The Ships of Merior (11 page)

Then the moment for organized defence was lost as the headhunter lancers thundered down and swarmed like bad-tempered hornets around the liveried horsemen and banners that surrounded Prince Lysaer.

‘We’ve come for the upstart who styles himself heir to s’Ilessid!’ The captain who shouted was bald, had a torn ear, and wore chainmail and bracers set with wrist spikes. The huge grey gelding who bore him was ugly, but unscarred, and taken by a sudden, poisonous aversion to standing still. The beast backed and sidled in half circles, gouging up spatters of soaked turf. Its rider sawed reins and cursed, while the younger of Lysaer’s liveried page boys approached and bowed, then announced in his clear child’s treble that his Grace the prince was pleased to accept invitation to call on the Lord Mayor of Isaer.

‘Invitation!’ The captain hammered his mount’s neck with a fist, then hauled its nose around to his stirrup to forestall a bucketing rear. ‘What gall! There’s been no invitation!’ His ire found no other outlet; underneath him, his warhorse went berserk.

Ears flattened to streaming neck, it bit the air, crow-hopped and danced sideways on bunched hindquarters. The headhunter captain stayed astride by dint of determined fury, while the neat ranks of his riders were bashed out of formation by the unravelling temper of his mount. Lances dipped, wavered and cracked into a cursing tangle of men and disgruntled horseflesh.

Too cynical for surprise, Lord Diegan glanced aside to find Lysaer watching the affray, his unruffled, wide-eyed dignity at odds with innocent intentions. The older page half-hidden by his horse cloths was deviously engaged with a handful of smooth pebbles and what looked like a rawhide bird sling.

A lifetime of Etarran politics lent Diegan the presence to mask astonishment. He was prepared and listening
for the low-voiced string of orders from his prince. ‘The headhunter captain’s horse is shortly going to bolt. Before it does, I’ll need an honour guard assembled, a delegation from our guild representatives and city officers, and the wagon bearing Lady Talith and her servants. This will be a state visit to Isaer, I shall make it so. But warn the men: on pain of punishment, and despite the most grievous provocation, they must hold their tongues and their tempers.’

No fool, Lord Diegan did as he was bidden; and so he missed the moment when the headhunter’s huge grey at last tore free of restraint and exploded kicking and snorting into a tail-streaming run. Somebody dispatched an equerry at speed to chase after the luckless captain. Before the sergeant left as second in command could restore the wrecked order of the troop, Lysaer rode forward to meet him.

‘Never mind the formalities,’ the prince opened, magnanimously forgiving, and sure enough in stature to shake the confidence of a struck bronze monument. He followed with a phrase that caused several lancers to break into laughter. While the sergeant was torn between outrage, uncertainty, and an explosive attack of pure mirth, Lysaer managed with light-hearted, lordly arrogance to make several sensible suggestions.

The headhunter lancers sorted themselves back into order, to find themselves seamlessly joined by the prince’s personal honour guard, a wagon bearing a woman beautiful enough to leave a man staring and silly, and a dozen trade dignitaries who were fed up with rain, and expressing thanks for the Mayor of Isaer’s timely consideration.

At the sergeant’s stirrup rode Lysaer, at patent length and diffidence inquiring what sort of silk would compliment his Lord Mayor’s colouring; the other gifts, he added hastily, were less personal. Unless the mayor’s lady wife had the misfortune to disdain Falgaire crystal?

Thoughtful, bemused, not entirely without sympathy for the sergeant who stammered answers to the royal inquiries under Talith’s distracting regard, Lord Diegan rode silent through the rain. In a humour that was piquantly Etarran, he watched Lysaer’s masterful diplomacy take the city of Isaer by storm.

There followed six days of formal dinners and protracted hours spent touring guild sheds where last year’s flax harvest lay hackled for bleaching. Lord Diegan followed the talk as he once had ravished the courtesans he seduced from the beds of wealthy patrons.

Yet even under close scrutiny, these discussions pursued the same topics as others in cities to the south, once Isaer’s mayor recovered from the flustered irritation of being hazed into guesting the very same prince he had dispatched his headhunters to set shackles on. The city’s guild ministers in circuitous politeness inquired whether Lysaer intended to launch from Avenor the same campaign he had spearheaded at Etarra: raise a garrison to meld forces with the headhunters’ leagues to clear Tysan’s wilds of barbarians. Trade with Camris, they said, suffered unduly from raids in the Thaldein passes.

