Lord of the Isles (47 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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Ilna knelt before the loom. She gathered the ruined fabric in her palms and began to cry.
W
ith a pair of Serian sailors apiece pulling three of the sweeps and Cashel alone on the fourth, the
Golden Dragon
nosed slowly onto the beach. The westering sun cast the ship's shadow far across the landscape of sand and tamarisk bushes.
“Hooray!” Mellie cried from Cashel's shoulder, bouncing from her toes into a handstand and back again. “Oh! it's so good to be back on land again, isn't it?”
Cashel grinned as he drew in the sweep, careful not to jab the sailors doing the same thing on the other side of the ship's waist. Strictly speaking Mellie stood on his shoulder and he stood on the deck of the
Golden Dragon.
Personally, he didn't care that the ship's flat bottom was aground on sand instead of gliding through shallow water.
“Well, I'm not a watersprite!” Mellie said as tartly as if she was reading Cashel's mind. “Ooh, come along, Cashel!”
She dropped from his shoulder to his waist, catching herself by one hand on his leather belt, and trickled like a breeze down his hairy right leg on her way to the ground.
“Hey, wait for me!” Cashel called. Sometimes he forgot that other people couldn't see the sprite the way he did, but it probably didn't matter a lot. The Serians treated him as though he were a member of a different species anyway. The fact that he talked to himself or the empty air didn't make him any stranger in their eyes.
The Highlanders
could
see Mellie, and they acted as though
Cashel were a bigger version of themselves besides. That was even more disturbing when Cashel let himself think about it.
The Highlanders had all scrambled off the ship, many of them while the square prow still slid through the surf. The little men capered and chortled in their joy: Mellie wasn't the only person aboard the
Golden Dragon
who was glad to be on firm ground again. One of the Highlanders gave a fluting call and pointed; the whole dozen vanished up one of the weathered draws into the scrub.
The Highlanders were the reason the
Golden Dragon
had made landfall here, one of the hundreds of uninhabited islets dotting the Inner Sea. Because the Serian vessel had been driven from port without time to load properly, it was short of the fresh vegetables and meat that to the Highlanders were the only imaginable foods. The Serian crewmen were on three-quarter rations of oatcakes and onions supplemented by the occasional fish, adequate until the
Golden Dragon
docked at a real port, but the Highlanders would starve unless something was done promptly.
Food was always a concern on a long voyage even when it wasn't a matter of life or death. Sail-driven merchant vessels could be becalmed for over a month, creeping along by the crews' backbreaking labor with sweeps meant only for maneuvering in harbor. Over the centuries, prudent captains had landed goats on most of the islets with a modicum of vegetation and pools to collect rainwater. The hardy little animals provided occasional meals for seawolves and a source of fresh meat for sailors willing to hunt them.
“Willing” wasn't the word to describe the Highlanders. Cashel doubted they'd even bother to cook the first goat or two they caught.
The sweeps fit into slotted racks on either rail. Cashel set his in place and stepped back, leaving it to the sailors manning the other starboard sweep to tie them both down in the fashion their tradition thought proper. Knots were as culturally individual as hairstyles; Cashel knew the Serians would quietly redo his work as soon as he turned his back.
He bent and scooped Mellie from the bridge of his instep, planting her on his shoulder again despite her squawks of complaint. “Masters?” he called to Jen and Frasa on the quarterdeck. “May I go ashore too?”
One of the brothers—Cashel still couldn't tell them apart at any distance—turned from a discussion with the captain and bowed low. “Of course, Master Cashel,” he replied.
“You'd think that you were the one who'd spent the last thousand years learning how to stay alive on this plane,” Mellie grumbled as Cashel picked up his quarterstaff and strode for the bow.
“There's likely rats here,” he said, unperturbed by the complaints. “And we know there's Highlanders. I'm not going to let something happen to you when you're my responsibility.”
Sailors hopped over the side and splashed up on shore. They'd build brush shelters for the night and heat their oatcakes, but unlike Mellie and the Highlanders they felt no great concern as to whether or not they were on land. The Serians—and this was true of Frasa and Jen as surely as it was of the common sailors—lived in self-contained units. It made little difference to them whether they were enclosed by a ship's hull or the walls of a trading compound.
A quartet of sailors staggered up the beach under the iron weight of the main anchor while other sailors payed out the cable behind them. They'd set it forty feet inland to keep the
Golden Dragon
from drifting away in the night. More sailors were lowering the bower anchor from the stern to prevent abnormal wind or waves from driving the vessel too hard aground to float off on the morning tide.
Jen and Frasa were convinced that there was no risk to this landfall, but Cashel kept remembering the storm that had raked Barca's Hamlet and driven the trireme to them. Well, he hadn't been asked his opinion; and the Highlanders needed meat, true enough.
Mellie sniffed and sat cross-legged, facing back over Cashel's shoulder. “There's no rats,” she said. “I'd smell
them. And the Highlanders won't bother me now because they think I'm your pet.”
She turned her head and stuck her tongue out at him. “I guess that's what you think too,” she added.
Cashel thrust one end of his staff down into the sand; the surf-washed upper few inches gave, but the packed lime substrate just below was firm. Instead of jumping down as the Highlanders and sailors had done, he lowered himself gently, supported by the quarterstaff and the bow railing. A man of Cashel's weight and strength learned early not to move hastily; and anyhow, he wasn't a hasty man.
Cashel hadn't minded life on shipboard but he found it surprisingly pleasant to be among greenery, even if it was mostly the minute, bitter-tasting leaves of tamarisks. He wondered how goats survived with no better fodder, and what their flesh tasted like if they did. He didn't suppose the Highlanders were finicky eaters.
