TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  'What are violets?' shrieked the twin who pounded on Arithon's hipbone.

  Feylind, presumably, answered. 'They're flowers, fishhead. The ground here's too salty to grow them.'

  'You don't know everything,' Fiark retorted.

  'No, she doesn't,' Arithon agreed, and silenced the fracas by prying the sister off his neck. 'Don't bicker, or you won't get your tour belowdecks.' To the captain, laughing, he added, 'Would you mind?'

  Drawn grinning into conspiracy, the hard-bitten waterman relented. 'Take them yourself, but go lively. In another half hour, this bitch'll be aground hard as Sithaer, and ornery as a half-skint wyvern for the pinch o' the sand in her planks. Keep clear of the hold lest the ballast shifts.'

  Slithered in a heap at the base of the companionway to evade notice as the conference ended, Dakar hugged his knees in stark misery. 'I knew it,' he mused in private conclusion. 'I just knew it! He's brought planks to build a damned war fleet.'

  Immediately above, Arithon's face eclipsed the light. 'Right now, just one small sloop. You needn't fret. We haven't the coin left to arm her.' Under pressure from Feylind's impatience, a malicious glint stirred the green eyes. 'You're not in the mood to get stepped on, I trust.'

  'The fat man's in the way again!' the insufferable Fiark proclaimed. Forced to give ground in a cloud of ill grace, Dakar heaved up his tipsy bulk and moved.

  From the stern, his weathered face crinkled in calculation, the sloop captain tracked Arithon's answers to the children's eager questions. 'Knows his lines and halyards like a man born to blue water.' The old salt cast his moody gaze at the horizon as though stalked by invisible foul weather. 'Why in the name of mayhem would anyone found a shipyard in a site that grows not a stick of native timber?'

  But the fat drunkard who might have lent insight now snored in an oblivious sprawl by the gangway. The captain spat downwind in disgust, then dispatched a sailhand to heave the sot ashore before he tumbled overboard and drowned underfoot in the shallows.

  * * *

  In obstinate refusal to permit the earlier, unsettled stir through his senses to give rise to his spurious talent for prescience, Dakar slept off his binge. Wakened to an aftertaste of dread, as if the visions jammed irresponsibly beyond recall had scalded their imprint in dreams, he sat hunched over dinner at a split-plank trestle in Merior's only boarding house.

  The tea grounds in his mug streaked the landlady's white porcelain in ominous, unlucky patterns, and his brooding bought no peace of mind. While southern moths like antique lace battered the smoke-hazed tin lantern overhead, Arithon plied thread and needle to patch his second-best shirt.

  'Shipwrights!' Fired by long-delayed pique, Dakar curled his cup in a rocketing slide that scattered through knives, chinked the honey pot, and caromed off a platter littered with fish bones.

  Arithon shed his mending on hair-trigger reflex and rescued the mug before it shot off the table rim. Balked of even that destructive satisfaction, the Mad Prophet raged, 'Who's going to finance your fool's notion, anyway? There's not enough coin in this whole village for you to sing for your upkeep.'

  'Then you might be more gentle with the landlady's crockery. Or tomorrow we'll eat baitfish served raw on a cutting block.' Green eyes regarded him, thoughtful; and in the same tone as the banter came the answer Dakar least expected. 'I thought the crown of Rathain should bear the expense.'

  'Your emeralds are safe back at Althain.' Had the tea mug remained in his hands, Dakar would have thrown to draw blood.

  The knife-edged start of a smile compressed the line of Azithon's mouth. 'A pity, since you're hot to lay into me for something.'

  Too tender to provoke s'Ffalenn temper head-on, Dakar attacked on a tangent. 'Well where will we live in the meantime? You can't want to stay until spring.' He dared not spell out the obvious: that the upheavals in Jaelot and Alestron were going to stir trouble. Elsewhere, two armies amassed to kill off the s'Ffalenn bloodline could scarcely stand idle at the news.

  As though content to do nothing in response, Arithon watched the moths flare up and die in fitful spits of flame. A milk-warm, tropical breeze played through latched-back, diamond-paned casements, textured with salt and the taint of tidewrack and fish.

  'Winter is coming everywhere else,' Dakar prodded. 'The Scimlade peninsula doesn't get frost, but in case no one told you, it rains buckets here.'