Lysaer heard their woes in rapt sympathy. When the banquet was finished and the fine brandies poured, he graciously ventured opinion. ‘The clans of Rathain were stamped out by Etarra because they fell to ill usage by the Shadow Master.’ A frown marred his brows. The glitter of his hair and his jewels hung still in the lamplight as he paused in disturbed reminiscence. ‘Your difficulties in the passes of Orlan must be approached carefully.’ In the face of poisoned fear - that as scion of s’Ilessid he might lay claim to clan loyalty and upset rule in the towns - he said outright, If a way can be found to avoid outright slaughter, I would seek that before war.’

Silence fell, tensioned with threat.

While inimical stares from the councilmen sharpened around the table, and the Mayor of Isaer whispered something to a servant that brought guardsmen in full mail to block the doorway, Lord Diegan groped to draw the hidden dagger in his sleeve.

The prince acknowledged none of this, but centred upon a careworn alderman who fluttered his napkin in dismay. ‘You can’t suggest a treaty with the clanborn! Ath! There’s no way to reason with such, uncouth as they are. Like animals.’ While the mayor’s fat steward retreated without refilling the wine goblets, he added with whispered distaste, ‘ ‘Tis said of Maenalle s’Gannley that she wears uncured animal skins.’

For a moment Lysaer looked blandly mystified. Then he roused and said in forbearance, ‘Forgive me. I can’t support such hasty thinking.’ Under the table, his hand clamped hard on Diegan’s arm, locking the little knife in its sheath. ‘What would an armed campaign accomplish except to drive Tysan’s clans to share grievance with their brethren in Rathain? No. Blood-hunts are too dangerous an option, and Arithon s’Ffalenn too wily an adversary to risk driving allies to his cause. Of all things, I dare not draw his interests to your land to threaten the industry of your cities.’

With a deftness that seemed natural chance, the discussion was deflected to threats of shadow and sorcery; Lord Diegan swept into passionate description of the heinous slaughter that occurred on the banks of Tal Quorin, when a grisly chain of traps had savaged Etarra’s proud garrison.

The telling set him in a cold sweat. Deshir’s clansmen had always been killers; allied with Arithon s’Ffalenn and his demonic touch at spellcraft, they had narrowly been stopped from threatening civilized Rathain. Hands clenched on his cutlery, Lord Diegan spoke; as if the roar of Tal Quorin’s flood still battered his ears, and the screams of those troops swept away. Sucked back into
memory like nightmare, he heard the crack of arrows striking through foliage and flesh; the ripping of timber and earth as concealed spring traps and deadfalls left his lancers gutted and bleeding out their lives in whimpering agony. Death did not account for all the losses. Some men were permanently deranged by the maze wards and shadows Arithon had used to bind them into confusion; others had been broken in spirit, prone to fits and raving when relivings wrenched them from sleep.

By itself, the account of the battle the Shadow Master had launched in Strakewood was enough to inspire terror. Isaer’s council ministers departed mollified; by direct command of their mayor, the men at arms tactfully dispersed.

Later, lighted by perfumed candles in a tapestried upper chamber, Lord Diegan chose his moment and cornered Lysaer before the prince called his valet to retire. ‘What are you playing at? I thought we agreed at Etarra that barbarian havens anywhere were too ready a tool for the Master’s use and design!’

‘You’re worried?’ The brandy had been particularly fine; yet an edge of irritation burned through the prince’s flush as he crossed the guest suite’s floral patterned carpet. Contained as smoothed marble, he said, ‘Then rest content, the raids in the passes will be ended. One way or another. By armed force as a last resort.’

Lord Diegan met and held those blue eyes, that could seem inhumanly assured in their candour. ‘Pretty manners and slick language might disarm the mistrust in Isaer. But tonight’s talk at supper would get you bloody and dead on the other side of the passes. Don’t fool yourself. Erdane’s mayor won’t be stood off with sweet talk and gifts.’

A frown knitted Lysaer’s brows. ‘I thought as much.’ He sighed and stifled a yawn behind a blaze of sapphire rings. ‘It’s inconvenient, I admit, but we’re going to need every city’s loyalty against Arithon. We’ll just have to
find something else to ease the Lord Mayor of Erdane’s antipathy.’

To which Diegan could say nothing, but only turn on his heel and retire to a bed where sleep did not ease him.