Mellie hopped to the ground as soon as Cashel strode beyond the upper line of the surf. She scampered up a bush and plucked one of the tiny pink flowers to stick behind her ear: on the sprite, it looked like the bloom of a poinsettia.
“Oh!” she called, leaping to the ground again. “It feels so
good
!”
The gully was less a watercourse than a trough the wind had worn, though it probably channeled the runoff when storms swept across the little island. Shrubs stood on pedestals of coral sand which their roots bound, but between those miniature plateaus the wind scoured twisting passages.
Cashel paused at the gully's head to check the bare ground for the footprints of goats—or, of much greater concern, rats. Mellie might say she'd smell rats if they were present, but he was the one who—
He looked up just in time to see the sprite vanish up the gully, turning cartwheels every few strides. Her laughter trailed back around the bend twenty feet away; then the sound was gone too.
“Mellie!” Cashel shouted. He raised his staff vertically so
that he could move without it catching in the tough branches and broke into a trot. He hoped that when he turned the angle he'd find the sprite waiting for him with her tongue sticking out in mockery.
He rounded the corner. Mellie wasn't there. To Cashel's amazement, a hut made of huge fossilized bones squatted in the middle of a wide spot in the gully. An old man wearing only a breechclout squatted at a fire of tamarisk stems in front of the hut; he was heating dark liquid in a chipped stoneware bowl.
“Oh!” Cashel said, skidding to a halt. He hadn't expected to meet even a goat. A human with a permanent though crude dwelling was more than a surprise.
“Good day, sir!” the old man said. He stood up spryly. “Very good to see you! Very! Won't you have some tea with me?”
“I …” Cashel said. He lowered his staff, embarrassed that he must have looked as though he was ready to smash something flat with the weapon. “Ah, no, I'm looking for a—”
He paused, realizing that the old man might have seen the Highlanders but Mellie would have been invisible to him.
“A friend,” he finished lamely. He stepped to where the hut squeezed close to the gully wall, tight for a human but a broad thoroughfare for the sprite.
“The little red-haired girl?” the old man said. He held his right thumb and index finger up in a close approximation of Mellie's height. “Why yes, she came by. I hoped she'd stay for a moment and talk, but she ran into the bushes there.”
He pointed generally to the side. The gully's wall, textured by a net of rootlets, was about four feet high; the tamarisks waved another eight or ten feet in the air. Cashel frowned at the tangle of scrub.
“I'm sure she'll be back here any time, good sir,” the old man said politely. “Why don't you wait with me and we'll have tea while we talk?”
Cashel frowned at the thicket, as featureless as the sea itself. He could force his way through the tamarisks if he
wanted to, but he certainly couldn't find the sprite among them if she wanted to hide. Was she that upset at his attempt to keep her close?
“Mellie!” he called. “I'm sorry, Mellie. Come back and don't scare me this way!”
Silence answered.
Cashel turned, feeling as though the clear sky were crushing him down. He didn't know what to do.
“Poor boy,” the old man said. “But she'll be back soon, I'm sure. Come sit with me, please.”
With a smile that seemed both sad and desperate he added, “I haven't talked with anyone for a very long time. I came here to be alone, but I'm afraid I succeeded better than I'd intended.”
“I—” Cashel began. He thought about what it would be like to live for years on this barren islet with no company except the occasional hunting party of sailors. The old fellow looked to be a cultured man.
“Well, I guess I can sit with you a moment,” he said. “But I won't have anything, thank you. Till my friend comes back anyway.”
“Perhaps later,” the old man said, lifting the bowl off the fire by its thickened rim. He seemed tense though as friendly as a little puppy. Gesturing toward the hut with his free hand, he added, “Would you care to see my dwelling?”
The hut was like nothing in Cashel's experience. The walls were made of petrified thighbones, each of them the diameter of a fruit tree's trunk. Ribs of similarly huge size formed the roof. The gaps were chinked with seaweed, but Cashel couldn't imagine the place being either dry or comfortable in bad weather. He'd slept in drystone sheep byres himself, but there he'd had the sheep to keep him warm.
“I'm a hermit, you see, though I know it sounds pretentious to say so,” the old man chirruped. When Cashel hesitated, the old man scooted inside himself as if to prove that there was nothing sinister about his dwelling. “I decided to
find a barren island like this to study, meditate, and purify myself in absolute privacy.”
He shook his head and tittered, a sound that had as much madness as humor in it. “Oh, my goodness, how well I succeeded! Absolute privacy! Oh, yes!”
Cashel squatted to look into the hut without blocking the light. He was uncomfortable; maybe it was just worry over Mellie, because he could
feel
the sincerity of the hermit's friendliness. He was a weird old man, sure, but not a lot different from Tenoctris, Cashel suspected.
Besides, the hermit was utterly harmless. Cashel could have broken him in half with one hand, not that he could imagine a circumstance that would make him want to do that.
The hermit had laid a bed of seaweed and tamarisk branches against one wall. An iron cooking pot, somewhat larger than the pottery vessel now on the fire, rested upside down against the other wall. Beside it was a dovetailed wooden box of about a half-bushel's capacity, its lid resting askew. Cashel could see that the interior was a series of vertical pigeonholes, each holding a parchment scroll that had been used so much that the varnish was gone from the roller tips. Though worn, the books were obviously kept with love.
There were no manufactured articles in the hut apart from the two pots and the book safe: not a knife, not a lamp; not even piece of cloth. The hermit's breechclout was inexpertly woven from fibrous tamarisk bark, obviously by the wearer himself.
Cashel leaned his staff against the front of the hut. He eyed the doorway, then knelt and turned his torso sideways in order to fit. The opening was high enough or nearly so, but it was very narrow.
He looked around again, certain that there must be more than what he was seeing. “Do you live on goats, then?” he asked. Though there was no sign of bones or butchering; no smell, either, and that you couldn't hide.

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