* * *
3
FROM THE SEA, Gil City looked nothing like the cesspit of danger, vice and oppression my mother had described, but it was no Pearl of the World either. To Kat and me, resting our elbows on the Fifth's bowrail as Chasco manoeuvred towards the gap in the breakwater, it looked like a prettyish little port city with a scenic castle, a promising number of masts inside the harbour and a few more treetops than most visible along the waterfront. If anything jarred, it was the castle itself, which was almost outrageously scenic, looming over the modest town like a marble telamon in a kitchen garden.
"What's happened here?" Our mother joined us at the rail. "Except for the Gilgard, I'd hardly believe it was the same place."
"Better than you expected?" Kat asked.
Calla nodded slowly. "Much cleaner, that's for sure. The walls the Sherank built are gone, but that happened before your father left. And I don't remember the breakwater coming out this far, or being so high and strong, and I certainly don't remember those watchtowers, though of course I never saw the harbour from the outside before—oh gods . . ."
Chasco was now threading the gap. We were passing between the watchtowers, squat blackstone structures hulking over the mouth of the breakwater, aware that we were being studied intently from both flanks. In another moment we knew the real reason why everything looked new and strange to Calla—another breakwater, which must have been the one she remembered, was still several hundred yards ahead of us, marking the line of an inner harbour. My mother's startled reaction was to a double row of enormous black windcatchers just coming into view behind the towers, moored four or five to a side in the outer harbour basin.
"Those ships look familiar," said Kat.
I agreed. "You're thinking of the naval windcatchers we saw in the Forn Channel."
"The ones," my mother said drily, "that persuaded us it was unwise to go to Sathelforn."
We were already among them, watching their imposing prows slide past us as we moved down the narrow channel of open water leading to the mouth of the inner harbour. Somebody somewhere was making a fortune in spearchuckers and bouldershots. Somebody else was making a fortune in banners. The latter were black or a deep blue-black in the bright sunshine, almost square, with some indecipherable logo worked on them in pale green and gold. Green and gold on their own would have been the royal Gillish colours; on a dark field they meant nothing to me, though I had been taught all the colours of the known world. On instinct, I disliked and mistrusted that flag.
Emerging from between the last two warships on the left, a little galley cut towards us with seven or eight men visible in the prow, all dressed in uniforms of dun-coloured tunics and britches. The craft looked tiny beside the great windcatchers, but as it came closer we saw it was not much smaller than the Fifth, though lower built and only single-masted, with half a dozen oars on each side. A figure in the bow was hailing us. He waved us, not towards the jetties and anchorages of the inner harbour, but towards a blackstone moorage platform built into the inner edge of the new breakwater about three hundred yards to starboard. His request was more of an order, given the number of spears, swords and bows we could see among his companions.
"The Sherank used to inspect all ships that came into the harbour," said my mother. Something in the flatness of her voice made me uneasy.
Shree came out of the cabin to help with the sails as we furled all but one and changed course under the vigilant eyes on the little galley. As we worked, he told us the disturbing news that Tigrallef was awake and in a "strange mood"—a euphemistic understatement that we understood very well. It was with increased foreboding that we watched the moorage platform approach. Not for the first time, I reflected how much easier life would be if Tigrallef could be sedated or knocked gently on the head or reliably locked in a closet when the occasion demanded it. I glanced at Katlefiya and saw she was very pale.
There were more spearchuckers set up on the moorage platform, together with the crews to work them. Another little black galley nosed out of its nest of warships to glide along beside us, as the first trailed us watchfully at a distance of a few lengths. Three men in green tunics were waiting by the bollards on the moorage platform, armed only with pens and writing boards instead of weapons with sharp glittering points, which made them the friendliest sight around. I felt a little better when I saw them—the writing kits made it seem less like we were being taken prisoner, more like we had a lengthy but not physically threatening bureaucratic procedure in store for us.
