The Ships of Merior (61 page)

… the azure harbour sparkled under mild, salt winds, creased by the satin splash of breakers. Against a fan of palm trees and the fluffy, low clouds of the tropics, a man in sailor’s garb closed a bargain with an aproned craftsman. ‘My shipyard will be settled at Merior by the Sea,’ he informed. ‘Your contract will extend for two years, through the course of building ten brigantines.’ As he turned to depart, the fall of southern sunlight limned glossy black hair and a face of steep planes and narrow angles; eyes clear-cut as dark tourmaline revealed him as the scion of s’Ffalenn …

The mirror-bright clarity of the scrying splintered, savaged by a claw-rip of hatred. Lysaer screamed in thwarted rage. The curse-driven impulse to draw steel, to dismember an enemy beyond reach unstrung his reasoned, royal bearing. He thrashed a step backward and spun, to seek the cottage doorway where his boar-spear waited ready to his hand.

But the walls, the blurred spice of herbs, the candle and crone: all were banished. His foot raised no squeak of waxed floor boards. Instead, he crashed through damp branches.

Lysaer jerked short in bewilderment. The unconsummated passion raised by the scrying sheared through his body in waves. Banished back to the wood by some twist of fey spells, he stood at the verge of a glen. The air wore a diaphanous mantle of twilight; grass and fiddlehead ferns drooped to a tarnish of dew.

Lysaer shuddered in the cold air. His oak spear lay at his feet. He snatched up the weapon, still fired in every nerve by an untamed blaze of animosity.

Movement across the clearing caught his eye.

Embedded in shadow beneath the tree limbs, a boar waited, head down and bristling to challenge the disturbance in its territory. Failing light printed the curves of its tushes, varnished with spittle. The pits of mean eyes scanned the gloom to a twitch of pricked ears.

Lent a hunter’s concentration by the riptide shock of Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer had no space for fear. The scrying had shown him his enemy, and now the berserk need mauled through him, to tear living flesh and draw blood. He raised his weapon, levelled its barred cross-piece, and crouched to meet the boar’s attack.

His move broke the beast’s snuffling uncertainty. It gnashed razored ivory, lowered its coarse neck and charged.

Dew scattered before a snapping click of cloven hooves. The boar came on, a brute mass of churning sinew and foul, snorted breath.

But Lysaer saw no animal bearing down on the braced tip of his spear.

Imprinted against the vague darkness, he aimed instead at the black, glossy hair; the detested, trickster features of his half-brother.

Lysaer’s lips peeled back in poisoned exultation as the
boar pounded headlong toward his vitals. The spear graced his hands like a smoothed bar of light, nervelessly steady and sure.

Perhaps the crazed beast sensed its doom; or else the fickle wind cast the scent of oiled metal, poised ready to be sheathed in hot hide. At the crux of the last closing stride, the boar swerved. The spear jabbed its shoulder and ripped deep. Impetus drove the weapon home through its straining mass of muscle. Bone hammered and grated in vibration through the wood in Lysaer’s grasp.

The wound he dealt was mortal, but not quick. The boar squealed its agony and thrashed. It tussled to gore, to a spray of gouged turf and bruised grasses. Its killer held fast to the spear shaft, partnered in a battering dance of death. Raised to sick thrill, Lysaer savoured fierce strength brought to helpless, thwarted rage; he gloried in his ascendance, and as his victim weakened, he revelled in its pain.

He twisted the spear, felt the blade slide past bone and bite deeper, to hack and ravage and bleed white. Through his curse-driven fervour of elation, he gloated in the knowledge that finally, his half-brother lay within reach.

Before the turn of the year, the unprincipled creature dying on his steel would be the Shadow Master, Arithon s’Ffalenn.

He hacked at the boar’s carcass long past the final quiver of life. Then a last, savage shiver rocked through him. Chilled in running sweat, smeared with torn greens and the hot copper reek of spilled blood, Lysaer felt his obsessed fit of fury drain away.

Awakened to shamed honour, he discovered just how far from sanity the witch’s filthy scrying had driven him.

The spear fell from his slackened fingers. Drained from the aftershock of magic, he bent, arms hugged to his breast. The stink of death and faeces revolted his
civilized senses. He crouched, overcome, and was rackingly sick on the grass.

Captain Mayor Pesquil sighted him there, huddled in the muck beside the butchered boar, steaming in the cold air of twilight.

