That Way Lies Camelot

by Janny Wurts

  No one had shaken her awake at dawn because today the twine would not be cast out for fish. When the wrecks littered the beach, men plied their nets to glean a storm's harvest from the waves. Custom barred girls and women from such labor, lest the nets bring up dead bodies, and the sight of drowned flesh sour the luck of their sons, born and unborn, and curse them to the horror that had befallen cousin Juard, to be taken alive by the sea.

  The man on the bed had escaped that fate, just barely. He had come in on a ship that was now ripped to fragments, Sabin knew for a surety. He had not swum; not in chains. And horses did not run in the sea. Unwilling to risk misfortune by looking too closely at the waves, or what tossed and surfaced in the whitening tumble of foam, Sabin spun away from the window. She shivered in the sun that fell on her back, and shivered again as she saw that the man on the bed had awakened. He studied her, his eyes like fine flawed crystal broken to a razor's edge.

  'You do not trust me,' he said in his rusty whisper. He flexed one wrist, and immediately grimaced in pain.

  'My uncle thinks you're a murderer.'

  He ground out a bitter, silent laugh. 'Oh, but I am, though my hand has never taken life.'

  She frowned, a plain-spoken girl who dreamed, but had always hated riddles. 'What is a Wayfinder?'

  Riddles came back in answer, as he regarded the beams of the ceiling. 'One who hears the sea. One who can read the earth. One who can travel and never be lost.'

  'I don't understand.' She stepped back, and sat on the clothes chest that had once held the shirt she was wearing, when it had been Juard's, and she had spent days spinning thread for her father's loom. Now her hands had grown horny and tough, and fine wool would catch on the callus.

  But the incessant lapses of attention had not left her; she forgot to mind sheet lines as readily as she had faltered at spindle and wheel. She curled her knees up and clasped her hands to bury that recognition. 'Anyone can be lost.'

  He stirred in the faintest impatience, jerked back by the cut of his chains. 'Inland to the east, there is a road, a very dusty road with stone markers that winds through a forest. Beyond lie farmlands, and three villages, and lastly a trader's town. Beyond brick walls are wide sands, called by the desert people who live there Dei'eh'vikia.' His head tipped sideways toward Sabin. His eyes now were darkened as gray sapphires, and he considered her as though she should be awed.

  She was not. 'You could have spoken to someone who passed that way,' she accused. 'Perhaps you lived there yourself.' But she knew as she spoke that he did not. His vessel had broken on the reef, and never sought harbor in these isles. Few ships did, for the rocks gave hostile greeting to mariners from afar.

  He looked at her in sadness or maybe pain, as if he had offered riches to the village half-wit who had use for no coin at all. He kept staring until she twisted her fingers together, embarrassed as if caught at a lie. For all his foreign accent, he had pronounced the place name as crisply as the nomads who made the desert their home. Townsmen and traders slurred over the vowels and called it Daaviki, in contempt for the troublesome native speech.

  He perceived that she knew this. He saw also that stubbornness kept her silent.

  He looked at her still, his gaze heavy-lidded, almost glazed as a drunk's. The angle of his neck must have pulled at his shoulders and wrists, but he shed any sign of discomfort as he said, 'Sabin, outside this room, there is a passage covered with braided rugs. It leads to a stairway that winds around itself twice. Downstairs, to the right of the kitchen lies a door that leads to a springhouse. Purple flowers grow by the path, and seven steps to the left lead to the sea cliff where there is a little slate ledge. You like to sit there on sunny mornings, in what you call your chair seat. But the people who inhabited these coasts before yours used the site as a shrine.' His grainy voice was almost gentle as he finished. 'They left carvings. You have seen them, when you scratched at the moss.'

  Sabin jumped up with her mouth opened like a fish. He had been carried into this house, unconscious. Ciondo had brought him through the front door. Someone might have mentioned her name in his hearing, but there was no way he could have seen the springhouse, or have known of her fondness for that ledge. Her aunt and uncle did not know, nor her own mother and father.

  'I am a Wayfinder,' he said simply, as if that sealed a truth that she realized, shivering, could not be other than magic. Her need to escape that room, and that compelling, mesmeritic gaze came out in a rush of speech. 'I have to go, now.'

