes the communities of the Folk ride the currents and the winds in a circle between the Isles and the Ice Capes, never touching land unless a storm strands a catcher boat.”
“You said ‘hunt,'” Sharina said, trying to copy the hermit's placid voice and manner as she watched the Folk approach.
A harpoon with a savagely barbed ivory point lay beside each paddler. “What do they hunt?”
“Whales mostly,” Nonnus said. “They build their houseboats from the skin and ribs of whales. Other sea beasts. Driftwood. Shipwrecked sailors when they think the odds are right.”
Asera's face went cold; Meder glanced from Nonnus to the catcher boats with wild surmise. The hermit didn't look directly at the nobles, but Sharina saw the hint of a smile play across his lips. “We should be all right,” he said. “They know better than to play games with a Pewleman. But let me do the talking.”
The boats came alongside the dugout, one to either flank. They were amazingly handy but Sharina noticed that they drifted almost as easily as the spume from their paddle-blades: because of the boats' high sides and shallow draft, they'd be almost impossible to paddle against a serious wind. Paddlers caught the dugout's outriggers to keep the three vessels together.
The Folk wore straps and bangles for adornment. The notion of clothing for modesty's sake clearly wasn't a part of their culture.
The skin boats and their crews gave off a charnel reek. Meder gagged and the procurator covered her nose with a fold of her cape. Even Sharina found the smell dizzying, though her own standards of hygiene had slipped considerably since she'd embarked on the trireme.
The Folk weatherproofed their bodies with blubber that quickly turned rancid. Whalebone had been formed fresh into the frames of the catcher boats: rotting marrow added to the blubber's effluvium, as did the half-cured hides of the hull.
“Hey Sleepsalot!” a crewman of one boat called to the older man in the stern of the other. His accent was thick but intelligible. “This log's got wood-lice in it!”
“That's easy enough to fix,” said the wormy-looking youth in the bow of Sleepsalot's boat. He hefted his harpoon; his right hand was missing the last two fingers. The crews
were in a joking mood, but it was the cheerfulness of a cat which knows its prey has nowhere to run.
Nonnus rose to his feet. He faced Sleepsalot and deliberately slanted his javelin over his shoulder with the point in the air behind him. “I claim the right to join your community, Sleepsalot!” he said. “For myself, my women, and my son!”
“It's a Pewleman!” a woman snarled. “What's a puking Pewleman doing floating on a chunk of driftwood like this?”
Sharina kept her eyes on the other boat rather than Nonnus and the Folk leader. She knew that the hermit for all his apparent nonchalance could spit anybody who threatened him in the direction he was facing, but even Nonnus didn't have eyes in the back of his head.
A woman whose breasts sagged to her waist despite being within a few years of Sharina's age made a stealthy adjustment of her harpoon. Sharina tweaked her hand axe so that sunlight glanced from the blade into the woman's eyes. The would-be backstabber snarled deep in her throat, but both her hands lifted from the harpoon.
“I claim the right to join your community!” Nonnus repeated. “I bring you wood worth six men's price: we are only four. Take me to your king, Sleepsalot—or fight me, as the Law is, if you refuse my gift!”
Sharina risked a glance behind her. The hermit barely moved: only a slight shift in the way his knees bent, but still a crouch from which he could spring into the skin boat's stern.
Sleepsalot cringed visibly. “Fah!” he said. “Threefingers, Gulleater, tie lines to this log.”
“We'll break our backs getting it to Home,” Threefingers muttered.
Sleepsalot ignored him. “All right, Pewleman,” he added in a venomous tone. “The Law says you can join the tribe, that's true. But you'll never leave!”
K
ing Carus leaned on the balcony rail, his fingers laced and an unusually somber expression on his face as he watched events below the vantage point he shared with Garric's dream self. Six women in white pleated robes and white headgear of varied height and complexity faced a younger Carus on the throne. In the midst of the court's glitter and plush, the straight-backed women looked like so many daggers of ice.
“The Abbess of the Renounced Daughters of the Lady,” Carus said, pointing toward the elderly head of the delegation. Two younger women had supported the abbess when she came forward; they waited now to catch her if she swayed. “Land willed to the temples wasn't taxed. My advisors told me I ought to change that custom—it wasn't law. It seemed a simple enough thing to me.”
