Ogberd took a deep breath, shivered all over like a fly-bit horse, and nodded, wordlessly. He wiped his eyes once more, put his kerchief back into his sleeve, gritted his teeth, and said between them, “Granpa. He’s gone into it.”
“Aaaah,” said the other, with a grimace. “How far gone?”
“He’s at the wandering stage. Ma says he keeps looking for something. Granma asks him what it is, and he shakes his head. He doesn’t know. Something. Something he’s lost. She says he keeps listening for something. She asks what he’s listening for. He says he used to hear it, he doesn’t hear it anymore. They’ve done everything they can think of. The Chief hired some off-world quacks to take a look at the situation. They came up with pure vacuum. Not an ion. Gorge and vomit! If we’d just been faster!”
“Come on, Og. We’ve tried everything anybody’s even thought of.”
“Then we should have thought of something else,” Ogberd mumbled.
Lokdren shook his head. “I’ve got dust in my ears from the nothing that’s come into them, so its hard to know where else we could have done.”
Ogberd sniffed, staring at the horizon. “I told them at home nothing was bein’ said. Father was raging. He said we just weren’t listenin’.”
“Ah?”
“So I told him we had been listenin’. I told him the Prince is conspirin’ to overthrow the Lord Paramount. I told him the Lord Paramount knows all about it. I told him the Prince murdered the Lord Paramount’s son, first in line for the throne. I told him the Lord Paramount did the same to his own brother who was conspirin’ to replace him. I told him they treat their women like so many chessmen, move them here, move them there, wed them off to this one or that one. I’ve listened, I told him, and there’s plenty being said, just nothin’ about what we need to know.”
Lokdren nodded slowly and came to lean beside the other man, the railing protesting gently at his added weight. “And we’ve got listeners planted all over Havenor and Mahahm and half the provinces by now, but they don’t yield anything either!”
Ogberd nodded. “I told Father he could always gamble on finding out after instead of beforehand.”
“Last report said the birthrate’s down again.”
“Gorge and vomit, man,” blurted Ogberd. “You think I’ve somehow missed that?”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean you’d missed anything.”
“Nobody means. Damn it. Why in hell is Ares going down the drainhole and this damn world bobbing along like a cork? Any one of our people would make five of these Havenites! And our women! These women don’t even start to measure up. I ask you! I’ve wracked my brain. You think it’s only this stuff we’re after? Stuff the people don’t even seem to know about? Somehow, after all this time, that’s getting to seem less and less likely.”
“It’s what everybody at home thinks.” Lokdren spoke in a soothing tone. “It’s what the Chief thinks. When the Chief thinks beefsteak, better we don’t go around talking chicken.”
Ogberd lowered his voice. “Yes, right, but you know, I’ve been wondering lately. Here’s all these women going missing. What if we’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Like, what if the stuff doesn’t come from this world at all? What if the Lord Paramount is trading women off-world for it?”
Silence. A long brooding silence, until Lokdren said, “Well, then hell, we’ll take the women over and find out where they’re bein’ sold, and we’ll do the sellin’ ourselves.”
The two men leaned together, bearing a weight of woe. When they left, a person moved from a cleft in the rock where he had stood throughout their meeting. Veswees. He stood looking after the two men, pondering, going over in his mind all that they had said.
It meant something to him even now. When he could get some time in the library files, he felt it would mean even more.
Genevieve wakened in the dark, too late to struggle, already gagged, already mostly tied. She struggled against bonds being tightened, and went on struggling against being lifted from her bed, carried and dumped unceremoniously onto a cart. She held her breath in hope as her abductor went away, but he returned to place something beside her. When the platform moved into a better light, she saw that it was her baggage, everything she had brought with her when she arrived. The driver was Zebulon, a strangely elated Zebulon, shifting from foot to foot and humming under his breath. When they had gone some way, he began to sing.
