by Janny Wurts
'Aunt Kala would curse you for putting your lies in my mouth,' Sabin accused from under damp nets, the reek of which suddenly made her dizzy. She was trembling again, and that made her angry, for he sensed her fear, she was certain. She could feel those pale eyes burning even through their veiling of cloth as he said, 'But you are not Kala. You are the child of a weaver, and your fears are not ruled by the sea.'
'They are when I sit in a boat!' she snapped back, more like her aunt than herself.
He laughed in his broken, rasping way, and because there was no malice in him, she wanted to hit him or scream. Instead she shrank into a tight huddle. Light and voices intruded, and the boat lifted, jostling, to be launched. As the keel smacked the water, and blown spray trickled through her cocoon of nets, she tasted warm salt with the cold. Tears; she was crying. The man seemed so certain that poor, lost Juard still breathed.
Sabin felt the rampaging buck of the surf toss the dory over a swell. The alternative terrified her, that her cousin had rightly drowned, and that this stranger who lured the people laughing to their boats to follow his blindfolded quest was a sorcerer who could swim in iron chains. They might rescue Juard, or else join him, leaving more bereaved families to weep and to curse at the sea.
* * *
Sabin rubbed the stinging cheek her uncle had smacked when he found her, and smacked again when she told what the Wayfinder had said of her lost cousin. While the wind shifted fitfully, slapping sails and stays in contrary gusts, and moonlight silvered the wavelets, she braced against the windward rail, away from the men by the binnacle. Their talk grew ever more sullen as Juard's fate was uneasily discussed, and shoreline and lights shrank astern.
'Nothing lives on the Barraken Rock but fishing birds that drink seawater!' cried Tebald over the wear of patched canvas. Young, and a friend of Juard's, his jutted chin and narrowed eyes were wasted.
Blind behind swathes of black rag, the Wayfinder stood serene before aggression, his thin hands draped on the tiller as if the wood underneath were alive.
Darru argued further. 'Without a fresh spring, a castaway would perish.'
'It has rained twice in the past week,' the stranger rebuked. 'Oilskins can be rigged to trap water, and the seabirds are plentiful enough to snare.'
Ciondo's spare smock flapped off his shoulders like an ill-fitting sail, the cuffs tied back to keep from troubling his sores. The linen bindings covering his wrists emphasized prominent bones; a man so gaunt should not have been able to stand up, far less command the muscle to mind the helm. But Sabin could see from where she stood that the sloop held flawless course. The wake carved an arrow's track astern.
Ciondo glowered and said nothing, but his hand strayed often to the rigging knife at his belt.
'We should put about and sail back,' Tebald said.
Darru was more adamant. 'We should let you swim back, stranger, for your lies.'
The Wayfinder answered in the absent way of a man whose thoughts are interrupted, if I prove wrong, you may kill me.'
At this came a good deal of footshifting, and one or two gestures to ward ill luck. No one voiced the obvious, that they could kill him only if malfortune went elsewhere and they lived to make good such a threat.
The night wore on and the stars turned. The wind settled to a steady northeast, brisk and coldly clear. Moonset threw darkness on the water, and the land invisible astern. Once, Darru repeated the suggestion that the wager be abandoned, that the sloop seek return by the stars. He spoke to Ciondo by the mainmast pinrail, but was answered in gruff-voiced challenge by the Wayfinder aft at the helm. 'Would you take such a chance, just to keep Juard's doom a clear certainty?'
Darru spun in vicious anger, jerked back by Ciondo's braced hand. 'Don't provoke him! He is in'am shealdi, or how else does he steer without sight? Find faith in the straight course he sails, or else give the decency of holding your tongue until you have true cause to doubt.'
'Grief for your son has turned your head,' Darru muttered, shrugging himself free. But he could not argue that lacking clear stars or a compass, no ordinary man could keep a heading hour after hour without mistake.
Night waned. Sabin slept through the dawn curled against a bight of rope. She dreamed of waves and white horses, and the rolling thunder of troubled seas until Tebald's shout awakened her. 'The Barraken Rock! Dead off our bow, do you see!'