The following morning, the royal retinue left Isaer to rejoin its abandoned caravan, now moved thirty laboured leagues to the west. After the escorting honour guard trailed four ox-wains crammed full of pottery, patterned linen and dyed feathers. The mules bearing the last crates of Falgaire crystal took a dislike to the ox teams, which occasioned much swearing from the drovers.

Surrounded by confusion that stirred a third of the cavalcade into a brew of bawling animals and stopped wagons, Talith’s suave brother screamed orders until his teeth grated from inhaling airborne grit. He ignored the ragged crofters who had paused at their sowing to stare. If he also missed the hoofbeats that approached through the din made by children beating clappers to scare flocking sparrows from the seed grain, Diegan obstinately faced forward as the rider arrived and fell in alongside.

‘Stop sulking.’ Lysaer laughed to his uncommunicative future brother-in-law. ‘When the snow comes, we can haul the fancy feathers out for mattress stuffing.’

‘Did you look in those sacks?’ Diegan reined around his dust-caked mount, his calf gloves fringed with hanging threads where use had torn off the beadwork. ‘They hold goose quills. Stiff ones, for pen nibs. If you can coax my sister to sleep on those, I’ll pick you nettles to plump your pillows.’

Caught on a hill crest against sky, his gold hair wind-ruffled against racing fleeces of spring clouds, Lysaer regarded the riled profile of Avenor’s Lord Commander at Arms. He said in teasing merriment, ‘That merchant’s vixen daughter refused you, I see.’ Which comment got
him shoved from his saddle into dung-spread furrows in just and indecorous vengeance.

From astride his snorting charger, Lord Diegan glared down at his prince, who accepted his demise without rancour for mud-spoiled velvets.

‘In Erdane, the headhunters’ league is lawfully sanctioned to torture clanborn captives for public amusement. As a prince in line for the succession, they’d hold a festival over your ripped carcass.’ Hurting in his affection as if his liege were an endangered brother, Diegan finished, ‘Will nothing I say dissuade you?’

Lysaer picked himself up, dusted loose earth from his breeches and cloak, then ascertained that one of his pages had recaptured his cantering horse. His eyes still pinned into distance, he said, ‘Wherever the Mister of Shadow lies hidden, whatever his current machination, he’s unlikely to be exposed without risks. I set out to bring these lands protection from his sorceries.’ Wide as sky, the blue eyes lifted to regard Avenor’s captain at arms. ‘Diegan, don’t ask me to reject a whole city just because its governor is petty, and terrified, and convinced royal blood can harm his position. We will ride through Erdane. Should I come to die there, then Tysan will require no prince. A townborn man like yourself will go forward to rebuild Aveuor and unify this kingdom in my name,’

The last time Lysaer crossed the Thaldeins by way of the Orlan Pass, the mountains had been mantled in mist and blizzard. Hastened then in the company of a Fellow-ship sorcerer, he recalled no landmarks beyond drifts and treacherous abutments of seamed rock. With the visible sky 4 ribbon of blue overhead, the scarp traversed today under knives of morning sunlight looked savage and strange, a tableau of broken slate overhangs, wind-chiselled ridges, and stands of gnarled evergreen slashed
and skewed with the boulder-strewn scars of old slides. The road wound and jagged between buttressed peaks, a mere lip in places over vast, windy chasms of cold air. The forested valleys unfolded below like creases in a painted silk fan, delicately blued in haze and crisscrossed by the gliding flight of hawks.

Here, a raffish band of barbarian scouts had once dangled Arithon s’Ffalenn upside down from a rope over a precipice. Lent abrasive reminder of a deceit that had once beguiled his trust and friendship, Lysaer gazed down a cliff wall bared of snow and jumbled with bone-grey, splintered timber and stone shards. He could wish now that the knots in the noose had failed.

Had the Shadow Master fallen to his death on that day, seven thousand Etarrans would still be alive with their families.

Over the bends and the rises, the wagons rattled and groaned, their hubs scraping rocks scarred by a thousand such impacts, while the opposite wheel rims flicked gravel in clattering spurts over the sheared edge of the verge. On the approach to the high pass, the carter’s quips echoed through the narrowing way, until Diegan sent outriders ahead to clear the road. Once committed, the drays could neither turn nor manoeuvre; caught between their lumbering bulk, horses and mules could not pass, should wayfarers meet them head on.

Merchants who hauled goods through the pass of Orlan for that reason eschewed use of carts. Informed of the risks, Lysaer had ignored all advice. Mounted, exposed in the vanguard, he looked least surprised when three riders positioned abreast approached and blocked off the trail.