“Take her where she’s going, yes, we’ll take her to and froing, and I’m the only one who’ll know that’s not where she planned to go, oh, no, oh, no …” He cackled, a high, manic giggle that went on endlessly, trailing away only to repeat itself once, twice, a dozen times more. When it ended at last, Zebulon wiped his face on his sleeve and muttered,
“He’s not the only rhymer, is he? Not him. Well, we’ll just say she ran off. Fell in a chasm. He’ll never know. He’ll never know. And we’ll get … oh, a good price for her. They’ll want her. They’re looking for her. Hide her away for a while. She’s got fat on her. She won’t starve in a week, no, not a week. Even a month, maybe. Water, that’d be the problem. We’ll, I’ll water her now and again, that’s what.”
She wrenched her hands, trying to get them apart. They were tied too snugly. Her knees and ankles were flexed and tied. Wherever he was taking her, she had no choice but to go along.
“Water her now and again,” hummed Zebulon. “Now and again.”
THIRTEEN
The Duchess Alicia’s Daughter
LORD SOLVEN, EARL OF RUCKWARD, WAS IN A FURY. EVEN in a man known for irritability, his present rage was extraordinary. It had to do, everyone knew, with the Lady Lyndafal, Countess Ruckward, who had put the new baby on her shoulder, walked down from Ruckward House to the shore, and gone out sailing with the child as she had often done in all weathers with her older daughter. This time, however, she had disappeared and had quite possibly drowned.
There were those who had seen her go and thought it foolish of her, just days from childbed as she was. Still, she habitually sailed around the bay, or across to Seapasture, the nearest of the Randor Isles, a lovely parklike place with grassy banks grazed by shaggy, long-horned sweet-breathed cattle. No one wondered at her doing it, for she did it all the time, and since the baby had come, she had taken the baby, too, saying the baby liked it, and it was true the baby stopped crying the moment her basket went in the boat, seeming to rejoice in the rocking motion and the chuckle of the water. So, Lady Lyndafal and the baby went out sailing, and the little white sail went back and forth and back and forth, and then away behind the island, and then out and back behind the island again until nobody watched it anymore and besides, why should they?
Come along dusk, people began to wonder who’d seen her last, and then come dark and they began to worry that nobody had seen her for hours, and then come deep dark and people began to shout and start running about, even before the Earl knew of it and fell to cursing and threatening. Hadn’t he put all his men into boats, hunting her? Hadn’t he screamed down the heavens, looking for her? Him, who hadn’t looked at her twice in the months before the child was born?
Well, indeed he had. He sent a boat out to scour Seapasture Island for her, which was not so easy as one might think, for it was dark with no moon and a veil of wispy cloud hiding even the stars, and at the first scrape of a hull on the beach, the shaggy cows that pastured there gathered around and demanded to be given something good, their noses pushing weüy and their long horns clacking, immovable as rocks. Cows and dark together brought the endeavor to naught but effort wasted and more screaming threats from the Earl.
On the morrow, they tried again and were able to confirm that she was not on Seapasture Island. So they went on to Little Swamp Island, the next island in the chain, though it was impossible to search the island thoroughly, full of trees as it was, trunks growing out of the water and dropping stems down from their branches to make the whole an impenetrable tangle. After sailing around it and shouting until everyone was hoarse, th
ey decided she wasn’t there, either. The third island out was much too far out for her to have sailed before she vanished, so it was obvious she couldn’t be there. By evening, the search was given up.
How tragic, cried those who enjoyed conjecture. How tragic there’d been a waterspout, or a wind gust, or the baby had fallen in, or she’d tipped the boat over trying to save the baby, or she’d gone in for a swim (though she’d never been known to do any such thing) and the boat had sailed off without her. How tragic, said the sentimentalists, that it had happened just when the Earl had announced his intention of taking her on a wonderful trip down to that marvelous resort on the Plains of Bliggen.
No matter what the intentions had been, they’d been blown off the parapet and into the moat, and here was Earl Solven in a temper that couldn’t be dealt with, not by anybody sane at any rate. It was to the tune and tempo of such turmoil that the people of Ruckward passed the first day and second night after the Countess’s disappearance.