She opened her eyes to a dazzle of sunlight, and the soured smell of seaweed beached and dried. 'Juard,' she whispered.
No one noticed. Ciondo stood as a man frozen in place by the foremast stay; the more volatile Darru gave back laughter and cried to his fellow crewman, 'Where were you an hour ago when the spit rose out of the sea?'
'Sleeping,' Tebald confessed. His awed glance encompassed the scarecrow figure who guided the tiller with a feather touch, and whose eyesight was yet swathed in cloth. The mouth that showed underneath seemed turned up in detached amusement. Tebald leaned down and ruffled Sabin's hair as he passed, his discomfort masked by a shrug.
Peevish and oddly unrefreshed, she tried a kick that missed at his ankle. 'Don't do that. I'm not a little girl anymore.'
Tebald ignored her as if she were a bothersome younger sister. To Ciondo he said, 'The wager's won, I'd say. Your in'am shealdi should take off his blindfold. It's probably making him sweat.'
'I said so,' Ciondo admitted. With one hand fastened to the headstay, he kept his eyes trained on the rock that jutted like a spindle from the sea. 'Tell him again if you want.'
But with the arcane powers of the helmsman now proven, no one seemed anxious to speak. Sun glared like molten brass off the wet shine of the deck, and the sheet lines creaked under their burden of sail. The pitiless isolation of the sea seemed to amplify the wind, and the mingled cries of seabirds that squabbled and flew above the rock. The deeper shout that was human seemed to rend the day's peace like a mortal blow to the heart.
On that gale-carved, desolate spit, splashing in seawater to the knees, a raggedy figure ran, dancing and gyrating to a paean of reborn hope.
'It's Juard!' Darru gasped. He glanced nervously back at the Wayfinder, ashamed for his unkind threats. Tebald at his side held his breath in wordless shock, and Ciondo just buried his face in his hands and let the tears spill through his fingers.
It was Sabin who moved to free sheet lines when the Wayfinder threw up the helm. While Tebald and Darru roused belatedly to set the anchor, the girl unlashed an empty bait barrel. She stood it on end by the sternpost, climbed up, and as the Wayfinder bent his head to receive her touch, she picked out the knots of his blindfold. The cloth fell away. Hair bleached like bone tumbled free in the breeze, and she confronted a face set level with hers that had been battered into pallor by exhaustion. The eyes no longer burned, but seemed wide and drugged as a dreamer's. She could almost plumb their depths, and sense the echoes of the spirits whose guidance had led the sloop without charts.
'You could hear them yourself, were you taught,' the Wayfinder murmured in his grainy bass. Yet before those eyes could brighten and tempt her irrevocably to sacrifice the reality she understood, she retreated to a braced stance behind the barrel.
'The moment Juard can sail with his father, I'll be sent back home. Whether or not there are horses in the sea, I shan't be getting lost behind a loom.' Her bare feet made no sound as she whirled and bounded off to help Ciondo, who was struggling in feverish eagerness to launch the tender by himself.
* * *
The sloop was met on her return by men with streaming torches. Juard's reappearance from the lost brought cries of joy and disbelief. Kala was fetched from her bed for a tearful reunion with the son miraculously restored to her. For Juard was alive; starved thin, his hair matted in tangles so thick they could only be shorn, and his skin marred everywhere with festering scratches that needed immediate care. The greedy sea had been forced to give back its plunder, and the news swept like fire through the village.
A crowd gathered. Children in nightshirts ga
mboled on the fringes, while their parents jabbered in amazement. The Wayfinder whose feat had engineered the commotion stood aloof, his weight braced against the stempost of a dry dory as if he needed help to stand up. From farther back in the shadows, outside the ring of torchlight, Sabin watched him. She listened, as he did, to the noise and the happiness, and she alone saw him shiver and stiffen and suddenly stride into the press with his light eyes hardened to purpose.
He set a hand marked as Juard's on Ciondo's arm, and said, 'No, I forbid this,' to the fisherman who had been boasting the loudest. 'You will not be repeating this tale to any traders, nor be offering my service to outsiders. This is my bargain for Juard's life.'