Prince Lysaer flinched at the swish of soft steps in the grass. He gathered himself and shoved erect. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said.

Pesquil looked him up and down, careful not to study the remains that lay mauled beyond salvage as a trophy. In damning, steely quiet, he noted, ‘I see you took your beast without any contest at all.’

Untouched by remorse, Lysaer recovered the sticky shaft of his weapon and braced his bruised body to full height. ‘Avenor’s army will march to sure victory, now. I know where our enemy lies hidden. The main muster shall take place at Etarra. Then we’ll need galleys, as fast as we can hire them, to sail our war host southward to Merior.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Pesquil snapped.

‘Arithon s’Ffalenn.’ Over bloodied fingers, Lysaer s’Ilessid smiled. ‘We shall find him holed up in Merior, building ships to prey on merchant commerce. His pirate father did the same. If we can cross the continent and put our war host to sea, the Master of Shadow will lie in his grave by the winter.’

Feeling cleansed, Lysaer understood that the Koriani witch had been wise in her way to arrange his tryst with the boar. The catharsis of violence had restored his control. He could review her scrying now with equanimity. A detail slipped past in the first heat of vision pricked now to the forefront of his mind.

The bullion chest in the sand by his half-brother’s foot, offered to bind honest craftsmen, had carried an Etarran guild brand
as well as the wax seal of Tysan.
The Master of Shadow could never have acquired such a coffer, except through Lady Maenalle’s collaboration.

Stiffened to sharp outrage, Lysaer said, ‘Ath’s mercy on her. We have beyond doubt been betrayed.’ There and then in Pesquil’s presence, he swore his royal oath to wreak vengeance upon the
caithdein
of Tysan. ‘Mark my word, Lady Maenalle’s life is forfeit. She has forsaken her realm and sent all my raided gold to serve the cause of Arithon s’Ffalenn.’

In the glens beside Tysan’s seacoast, a boar’s blood clots in matted grass; a candle stub charged with energies from a dangerously significant scrying dusts trailers of failed smoke through an abandoned cottage; a prince rejoins his worried retinue; but unlike every other night, the Warden of Althain fails to track these events from his tower, immersed as he is in the deeps between stars in search of a colleague’s lost spirit …

Within Alestron’s state chamber, a dishonoured captain marked with raw whip scars stands straight to receive the sentence of his duke; but the words that condemn him to exile mean less than the knowledge that an envoy rides north to seek word of the war host being raised to hunt the Master of Shadow…

In Avenor, under low-bellied clouds and fine drizzle, the last companies gather under Tysan’s royal banner, then
form up in smart columns to march east; while before the arch of the gatehouse, Lady Talith sheds tears of farewell in her husband’s embrace, saying, ‘Kill the felon swiftly and return.’

Arithon’s sloop
Talliarthe
slipped back into Merior’s tiny anchorage after a late night passage. The fishermen abroad in the pearl grey of dawn simply saw her, returned without fanfare and tied off to an unused mooring. By sunup, Jinesse’s young twins repeated the discovery. Their bout of ecstatic shouting rang shrill through the glassine air. Through the wheeling flocks of sea birds startled from the watch tower, the children rowed out in their dory and came back an hour later. Braced in the little boat’s bow lay an exquisite bowl of Falgaire crystal crated in straw and a bolt of blue silk for their mother, sent with Arithon’s compliments.

Disturbed at her washing by the widow’s confounded dismay, the boarding house mistress offered counsel. ‘Keep his gifts or sell them for silver, but don’t be silly over nothing! Yon outsider’s a man who knows his own mind.’ The large woman thrust out the dripping end of a bedsheet. ‘Hold this.’ Her strong, collected hands wrung the cloth. ‘You’ll offend him, and deeply, if you slight him by sending them back.’

Returned to her cottage with her apron spattered with soap suds, and her hair tugged into a shag of wild ends
by the sea breeze, Jinesse slammed her door and shot the bar. Then, unsettled to note how the shimmery, pastel silk heightened her thin-skinned, fair colouring, she locked the bolt away in her dower chest. The crystal bowl was too delicate for the kitchen. It lay unused behind glass in her dish cupboard, its luxury displaced as diamonds tossed in burlap. Even in gloom when the candles were cold, stray light struck the cut facets and woke a vibrant, rainbow shimmer, too rich to belong beside vessels of commonplace clay.