The abbess began to speak. It was amazing that so frail a body held a voice and spirit of such iron strength. Garric would rather have taken a whipping than had that cold scorn directed at him. He looked at his dream companion.
Carus smiled ruefully and shook his head. “A lot of things seem simple until you think them through, lad,” he said. “If the temples were to be taxed, then would the state care for the sick as the Renounced Daughters had been doing?”
He met Garric's eyes. For Garric it was like seeing his reflection among the leaves of a woodland pool, distorted but clearly himself. “Fighting comes naturally to me,” Carus said. “I was good at it and men followed where I led. Ruling was another thing.”
The figure on the throne was fidgeting. Men in fur-trimmed robes whispered into his ears from either side. One of them
held a sheet of parchment as if trying to shield the young king's eyes from the petitioner. The abbess continued to speak, and her words were a saw on stone.
“I decided to deal with the Duke of Yole in the way I
knew
how to deal,” said the figure on the balcony softly. “I decided to crush him like a bug.”
“Maybe there was no other choice,” the dream Garric said.
His companion nodded. “Maybe there wasn't,” he agreed. “But I didn't even think about other ways. I took the easy route, and it took me straight to the bottom of the sea.”
The man on the throne stood, his face a mass of frustration. The abbess pointed her bony arm; one of the advisors plucked the puffed sleeve of the king's court doublet. The king shouted in fury and stamped out through a doorway behind the throne.
“Maybe this time we can do a better job ruling the Isles, lad,” said Garric's companion. “And I
will
crush the Duke of Yole like a bug.”
He laughed his familiar ringing peals as the throne room dissolved and the balcony dissolved and the dream Garric merged with the aching form of the youth awakening on the bed of a room lighted through a west-facing window above Carcosa's South Harbor.
Pale smoke with a pungent odor drifted in the sunlit air. Charcoal burned in a brazier on a brass tripod beside the bed; the legs were paired serpents twining. Tenoctris dropped pinches of herbs on the fire with one hand while the other swung the boxwood twig through the smoke in an intricate pattern. She noted Garric's eyes opening with a nod, but she continued to chant and stroke the air.
Garric lay on his belly. He started to lift himself onto his left elbow. “Don't move!” Liane said sharply.
Garric jerked his head around. He'd been stripped bare; Liane was rubbing ointment into the gashes on his back and thighs. The ointment's touch was tinglingly warm, but it quenched the sharper pain of the wounds the way a backfire blocks a dangerous blaze.
Strasedon hadn't left much of the tunic anyway. Cutting the remainder off him didn't make any difference for modesty. Garric still turned his face resolutely toward the window and tried not to blush.
There was a quick knock at the door. “Mistress Liane?” a voice called. “There's a boy from Nuzi the Apothecary with the drugs you ordered.”
“Yes, bring them in,” Liane said as her strong fingers continued to work on Garric. “I can't get money out right now, so pay him and put the charge on my account. I'll settle it with my bill.”
The mistress of the Captain's Rest bustled in with a packet wrapped in oiled paper. A pimply boy of twelve or so stared at Garric through the doorway until the woman shooed him back angrily and closed the door behind her. Garric's proper bed was in the common room; this was one of the private apartments on the inn's second floor. From its size and location it was probably the best in the house.
“Ah …” he said, meeting Liane's eyes again. He supposed his father would send money if he had to … . “Do you know how much this is going to cost?”
“It very nearly cost your life!” the girl said in a savage tone. “Now just don't move!”
Garric blinked in surprise before he realized that Liane's anger was directed at herself, not him. He didn't speak, but his muscles had gone hard when she snapped.
“I'm sorry,” Liane whispered. Tears began to fall from her eyes. She continued to dab ointment from a stoneware pot and work it in instead of just smearing it lightly onto Garric's skin. “Oh, Lady help me, I'm so sorry. It was my fault it all happened. I should have stopped him … .”
She dropped to her knees beside the bed as though her legs could no longer hold her. She clasped her hands, shiny with the ointment. “But he was my father! He said he needed my help because there was nobody else he could trust.”
“Anybody would have done the same thing,” Garric muttered, lacing his own fingers and looking out the window
again. “I would have done it if my father asked me.”