Still, I did not like it. We had been expecting some kind of formality when we entered the harbour—most ports had a harbour master, quite a few had customs officials as well, and we were used to dealing with them—but we had not anticipated anything like this. In the Tatakil port, the formalities consisted of two old men ambling along the grimy wharf to meet the smallboat when Chasco and Shree first put in, to accept a reasonable bribe and ask a few gossipy questions. Other ports, Amballa for example, had been a little more businesslike; in a few the bribes or landing taxes demanded had been exorbitant, and in a few others an outrageous duty had been levied on our visible cargo, which was one reason why the Fourth and Fifth had been built with false bottoms and several hidden holds. The austere efficiency in the harbour of Gil City, however, the unsmiling and largely wordless show of force, were of a scale and quality we had never encountered before.
Between this and the surging attack of Tigrallef's Pain, our sense of homecoming was not what it had been in the early morning. With serious misgivings, we threw the lines to the moorage crew and suffered ourselves to be warped in. The tension increased when we saw that a guard of six armed troopers was waiting to accompany the three scribes on board.
"Use Storyline Two," my mother whispered to Shree.
Shree nodded. Storyline One was the carefully edited truth. Under other circumstances we might have been tempted to use it, but these circumstances warranted something more convincing than the truth.
Storyline Two was a poignant saga about two Gillish brothers, Selki (Shree) and Masli (Chasco), torn from their starving elderly parents in one of the infamous Sherkin labour levies and shipped off to be worked to death in the copper mines of Calloon about half a year before the liberation. It was plausible. Shree said such things had happened frequently, though most levy-loads were taken directly to Iklankish. When freed by the wrack of Sher, the two brothers had gone into the copper business in Calloon and built up a good trade and a modest fortune. Selki married Shanna (Calla), a Gillish girl liberated from the shintashkr of a garrison in Tata, and together they produced several fine children who had never known want, hunger or the heel of oppression.
Now the three Gilborns were fulfilling a vow to themselves, to return to their beloved homeland with their exile-born Gillish children, to walk once more the streets sanctified by the blood of their forefathers, the streets of the Pearl of the World. And, incidentally, to seek a good Gillish price for the Calloonic copper vessels and traditional Tatakil ornaments they had brought with them in the cargo holds. That homely commercial detail was intended to add a gloss of authenticity to Storyline Two.
The moment the officials came on board, it seemed that our fears had been unnecessary. The demeanour of both scribes and troopers was courteous, professional, impersonal; Shree, whom they instinctively but not quite accurately identified as the Fifth's master, was greeted with a welcoming sweep of the hand that was straight out of the old gestural system. Another curious revival occurred when I took my first close look at the device on the scribes' green tunics, identical to that on the flags—two golden glyphs entwined on a grass-green circle, bordered with a thin black band. With an unpleasant lurch of the heart, I recognized one glyph as the name of the Lady in Gil in hieratic Old High Gillish, which had not been used for over five hundred years except in the most secret and sacred of the Flamens' records. The other glyph was unfamiliar. I saw Shree frown at the logo several times as if it reminded him of something he co
uld not quite remember.
We were soon too busy to think about it. One of the officials, in a respectful but no-nonsense fashion, began by interviewing Shree/Selki about our past, our plans, our cargo, our intentions in Gil, and a large number of other pertinent or impertinent questions. A second inspected the cargo of copper and wooden ornaments in the holds, guided by Chasco/Masli and myself. The third, who was obviously in charge, a gaunt man with thin-pressed lips and cold eyes, stood by the foremast and watched and listened to everything.
Kat sat quietly on a bench in front of the forecabin door; Calla joined her after slipping into the forecabin and out of it again, signalling that all was well and Tigrallef was sleeping again. This was a relief—with luck he would stay asleep until the danger was over, and the inspection would both begin and end with the contents of the hold.
So it turned out for the first while. My poor father slept on. The customs scribe, who was not unfriendly, asked routine questions and scribbled many notes, doing an expert job of surveying the visible cargo but showing no great interest in sounding for secret holds. He loosened up far enough to exchange small talk with Chasco about the weather as we climbed back up the aft companionway, and even recommended a merchant in Coppermonger Yard—no doubt one of his relatives—for our load of copper. It was obvious this inspection was nothing special in his eyes. Chasco and I began to relax.
On deck, we found the same workaday air among the rest of the boarding party. Shree was getting hoarse from answering questions. Chasco was immediately drawn aside to fill out a sheaf of documents under the customs scribe's direction, and to pay a fee which was significantly smaller than many bribes we had cheerfully paid in other ports. I lounged unimpeded by the rail and watched two other small windcatchers being escorted from the channel towards the moorage platform, which further reassured me. We had not been singled out, as I feared at first—it looked like all non-Gillish ships coming through the breakwater were inspected in this way.