Then the gossip stormed through Merior like wildfire. In the front room of her herb shop, the Koriani enchantress still in residence received word from a young mother who stopped to collect an infusion for a convalescent child.

The outsider’s back, and no one knows why, except to use our village for a smuggler’s haven.’ In no hurry to leave, the good wife offered a half copper, and tucked away the wrapped remedy in return. She fussed at the fringe on her shawl and added, ‘You heard about that black brig which stopped here in his name? Well, she carried a cargo of gold and rare riches. The cobbler’s wife says the whole cache was sailed west and buried in the sands of Sanpashir.’

When this comment raised nothing but silence, the woman tried a fresh angle. ‘You know that rough woman captain and the outsider are in league. Both carry scars from past violence. Jinesse may well come to grief through her friendship. I should fear, were I in her place.’

‘I don’t believe Jinesse will suffer,’ Elaira said firmly. Unbound hair mantled her shoulders, dimmed to brown smoke in the shadow as she stepped past the dormer. She dropped the coin into the milk crock that served her as strongbox, then returned.

If she knew more of the outsider’s doings, she was unwilling to talk. Wide open and direct, eyes the fathom
less, pale sheen of electrum stayed level and pinned on her client.

Disturbed by that close a scrutiny, or perhaps frozen out by the silence, the mother made haste and departed.

Elaira sighed and decided to brew tea to ease the starting, tight pangs of a headache. In place of relief, she felt deep unease, that intuition had served her correctly: Arithon s’Ffalenn had come back. Spared the painful indignity of chasing his shirt tails to Innish, as Morriel’s orders would eventually have insisted, the enchantress shook off the unreasonable desire to throw down everything as the twins had, and run with skirts flying to the beach.

Temptation could mount to an insidious ache, to invent some excuse to call on Mistress Jinesse and ask if she had seen him, or talked, or knew how he had weathered the winter cooped up in the incense-soaked taverns of the southcoast.

An interval later, slouched on one elbow at her work table surrounded by stubs of chalk, snipped lengths of brown string, and twists of figured tin laid out to fashion sigils to repel iyats, Elaira stirred from troubled thought. She rubbed long-boned fingers at her temples, startled by the diced slant of sunlight through the casement; her hands had lain idle through the morning. In the sandy yard outside her window, the goat-bells had stilled, each animal tucked on folded knees under the patched shade of the scrub thorn.

Elaira grasped her oak stylus and selected a ribbon of metal. Resolute in concentration, she embossed the unquiet ciphers that fashioned a spell of go-hither into the wafer thin alloy. Arithon s’Ffalenn had returned to Merior. If he planned to stay, hearsay would inform her soon enough.

But the impact of the Shadow Master’s intentions outpaced even the villagers’ loose talk.
Black Drake
sheared into port by sundown. Hard in her wake came three
merchant galleys crammed to their load lines with lumber from the Telzen mills. The fleet had brought its own lightermen and stevedores. The next day Merior’s cramped quay seethed like a kicked ants’ nest with oared boats, while cargoes of imported planking were offloaded and set down in stacks on the sandspit beyond the village. The arthritic old sailors left the boarding house porch to observe, and even the most clouded eye among them could not mistake seasoned oak; the sawn boards of spruce and fragrant cedar; the beech; the rare locust; the fine teak which rimmed the raked crests of the dunes like buttresses.

Delivered to the beaches above Merior to the last beam and billet came the marrow to fashion blue-water ships.

Speculative gossip led to spirited wagers, met by cheers from the winners when yet another galley bearing tools hove in from Southshire. Feylind took interest in
Black Drake
, then threw a swaggering tantrum when balked in her desire to have a red shirt like Captain Dhirken’s. The trading sloop that used the Scimlade beaches for her yearly careening haled into port out of season. She delivered a master shipwright and seventeen journeyman craftsmen.

Onto the strand of Merior, seemingly overnight, came the sinew and skilled labour to begin the manufacture of hundred-ton keels. As suddenly, the load-bearing fleet raised anchor. To the beat of the drum and a white thrash of oars, or the crack and belly of filled canvas, the vessels made way and returned to their customary trade routes. Gusts from the north bore the tang of fresh timbers; then the rattling hail of hammer, saw and chisel, as crude shacks sprang up to house the influx of outsiders.

Merior’s hardy villagers met over beer in jammed parlours, and lashed up a storm of troubled talk.