Except that Reise wasn't arrogant. Liane's father had been arrogant and worse: he'd been the sort of man who would unhesitatingly put his daughter at risk simply because she was available.
Tenoctris finished her soft chanting. She put the cutwork lid on the brazier with a sigh and settled herself on the window ledge. There was sweat on her forehead. Whatever she was doing involved more than merely waving a twig in circles, though that might be the only visible aspect of it. Garric's mind was alert but he felt a numb detachment from his body: he was aware of physical pain, but he didn't really feel it.
He smiled at Tenoctris. “I thought you said Benlo's athame was too dangerous to use?” he said.
She smiled back. “Too dangerous to do magic with, certainly,” she said. “As a dagger it proved very useful.”
Tenoctris touched her left fingertips to the palm of her right hand, the hand with which she'd stabbed the demon. “I'm having all manner of experiences I'd never dreamed of in my own time.”
Liane filled the pewter mug with water from the pitcher on the washtable and added powder from the apothecary's packets. She set the mixture to warm on the lid of the brazier.
Noticing Garric watching her, she said, “It's lettuce cake, a mild dose. It'll help you sleep.”
Perhaps because he didn't react she added in a defensive tone, “I'm quite competent to treat you. The Daughters trained us in both medicine and in surgery.”
Garric smiled. Liane's face hardened, thinking that he was mocking her for her pretensions. Quickly he said, “The Renounced Daughters of the Lady, yes, you'd said. Do you know if they pay taxes to the Earl of Sandrakkan?”
“What?” Liane said. She was as flustered as if he'd asked her what clothing the inhabitants of the moon wore. “Well, I really don't have any idea.”
She fiddled with the rag on which she'd wiped her hands.
It was a strip of Garric's tunic; he wondered if it would be all right to put something on, but he didn't guess he'd say anything to call attention to the fact he was buck naked.
“My father had sufficient funds,” Liane said toward the rag. “More than sufficient for my purposes.”
She looked at Garric. Her expression was set and her tone clipped as she continued, “I've arranged to have my father embalmed here. I'll take him back to Erdin; the tomb is still ours, he told me repeatedly. I'll place him beside my mother. That's what he'd want.”
Garric nodded, avoiding the girl's eyes. She'd watched her father being killed; it'd been shocking enough just to see the drover's gutted corpse afterward. He didn't know if he ought to say anything. He surely didn't know
what
to say.
“I'll carry back the flock as he contracted to do,” Liane said. Fiercely, coldly she continued, “I'll find the person who sent my father here. And I'll learn why my father died!”
Tenoctris watched the girl. The old woman's face was never closed, but neither did her minute smile give any suggestion of the thoughts beneath it.
“My father's guards have left me,” Liane said. “I don't blame them particularly, and in any case it's their right. I'd like to hire you to accompany me, Master Garric. You can set your own wage.”
Tears were running down her cheeks again. She ignored them for a moment, her face as stiff as a marble statue's; then she wiped the back of her bare arm across her eyes with a deliberately exaggerated motion.
“Mistress …” Garric said.
“I don't need to tell you how very dangerous it may be to be around me,” Liane said harshly. She started to wipe her eyes again. Instead she covered her face with both hands and sobbed openly into them.
“Does Ilna know what's happened?” Garric asked Tenoctris, his voice slightly lowered. Part of him wanted to help Liane; but home was already far away, and the thought of what Ilna would say if he went
off
made him uncomfortable.
The two women exchanged glances that Garric couldn't read. “Ilna followed us to the tomb, Garric,” Tenoctris said quietly. “She hasn't been seen since then—last night. I've made a search of sorts for her; not a complete one because I was dealing with your injuries too, but complete enough.”
“I'm very sorry, Garric,” Liane said. She laced her fingers firmly together. “Your friend may be dead.”
Garric's mind tried to get around the thought. It was as if he'd been told that the inn and his family had fallen into the sea. He said nothing.
Tenoctris handed Garric the mug from the brazier. He drank the bitter fluid mechanically, then set the empty vessel on the floor beside him.
Everything was changing.
“I think I'd like to be alone for a while,” Garric said without looking around. The women left the room silently. He heard them murmur together as the door closed behind them.
Garric began to cry.

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