  The Wayfinder let his head fall back on the pillow. At a word from him, she would have fled; she waited, tautly poised on one foot. But he made no sound. He closed his eyes, and curiosity welled over her fear and held her rooted. 'Still there?' he murmured after a while.

  'Maybe.' Sabin put her foot down, but quietly.

  He did not open his eyes. 'You have a piece of the gift yourself, you know, Sabin.'

  She quivered again, as much from anger. 'What gift!'

  His hands were not relaxed now, but bunched into white-knuckled fists. One of his sores had begun to bleed from the pressure; he was trying her uncle's knots, and finding them dishearteningly firm. 'You came to the beach at my call.'

  She stamped her foot, as much to drive off uneasiness. 'You called nothing! I forgot my jacket. That was all.'

  'No.' His hands gave up their fretting. 'You have given your jacket as the reason. But it was my call that caused you to forget it in the first place. When I asked the spirits for their help, you heard also. That was the true cause of the forgetfulness that drew you outside in the night.'

  'I've been scolded for carelessness all my life,' she protested, 'and my jacket was forgotten at twilight!'

  'And so at that hour I called.' He was smiling.

  She wanted to curse him, for that. He seemed so smug. Like Juard had been when he teased her; and that remembrance called up tears. Sabin whirled violently toward the doorway and collided headlong with her aunt.

  'Sabin! Merciful god, you've spilled the soup.' Kala raised the wooden tray to keep it beyond reach of calamity, and her plump face dimpled into a frown. 'What are you doing here anyway? A sick man has no need for prying girls.'

  'Talk to him,' Sabin snapped back. 'He's the one who pries.'

  'Awake, is he?' Kala stiffened primly. She glanced toward the bed and stopped cold, her chins sagging beneath her opened mouth, and the tray forgotten in her hands. For a moment she seemed to breathe smoke as she inhaled rising steam from the soup bowl.

  Then she exploded. 'My fool of a husband! Rope ties! The cruelty and the shame of it.' She stepped sideways, banged her tray down on the clothes chest, and in a fit of total distraction, failed to bemoan the slopped soup. 'Sabin, run out and fetch our mallet and chisel.' She added to the stranger on the bed, 'We'll have you free in just minutes.'

  For an instant, the Wayfinder's cut crystal eyes seemed to mirror all of the earth. 'Your goodman thinks I'm a murderer.'

  'My goodman is a fool who thinks in circles like a sand crab.' Kala noticed that Sabin still lingered in the doorway. 'Girl, must you always be idling about waiting for speech from the wind? Get along! Hammer and chisel, and quickly.'

  * * *

  Kala had matters well in hand before the last fetter was struck. 'You're taking up no space that's needed,' she insisted with determined steadiness. 'Juard's bed is yours, he's dead and at rest in the sea, and if you care to lend a hand at the chores, we could use the help, truly. Sabin belongs home with her family.'

  She ended with a strike of the mallet. As the last rivet sheared away, and rusted metal fell open and clanged in a heap on the floor, the Wayfinder raised his freed wrists. He rubbed at torn skin, then looked up at Kala, who stood over him gripping the tools with both fists braced on broad hips. In profile, Sabin saw the stranger give her aunt that same, heavy-lidded gaze that had earlier caused her the shivers.

  'He's not lost, your Juard,' the broken voice announced softly.

  Kala went white. She dropped the
tools with a clatter and clapped her palms behind her back to distract bad luck, and avert the misfortune of hearing false words. 'Do not spin me lies! Respect our loss. Ill comes of wishing drowned men back from death, for they hear. They rise in sorrow and walk the sea bed without rest for all of eternity.'

  The Wayfinder cocked up his eyebrows in sad self-mockery. 'I never lie. And no such lost spirits walk the sea, nor ever have.' At Kala's shocked stiffness, he thumped his marred fist on the mattress in frustration. 'Your boy is not dead, only washed up on a beach, as I was.'

  Aunt Kala turned her back, which was as near to an insult as anyone ever got from her. The Wayfinder glared fiercely, his ice-gray eyes lit to burning. Then his jaw hardened until the muscles jumped and his speech scraped out of his throat. 'Your son fetched up on the Barraken Rock, to the west. At this moment, he is gutting a fish with a knife he chipped from a mussel shell.'

  'My son is dead!' Kala snapped back. 'Now say no more, or when Ciondo comes back, you will go trussed in the wagon to the bailiffs. I'll hear your word.'