By which time the cause of all this annoyance, the woman who would call herself Bessany Blodden, was working her little boat out of a tangle of trees on the east side of the fourth island out from county Ruckward, where she had been since the previous evening.
Lyndafal had been afraid the child might cry in the night when, with sound traveling so far over water, it could lead people in her direction. The baby, however, had been hungry whenever she was not asleep, which kept her busy rooting at the nipple like a little pig, grunting contentedly and otherwise quiet as could be in her mother’s arms while Lyndafal waited for first light to take advantage of the wind and get herself beyond finding. She figured she had four more days to make it the rest of the way east to Ramspize Point, where, pray heaven, someone would be waiting for her.
Just now her greatest worry was not herself or the baby in the basket but her other daughter, Evaline, left at Ruckward Manor with Dora. Two years old, Evaline. Too headstrong and noisy to bring on this trip without risking all their Uves, but otherwise sweet and dear and all too vulnerable. Well, Alicia would soon hear of Lyndafal’s “disappearance.” She would come to Ruckward to beg Evaline’s company for a time. The Earl had never paid much attention to Evaline. He wouldn’t care where the child went, so, pray heaven, Evaline would be taken back to Merdune where she’d be safe. If she ever could be!
Lyndafal had thought she herself was safe. She had believed it, utterly. She had convinced her mother.
“He loves me,” she had said of the Earl, who had come courting at the school she attended in Baiverberg, introduced to her there by the Duke of Merdune, Lyndafal’s step-father.
“He may think so,” her mother had whispered. “I am sure he wants you.”
“No, Mama, he really loves me. He loved his first wife, too, but she died. He’s a good man, really he is.”
Her mother had not answered, had merely stared at her, as though looking into a crystal ball, trying to find a separate dweller within, someone who might respond independently, differently. “Have you had a … vision of your being married to him?” This mentioning of visions was a rare thing. The Duchess did not have the talent, though her mother had had it. Lyndafal never knew whether her mother envied the talent or rued it, so they spoke of it seldom.
“Mama, the only visions I’ve had about me are sailing in a little boat with my children.” Not children, precisely. Child, but it was the same thing. She wanted half a dozen, at least.
The Duchess’s eyes were teary as she said, “I wish Gardagger had not introduced you to Earl Solven, for I believe you are too young. Still, you want children, and having them is easier when one is young. Oh, Lyndafal. I wish your grandmother were alive to counsel us both. I’ll not stand in your way, but be careful.”
“I will be, Mama. And Solven will take good care of me.”
He had been ardent, and she had loved their lovemaking. He had been attentive, and she had loved that, too. And when the ardor waned with her first pregnancy, she had said to herself, well, it is appropriate at this time. The newness wears off, but he loves me none the less. And Evaline had been born, and there had been that joy, and then she became pregnant with this little one.
When had she realized that she was no longer safe? When had she understood that she never had been? Was it the cool way that Solven had spoken to her during this last pregnancy, a kind of terminal detachment in his voice. Was it the way he had stopped looking at her, as though he was trying to forget she was there? Was it his avoidance of those times when they had formerly been alone together, as at breakfast or during late afternoon walks in the garden? Suddenly he had been very busy morning and night with his estate men. Suddenly he had had many trips to take, here or there.
Had she been convinced of her danger that time she heard him speaking with the heir to Ruckward, his son by his first wife, referring to Lyndafal as, “The woman, Lyndafal.”
She had heard him use that same tone in speaking of a mangled dog that had had to be put down. “The bitch, Runner.” In his mouth it was a knell. It had chilled her. She had told herself she was being foolish. She had told herself she was simply imagining things. Pregnant women did imagine things!
Then, only then, the vision had come, herself lying on dry soil, her cheek pressed into the grit, the sun burning the skin of her back, her head tipped down so she could see the gush of blood soaking into the soil. Near her, a circle of men, passing her little child among them, talking in low voices.
And from somewhere near, her husband’s voice, aware but untroubled, in that same tone of detachment.
“So. It is done.”