Silence fell with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Surf and the snap of flame remained, and a ring of stupefied faces unfamiliarly edged with hostility. 'Which of us made any such bargain?' shouted someone from the sidelines.
The Wayfinder's peaked brows rose. 'Ciondo is my witness, and here is my warning. For yourselves, you may ask of me as you will. The guiding and ward of your fleet I shall do as I can; but let none beyond this village ever know that I am in'am shealdi. Say nothing, or sorrow will come of it.'
Finished speaking, or perhaps too weary to stay standing, the Wayfinder strode out of the pack. He left all the village muttering and wondering as he moved in slow steps toward the path. On the chill sands outside the torchlight, Sabin watched him vanish in the darkness under the pines. She did not follow; nor did she feel moved to join the villagers. The waking dream had touched her. Curiosity no longer drove her to discuss the stranger Kala sheltered.
'Was he a felon, to want such secrecy?' one goodwife muttered from the sidelines.
Ciondo replied in indignation, 'Does it matter?' Then good sense prevailed over argument, and Kala scolded the gawkers roundly for keeping poor Juard from his bed.
* * *
A month passed, and seven days. Juard recovered his health and returned to fishing on the sloop. The Wayfinder who had brought his recovery took a longer time to mend. Kala pressed food and comforts on him constantly, until he complained of her coddling. Unlike anybody else, she listened, and left him alone. His white hair began to grow out its natural color, a golden, honey-brown, until Sabin sitting in her chair seat on the cliffside could no longer pick him out from the villagers who manned the sloops. She saw him seldom, and spoke with him not at all. Winding the skeins of wool and stringing the looms in her father's craft shop in furious concentration, she avoided walking the beach. Since the night she forgot her jacket, she could not bear to watch the combers. She heard them, felt them, even indoors with her ears filled with the clack of shuttle and loom - the thunder of what might be hooves, and the tumble of white, upflung spray that pounded the beaches in procession. She swept cut threads from the floor, and helped her mother bake, and each night begged her sleep to show her silence.
It did not. She misplaced socks and tools, and once, let the fire burn out. The waking world came to seem as a dream, and herself, strangely separate, adrift. She was scolded more often for stargazing, and seemed more than ever to care less.
The Wayfinder laughed in the tavern at night, accepted, but with a reverence that marked him apart. Two boats he saved from ruin when storms caused shoaling off the reefs. Another smack was recovered with a damaged compass after squall winds blew it astray. No one knowingly broke the Wayfinder's faith, but his presence loomed too large to shelter. Sabin understood this, her hands fallen idle over wool she was meant to be spinning. She twisted the red-dyed fibers aimlessly, knowing: there were traders who had heard of Juard's loss, and who saw him back among the men. They asked questions. Driven by balked curiosity, they pressured and cajoled, and won themselves no satisfaction.
The silence itself caused talk.
Summer passed. The winds shifted and blew in cold from the northeast, and the fleet changed quarter to follow the shoals of fish. The looms in the weaver's shop worked overtime to meet the demand for new blankets. Sabin crawled into bed each evening too tired to blow out the lamp; and so it chanced that she was awakened in the depths of night by the blood-dim glow of a spent wick. This time no forgotten jacket needed recovery from shore. The restlessness that stirred her refused to be denied.
She arose, dressed in haste, and let herself out of the back door. Lights still burned in the tavern, and a few drunken voices inside argued over ways to cure sharkskin. Sabin slipped past, down the lane toward her uncle's cottage. Once there she did not knock; every window was dark. Instead she went on down the cliff path. Her shins brushed the stalks of purple flowers, dried now, and rattling with seedheads in the change of season. Wind snatched her clothing and snapped at the ends of her hair. A wild night, yet again, the kind that was wont to bring wrecks. She completed the last, familiar steps to the chair seat, dreading what she might find.
The horizon was clearly delineated under a waning half moon. Clouds scudded past like dirty streamers, muddling the swells pewter and gray, and against them, like penstrokes in charcoal, an advancing forest of black masts. Where peaceful craft would have plied sails, this fleet cleaved against the wind, lashing up coils of foam beneath the driving stroke of banked oars.