  The Wayfinder sighed as though sucked down in a chasm of weariness. 'Woman, you'll get no word from me, but neither will you hear any, either, if that is your desire.'

  'It is.' Kala stamped out through the doorway without looking back. 'Sabin,' she yelled from the threshold at the head of the stairwell. 'You'll see that yon man eats his soup, and bring down the tray when he's finished.'

  But Kala's bidding was impossible to carry out, Sabin found. On the bed, the Wayfinder had closed his eyes and fallen deeply asleep.

  The house stayed quiet for the rest of the morning, with Kala beating quilts with a ferocity that outlasted the dust. At noon Uncle Ciondo returned from the beach, swathed in dripping oilskins, his boots caked to the ankles with damp sand. The bull bellow of his voice carried up through the second storey window where Sabin kept vigil over the invalid. 'Kala! Where is that man?'

  The thwack of the broom against fabric faltered. 'Where else would he be, but in bed? The shame on you, Ciondo, for leaving him trussed like the felon he certainly isn't.' Smack! went the broom on the quilts.

  When only the cottage door hammered closed in reply, Sabin gripped her knees with sweaty hands. She all but cowered as her uncle's angry tread ascended the stairs; bits of grit and shell scattered from his boots and fell pattering against the baseboards as he hurried the length of the hall. The next instant his hulking shoulders filled the bedroom doorway and his sailor's squint fixed on the empty shackles that lay where they had fallen on the floor.

  'Fool woman,' he growled in reference to his wife. He raised hands scraped raw from his labors with net and sea, and swiped salt-drenched hair from his temples. Then he noticed Sabin. 'Out, imp.'

  Her chin jerked up to indicate the man on the bed. 'I found him.'

  'So you did.' Ciondo's grimness did not ease as he strode closer, but he did not send her away. Sabin watched as he, too, met the uncanny gaze of the stranger who had wakened again at the noise. The sword-edged clarity of that stare arrested her uncle also, for he stopped, his hands clenched at his sides. 'Do you know that all morning we have been dragging in bits of burst ships? Not just one, but a fleet of them.'

  The Wayfinder said a touch tartly, 'Karbaschi warships.'

  'So you know them.' Ciondo sighed. 'At least you admit it.' His annoyance stayed at odds with his gesture as he noticed his boots, and the sand left tracked in wet clumps. Hopeful as a miscreant mongrel, he bent and scuffed the mess beneath the bed where Kala might not notice. He dusted his fingers, ham-pink and swollen from salt water, on the already gritty patches of his oilskins. 'You were a criminal? Their prisoner perhaps?'

  The Wayfinder's lip curled in a spasm of distaste. 'Worse than that.'

  Ciondo straightened. 'You'd better tell me. Everything. Our people fear such fleets, for where they go, they bring ruin.'

  The man propped up by the pillows seemed brown and wasted as stormwrack cast up and dried on the beach. In a whisper napped like spoiled velvet, he said, 'I was their Wayfinder. Kept bound in chains to the flagship's mast, to guide them on their raids. When I refused to see the way for their murdering, or led them in circles at sea, they made sure that I suffered. But by the grace of your kindness, no more.'

  Uncle Ciondo's square face looked vacant with astonishment. 'You!' He took a breath. 'You? One of the in'ant shealdi, the ones who are never lost? I don't believe it.'

  'Then don't.' The Wayfinder closed his eyes. His lashes were dark at the roots, and bleached white at the tips from too much sun. 'Your wife named me liar also.'

  'Storm and tide! She'll fling any manner of insult at a man, if she thinks it will help make him listen.' Ciondo shifted stance in disgust. 'And I did not say you spoke falsehood, but only that I can't believe you.'

  At this, the Wayfinder's eyes flicked open. Though he tensed no muscle, Sabin felt warning charge his presence that swept the room like cold wind. 'Is it proof you want? You shall have it. Leave me blindfolded on any of your fishing sloops, and give me the tiller, and I will set you an accurate course for the spit called the Barraken Rock.'

  'A wager?' Ciondo covered his uneasiness with a cough. Thoughtfully, he added, 'The trial would have to be at night, or the sun on your face might guide you.'