  'I've leased the shell flats by the abalone cutter's.' Arithon spun the mug in a curling slide that missed soup bowls and plates by narrow margins, then thumped in an accurate jab to the nerve in the Mad Prophet's dimpled elbow. 'If you want to try carpentry, we've plenty of wood for a shack.'

  'I can scarcely drive nails when I'm sober.' The Mad Prophet lapsed into offended silence.

  By morning, he was once again comatose, and Arithon had to borrow a handcart to remove him to the site where his lumber lay. Dakar snored on through the ride, his arms and knees dangling, and his bearded chin tipped to the sky. Arithon dumped him in the shade to sleep off his poisoned stupor, then took stock of his future boat, stacked now in neat piles that beckoned to be shaped with adze and saw and plane.

  The twins found him in less than an hour. Every minute after that, they infested the shell flats like a hopping plague of locusts, until every step a man took seemed encumbered. The Mad Prophet was slowest to differentiate between them. When he misnamed Feylind, she screamed at him until his ears rang; her brother preferred to throw stones. Arithon never minded their boisterous noise. Obstructive whenever the future was mentioned, he tousled the twins' hair like young puppies and stopped Fiark's arguments by letting him hold the ends of his chalk strings.

  'They just lost their father to the sea,' the Shadow Master explained on the day Dakar woke to find his bootlaces kinked into knots. Lately discharged of a vociferous lecture on the topic of children who should be home in strict charge of their family, he was in no mood to listen as Arithon added, 'The mother has forbidden them to sail since he drowned, and in case you hadn't noticed, in Merior, only infants and the sick stay ashore.'

  One boot half off, the other ingeniously entangled, Dakar looked up into green eyes untrustworthy for their mildness. 'So why do you stay ashore?'

  'For my amusement,' the Shadow Master said. Rankled again by the queer, warning ripple of impending prophecy, Dakar bit his lip, hard. The coppery taste of blood killed the vision's deployment fast enough. But peace of mind did not return. Eaten by nameless foreboding in the face of Arithon's complaisance, the Mad Prophet found no comfort in his vices. Every girl he pinched was somebody's wife, and twice he got pummelled by packs of brothers led by a wronged and vengeful husband. Merior's villagers were closemouthed and reserved, and their town, a dull backwater that made the bigoted stews of Jaelot seem a wistfully remembered time of paradise.

  The days shortened; the fishing luggers sailed reefed to stronger winds, and the sandspit south of Scimlade Tip abided in its customary idyllic isolation. Arithon made no clandestine effort to stay abreast of events in the north. His easy-going humour under needling was just another sham, the sort of masterful, guileless fabrication his s'Ffalenn wiles employed to mask havoc. His work might seem unhurried, as he measured his fine wood in whistling patience. But the little sloop's keel was laid and her stem post set in the sort of studied, sustained effort that admitted no loophole for setback. Like the baitfish before the barracuda, Dakar discovered he was unable to bury himself in detachment. Complaints became excuse to provoke arguments. 'A man could get permanently griped on a diet of saltfish,' he broke in after a laboured visit to the privy. 'And sleeping under sail canvas has me rotten with sores like the pox.'

  'That might not be the case had you bought black beans and figs instead of that beer keg from the market.' Arithon bent to shape a raw plank, shirtless, the shiny lines of old scars browned by the sun.

  'Curse you!' Dakar dug his fingers behind his waistband to scratch. 'They haven't sold figs or beans since the last cart returned from Shaddorn, and that's
been better than a week.'

  The adze sheared off a pallid scroll of wood. 'Six days.'

  'Curse you!' Tired of the ocean, the heat, and the unending, brain-stabbing headaches brought on by the dastardly hours of banging required for maritime construction, Dakar jettisoned tact. 'All so that you can wreak vengeance in ships crammed to the gunwales with arbalests.'

  Arithon paused, his tool stilled in warning between strokes. 'You speak like a master taleteller,' he said in pleasant deceit. 'Halliron would have applauded. I've only got enough wood for one vessel. A sloop. Thirty feet to the inch, and if I use sword steel or stone shot for ballast, the quarries in Elssine will have run out of honest grey stone.'

  Half-inebriated, his tunic undone to the waist, Dakar lashed back in cornered fury. 'Who are you fooling? You know you are cursed. Lysaer is amassing armies while you dawdle, and -'

  'What am I supposed to do?' The adze scythed down in a vicious, white flare of reflection and sheared off a sliver of spruce. 'Agree? Make you promises? Confide?'