And a strange voice answering. “Congratulations on your ascension, Solven. It has been well done. And here is another who will be candidate for you …”
Lyndafal had wakened with the dream fully in her mind. She had taken no time to consider its meaning. She had not been dead in the dream, her child had not been dead, but the tone of it had been enough. If death was not present, it was not far off. She knew an absolute truth with a part of her mind that was not accessible to reason. She either accepted the warning her vision had given her or she ignored it at her peril.
If the dream had not been enough, the following day might have warned her, for on that very morning Solven had begun wooing her anew, hugely pregnant as she was. He had apologized for having been distracted. He had apologized for having neglected her. His hand had patted her cheek, had stroked her arm, his eyes sought hers with pretended love, and she had seen the lie squirming there like a leech, seen it, and known it for what it was.
He had purred at her. “I’ve arranged for us to have a trip, dear love. When this baby is born, we’re going to the resort in Bliggen. I’ve heard wonderful things about it!”
Though she was weary with the weight of the unborn child, she tried to sound normally interested and unafraid. “But the baby, Solven. The baby will still be nursing, and you know what the covenants have to say about nursing. A mother must nurse her own child for a whole year.”
He could scarcely argue. It was part of the covenants, one of the amendments added by the Tribunal during their years on Haven. A child receiving noble nature and noble nurture was fit to assume the noble title. Breast milk was one of the three female sacraments—resignation, bearing, nurturing—bestowed by the mother upon the female child.
Solven had merely smiled tenderly. “No problem, sweetheart. We’ll take the baby with us.”
That day she had called Dora to her, whispering into her ear, putting the letter into her hand, together with money and a promise of an equal amount when the letter was delivered. Dora would find a messenger, and even if the letter was intercepted, there was nothing in it to condemn her. It was written in a personal code mother and daughter had used and refined for years, one that conveyed meaning through idle phrases of chit-chat. Well, Mama, soon I will be out of danger, as I’m due the tenth. Soon after, we’re leaving here. It would be fun to go on a sailing boat, across past Ramspize to Poolwich, but we’ll pro
bably travel by road, down through Bliggen …
The message concluded with some jotted figures, 9 royals 1, 5 royals 1, 4 royals 2, 9 royals 2, and 3 royals 1, totalling 29 royals 9. Please, Mama, send me thirty royals to buy special somethings for Evalene for her birthday!
Hidden in this brief missive was the message:
Danger. Tenth. Leaving here. Sailing boat. Ramspize.
The day before she left she had received her answer: Thirty royals and the coded message, Meeting you. Watch for a fire.
While Solven had prepared for their trip to Bliggen, Lyndafal had prepared likewise, awaiting the birth, praying it would be neither late nor hard. It had been harder than the first, but rather earlier than late, and she had forced herself to move, to heal, to go out sailing on Havenpool.
Now she used an oar to push free of the mud. The boat slipped out onto the waters, buoyant as a duck. It took only a moment to step the slender mast and see the light linen sail fill with wind, still blowing seasonally from the northwest as she had hoped. She had gambled it would blow strongly enough to let her escape.
The baby went on sleeping. The island receded behind her. Number four, she reminded herself. There were a dozen, all told, and she needed to keep track of where she was. She hoped to rest on the seventh tonight and tomorrow. She would go by the eighth island at night, for it was populated by fisherfolk, and the last few islands were close together, mere rocky peaks covered with waterbird nests and deep-piled guano that had been mined by the farmers of Ramspize and Southmarsh before the last fever epidemic.
She glanced at the sleeping child, rocking in her basket. This was what she had dreamed before she married Solven: herself and her child, sailing in a little boat. She had taken it for a vision of happiness. She had never guessed what it really was, had not even recalled its details until now. She threw her head back, staring at the sky, swallowing her tears. The warning had been there, but she hadn’t seen it. What good was a talent that was so misleading? And why did she have it at all? Mother didn’t. Grandmother had, evidently, and maybe she’d known what it was good for.
Singer From the Sea Page 22