  'Be it night, or in storm, I care very little,' the Wayfinder challenged. 'But if I win, I'd have your promise: not a word of my gift shall go beyond this village. Your King, if he found me, would send me back as a bribe to plead for an exemption from tribute. Greedy traders anywhere would sell the secret of my survival. The Karbaschi make unforgiving masters. If they learned I still lived, a warrior fleet would sail to collect me, and killing and looting would follow. If your people have no riches to adorn Karbaschi honor, your houses would burn, and your daughters know the miseries of slavery.'

  Ciondo went pale, even to the end of his nose that seasons of winds had buffed red. He stepped back from the edge of the mattress and sat, without care for his soggy oilskins, on the cushion by the windowseat. if you are in'am shealdi, then you steered those ships afoul of the currents. Was it you who set your Karbaschi overlords on our reef to drown and then took your chance in the sea?'

  The Wayfinder denied nothing, but regarded his wrists as if the weals dug by fetters could plead his testimony for him. A tight-drawn interval followed, broken at last by the rattle of pots in the kitchen; Kala had relented enough to oversee the noon meal. Her industry spoiled the quiet, and forced the Wayfinder to raise his burred voice to be heard.

  'Men travel the land, but they do not hear it. They sail the waters, yet they do not know the sea. The Karbaschi warships carve paths of destruction, and the peoples they conquer grieve for slain husbands and sons. But where the Karbaschi stay to settle, they bring cruelties more lasting than death to the flesh. The lands they rule will wither in time, because they are a race who take and give nothing back. Their habit of pillage has deafened them, until they plow up forests for fields and raise towns without asking leave. The rituals mouthed by their priests are empty of truth, and without care for the still, small needs of the earth.' Here, the invalid lifted his wasted, leathery shoulders in a shrug. 'In'am shealdi are actually guardians. We nurture the spirits which the Karbaschi run over roughshod, because they love only the desires of humanity. It is such spirits that show me the way. If I call, they answer, though the Karbaschi ruled my body as a man might course a hunting dog. The guidance given to me in trust was forced to ill use, and inevitably brought the earth sorrow. The day came when I could not endure its pain, or my own, any longer.'

  The Wayfinder sounded wistful as he finished. 'I expected to die in the sea. Since I did not, I should like very much to stay. To live simply, and make use of my talent very little. I wish for nothing beyond your leave to guide your village sloops back to anchorage each night for the rest of my life.'

  Secure in the belief she was forgotten where she sat on the clothes chest, only Sabin caught the half glance he flicked in her directio
n. As if his cracked voice informed her, she knew: because of her he begged sanctuary - because of the gift he claimed she shared; and not least, for the sake of Juard who was dead, who had to be dead, else magic and spirits were real and horses ran wild in the sea.

  If in truth such beauty existed, she would never shed the distraction of dreams but helplessly become consumed by them until the small inattentions that cursed her grew monstrous and took over her life.

  Spooked by strangeness that threatened to draw her like some hapless moth to a flame, Sabin sprang to her feet and fled. Out through the hall she pounded, and on down the stair beyond. Kala called out as she passed through the kitchen, to say the noon meal was waiting. But the girl did not stop until she had left the house, and raced at reckless speed down the cliff path to the place she called her chair seat.

  There she spent the afternoon, while the Wayfinder slept. She did not return for supper, though Kala called from the back door to say that their guest had arisen for the meal. By that Sabin understood that her uncle had accepted the Wayfinder at his word; an outsider who spoke false might stay because he was ill and had need, but he would not be invited to table. One supposed that Kala and the stranger had settled their hostilities by not speaking.

  At nightfall, when most folk gathered at the tavern, the beachhead glittered with torches. Word had passed round of a wager, and every boy with the sea in his blood turned out to ask Ciondo's leave to man the sloop, never mind that the craft was handy and needed little crew. The commotion as boasts were made and shouted down, and lots were finally drawn to keep the choice fair, enabled Sabin to sneak past and hide under the nets in the dory. Certain she had not been seen, she peered out cautiously and saw the tight knot of men stepping back. They left the Wayfinder standing alone with black cloth muffling his head. He turned unerringly toward the tender that was Ciondo's. If his steps were unsteady due to weakness, the line he walked was straight. He crossed and found the thwart without fumbling, and spoke so no others could hear. 'Your good aunt does not know where we sail. I never mentioned to your uncle that I know your cousin Juard to be alive. Before we arrive at the Barraken Rock, I give you the burden of telling him.'