War galleys, Sabin identified, though the Karbaschi to her were just talk. The Wayfinder's secret was loose in the world, and his overlords had returned now to claim him. Poised to run and rouse the town, Sabin found she could not move. Her flesh became riveted by a cry that had no sound, but ripped between the fabric of the air itself to echo and ring through her inner mind.
The vibration negated her scream of terrified surprise, and filled her unasked with its essence: that of rage and sorrow and mystery, and a wounding edge of betrayal.
Dizzied almost to sickness, she clawed at the rocks for a handhold to ward off a tumbling fall. The summons faded but did not leave silence. The grind of the sea overwhelmed her ears with a mauling crescendo of sound. Cowering down in the cleft of the chair seat, Sabin saw the sea roll back. It sucked in white arrows of current off the tide flats until slate, shingle and reef were laid bare. Fish flapped in confused crescents across settled streamers of weed, and the scuttled, half-rotted hull of a schooner turned turtle with a smack in the mud. Fishing boats settled on their anchor chains, and townside, the bell in the harbormaster's house began steadily tolling alarm.
Faintly, from the cottage behind, Sabin heard her uncle's bellow of inquiry as the clangor aroused him from bed.
Juard, also, would be tossing off blankets, and stumbling out with the rest.
Sabin did not move. She, who had been born in a village of seafarers, and should have been, would have been, one of them, could only stare with her joints locked immobile. She alone did not flee in blind concern toward the beach path to stave off the threat to their boats.
Had she gone, it would not have mattered; the chair seat offered an untrammeled view as the horses thundered in from the sea.
They came on in a vast, white herd, manes tossing, and forehooves carving up arcs of flying spray. The water swirled under their bellies and legs, and rushed in black torrents behind uncountable upflung tails. Wave after wave, they surged in, plowing up weeds and fish and muddy gouts of seabottom, and milling the shells of galleys and sloops into shreds and splinters as they passed. Spars of fishing smacks entangled with snapped off oars and the dragon-horned timbers of Karbaschi shipwrights; the cries of warriors and oarsmen entangled in the flood mingled with shouts from the villagers who saw their fleet and that of the raiders become smashed to kindling at a stroke. The horses swept on in a boil of foam that boomed like a god-wielded hammer against the shore. Spindrift sluiced across the cliffs. Ancient pines shivered and cracked at the blow, and boulders broke off and tumbled.
Drenched to her heels by cold water, Sabin cowered down, weeping for the beauty of a thousand salt-white steeds that reared up and struck at the windy sky. And with that release came understanding, at last, of what all along had been wrong: her heart held no sorrow for the terrible,
irreversible destruction that rendered her whole village destitute.
Lights flickered through the pines at her back, as angry men lit torches. Shouts and curses carried on the wind, and the tolling bell fell silent, leaving the seethe of the seas a scouring roar across the reef. Sabin pressed her knuckles to her face. The Wayfinder was going to be blamed. This ruin was his doing, every man knew, and when they found him, they would tear him to pieces.
Pressed into her cranny by a weight of remorse she could not shed, Sabin saw the wild horses swirl like a vortex and turn. Back they plunged into the sea that had spawned them, leaving churned sand and burst wood and snarled bits of rope. Amid the roil of foam, a lone swell arose and broke; one mare spun away and parted from her companions.
Sabin saw her stop with lifted head, as if she listened to something far away. She tossed her mane, shedding spray, then raised up one forehoof and stepped, not into water, but most irrevocably, out onto wrack-strewn sand.
Sabin cried out at that moment, as if some force of nature wrenched her, spirit from flesh. Reflex overturned thought, and she was up and running inland at a pace that left her breathless. Voices called out to her as she reached the lane, people she knew, but she had no answer. The torchlight in the market did not slow her, nor the press of enraged men who gathered to seek their revenge. Scraps of conversation touched her ears and glanced away without impression - the in'am shealdi and his vicious, unfair bargain - Juard's life, in exchange for the livelihood of all the village. Boats had been broken and sunk. Folk would starve. The Wayfinder would be made to pay, made to burn; they would pack him off in chains to rot in the dungeons of the King's bailiff. A hangman was too good for him, someone yelled, his words torn through with the sounds of a woman's crying.