  In the sudden stabbing sarcasm he used when a nerve had been struck, Arithon smiled. 'Much better to leave you dangling, Prophet. You're far less bother to me, drunk. Failing that, you might consider washing your underclothes. They're stiff enough to stand by themselves. If they rot from neglect, we'll all watch you greet Etarra's armies bare-arsed.'

  'Oh, but you're careful, and nasty in your arrogance.' Dakar narrowed foxy eyes, suffused to a high, purple flush. 'You daren't mention your nemesis by name, do you? What about this town? It is innocent. You'll draw the danger to your web, sure enough. Do you tell me, will the children once again pay the cost?'

  He had gone too far.

  Blood drained on a breath out of Arithon's face. His green eyes watched, flat and fixed as a cat's. Lanced in the grip of raw fear, Dakar scrambled back, hands upraised to discharge a spell-ward of guard at the first twitch of movement from his enemy, for one twist of muscled hands could hurl the adze in a stroke pitched to murder.

  'Ath forfend!' said Arithon s'Ffalenn. He raised a wrist and stifled back a belly whoop of laughter. 'Dakar, what are you thinking? This is a pleasure sloop, and when she's launched, I'm sailing her to Innish!'

  A matter of a song and a widow denied reunion with her husband; the promise sworn at Halliron's deathbed that Arithon now claimed his full intent to honour.

  Caught aback inside a spitting crackle of sparks thrown off by the collapse of an inept conjury, lent no grounds to attack unimpeachable decency, Dakar broke off his challenge, unsatisfied. The sop he had been tossed to force his silence assuredly did not include the truth.

  A month passed, and the graceful frame of Arithon's sloop took shape on her ways on the shell flats. Fishermen returned from their dories began to stop and share news, or sometimes a fish from their catch. The reek of cod or halibut toasting over an open fire pervaded Dakar's whisky-soaked dreams. The autumn equinox brought in the feast days, and the twins brought yarn strung with folded paper talismans. Through the lattice of the palm groves, candles burned on every cottage windowsill. Amid the bonfires and the dances to celebrate the summer's harvest came the inevitable change to the wind patterns, and the driving, seasonal rains.

  The deluge caught Dakar in a desperate, furious bout of hammering.

  Indignant when the villagers dared to appreciate his discomfort too much, he retorted, 'Well how can I see to bang a nail with Ath-forsaken water in my eyes?'

  'Wait till the rain stops,' Arithon suggested.

  Dakar missed stroke and mashed himself a black thumbnail. His subsequent explosion exhausted filthy epithets acquired through five centuries of debauchery. Every curse and full blame for the weather attached to the Master of Shadow, and the twins, apt mimics, filched the best phrases to malign Dakar.

  Arithon gripped his ribs, a suspect expression on his face, while white runnels streamed off his hair. Since the downpour doused the coal fire that fuelled his steambox, he used the chance to wash his clothes in a nail keg.

  The children were kept home the next day.

  'In bed with coughs, their mother said,' offered a fisherman in a syrup-slow, southshore dialect. Close with his words as a pinch-fist doling coins, he trudged with his fellows to launch the dories. But the wink he tossed over his shoulder gave fair warning: the widow whose household had been outraged by an influx of rough language might be along later to scold.

  A moment of forethought, and Arithon sent Dakar on an errand.

  The woman came between showers, a thin, stoopshouldered figure swathed in the black skirts.of mourning, her wisped hair muffled under an enormous oilskin. She carried sprigs of sage to ease her passage through the fishmarkets. Against the white sands and the wheeling gulls, and the silver-banked, cloud-silted sky, the storm harried her like an omen in beggar's rags.

  Lent a shore bird's gait in her pattens, she picked her way past the puddles in the workyard as if apologetic for the crunch of her tread on the shavings. Met by sour smells of pine and wet oak, her swift, darting glance took in Dakar's crude shack, the gapped, miscut boards and bent nails a flute for the tireless sea winds. The roughsawn windows boasted no shutters, nor candles in honour of equinox. The little paper talismans brought by her twins hung tacked to the eaves, soggy and entangled in their tethers. Austere as fine muslin, she rounded the building and stopped with caught breath at the absolute shock of discrepancy: before her, in grace that bespoke patience and a loving touch with raw wood, rose the clean curves of a sloop's frames. Neat, tight pegs fastened the stempost to her keel, under damp like a patina of new varnish.

  A glance told the widow why the fishermen of Merior gave this outsider their respect.

  The yard at first sight seemed deserted. Then the rhythmic tap at first mistaken for a woodpecker fell silent. A man crouched half under the unfinished hull stood up, compact, well-made, a mallet and chisel in his hands. Sawdust and shavings twined through his dark hair. He wore canvas knee breeches tied with fish twine, the cut ends whipped deftly in round splices. Too wellraised to stay shirtless in her presence, he snatched a soaked smock from a saw trestle and wrung out the water. She caught a disturbing glimpse of scars as the cloth dropped over his head. Too reserved to make comment, she strove not to stare as he flicked off scrolled shavings, then moved with his hand out to meet her.

  His approach jarred her to an inadvertent step back.

  His build was small and light-boned as a hawk's, where the twins had painted a giant. 'You're the one called the Master?' She knew of no other address for him; even when maudlin and drunk, the stout companion never spoke his surname.

  'Friends call me Arithon.' Eyes of a piercing summer green flickered over her. Then he smiled. Thwarted from shyness by warm fingers that touched and then steadied her elbow, the widow averted her eyes. Her reason for coming was not going to please him, and his manners left no excuse for brevity.

  'You must be Jinesse ,' he said. 'Here, come and sit.' He steered her the necessary steps across ground littered with angles of scrap wood, the sort the twins had often dragged home to whittle by the hob in the kitchen. A tarpaulin was whisked aside. Arithon set her down on the fine-grained teak stacked aside to become his sloop's brightwork, then melted back out of contact. 'These boards are dry, and more tidy than Dakar's lair indoors.'

  Jinesse stared at her feet, and then, less comfortably, to one side, where she saw in mute shock that he had outflanked her. Adjacent to her perch rested the finished hulls of two dories the tarpaulin had also masked from view. Gripped fast to the greens, her hands clamped together in paralysed dread, for the sloop now in progress on the shell flats was too small to tow any more than one boat as tender. By Arithon's intent look of pleasure, she guessed: the craft had been made for her children.

  Alarm tensed her shoulders and made her look achingly brittle. 'You don't make this easy.'

  The Master upended an empty nail keg and seated himself, his wrists clasped loose at his knees. 'I know very well you've come to say the twi
ns are best off without my company.'

  Jinesse flinched. To stop the wild tremble transmitted through her posy, she opened bird-boned fingers and flung away the wilted sprigs. No matter how difficult, the dory perforce must come first. 'You should know they are destined to be apprenticed to a craftsman.' His vantage below her defeated her armour of oilskins. Intimate as touch, his study mapped her dry-skinned, ageing fairness, then the pale hair wished at her temples. Annoyed by her nervous leap of reaction, Jinesse understood he was not going to grace her with an opening. 'My children lost their father to the sea. I would not see them drowned offshore in a lugger, and their acquaintance with you makes that hard.' She stopped, wrung mute by the sound of her own rough-sawn fear.

  Arithon was first to break their locked gaze. Through fallen dark hair, his expression stayed masked as the beauty of his voice leached the iron from her determination. 'I agree.'

  'You'll sell the second dory, then.' Her business concluded, she stirred to arise and encountered an immediate obstacle. Unless she wished to hike up her skirts and step over him, the loom of the woodpile trapped her.

  The smile that bent the near corner of his mouth revealed the disadvantage was intentional. 'The dory will not drown your little ones. Nor will the sea of itself bring them harm. Lack of knowledge will certainly do both.'

  Nettled past diffidence at last, Jinesse exclaimed, 'Trust a man to make a simple thing impossible.'

  'This is not simple,' Arithon said.

  'I won't have their future tied to fishing, can't you understand?' He had been in Merior long enough to have seen the crippled old men while away their afternoons on the guest house porch; the horribly-swollen arthritic hands, or ones maimed and scarred, that could no longer draw nets from the sea.

  But Arithon did see, Jinesse realized as he faced her directly. The compassion in his challenge, and the stillness of his patience made her wonder if he, too, had weathered losses. He said, 'The twins' father has died.

  Would you give them your fear as their legacy? Will you force them to ignorance, where now there is laughter, when the sea is born into their very blood?'