More than an hour had passed since we were boarded, and the afternoon was becoming hotter and we were becoming drowsy. All vestiges of threat had faded; what was left was boredom, lassitude, and some slight irritation at the ponderousness of the Gillish bureaucracy. A seaward breeze wafted past, laden with the smell of a good marketplace—incense, spices, stall-cooked food, woodsmoke—and still the damned pen-pushers carried on, though there were signs they were running out of procedures. The customs scribe was writing out the fourth of four copies of Chasco's receipt; the scribe interviewing Shree, having asked at least fifty questions, had only a few sheets left to go. I stifled a yawn.
"You declared a complement of six," the scribe said to Shree, his pen poised over the writing board, "your wife and brother and three more. You will identify the others for me."
Shree nodded. "They are all my offspring, my sons Vero and Tilgo and my daughter Katla," he said promptly, remembering to omit the Scions' tags. "Vero, my elder son, is the one by the rail; my daughter Katla is over there on the bench; and my second son, Tilgo, is in the forecabin."
The scribe peered serially across the writing board at me, at Katla, and finally at Shree. "I need to inspect them all. You must show me your second son," he consulted his writing board, "the one called Tilgo."
"If you must see him, you must," said Shree, "though I'd rather not waken him."
"He's sleeping? At this time of day?"
Shree also suppressed a yawn. "Can you blame him? I'd forgotten how hot these Gillish summers can be. But the truth is, he's not feeling well."
This was a mistake on Shree's part, a transgression of one of the first rules he ever taught me: never volunteer information. It was also the first turning point. Every man in the boarding party stiffened. The scribe's chin snapped up; he stared hard-eyed at Shree for a few seconds and twisted in his tracks to look at his chief. Ominously, the chief scribe cleared his throat.
"Did you say he's not well?"
"It's nothing," Shree answered firmly.
The chief scribe, moving a couple of paces forwards, came very close to standing on Shree's feet. "Nothing?" he repeated. "Nothing? What does nothing mean? Is your son ill or not?" His voice retained a veneer of courtesy that I found more worrying than bluster.
Shree was quick to pick up this sudden shift in the wind. With a casual air, he stepped back from the chief scribe and reached down to adjust his broad belt—inside it was a fighting chain forged in Gafrin-Gammanthan, like the one in my own belt and Katla's, with flat razor-edged links on the business end and a flat leather handgrip on the other.
"He's been seasick, poor lad," he said. "He's not used to travelling by ship." This of a man who had spent the last twenty years aboard ship, had circumnavigated the known and unknown worlds, and had never once in my memory thrown up, courtesy of the Pain; but it was a good lie, because seasickness was not a disease that could be passed from person to person. I was beginning to understand that the boarding party's concern was most likely a legacy of the Last Dance.
"We'll need to see him before I can issue an Affidavit of Clearance," the chief scribe said in the same deadly tone. "You must know of the Most Revered One's fiat, that no sickness shall be allowed to invade Gil City from the sea. I warn you, I am empowered to take stern measures to prevent the entry of any kind of contagion."
"I understand," Shree said quickly, "but it's nothing like that—he's been seasick, also he took the late watch last night and he sleeps through to suppertime when he's taken the late watch . . ."
Tigrallef, fairly typically, chose this moment to throw open the cabin door. Blinking and smiling, he emerged on to the deck and was past Kat and Calla's bench before they could move to intercept him. He was not visibly glowing, fortunately, but his cheeks were flushed and his eyes were glittering with a sort of mad amiability. His appearance on deck brought about the second and more dramatic turning point.
Before he'd gone three steps from the door, one of the underscribes and two of the troopers gasped and fell to their knees; the other underscribe followed a moment later, and the remainder looked as though they were thinking about it—all but the chief scribe, and even he looked shaken at first. Then he stepped back a pace and stared searchingly at my father. Ignoring them all, Tigrallef drifted across the deck taking deep lungfuls of the humid Gillish air.
By this point, three broad belts had already been discreetly loosened; Chasco owned a Gafrin-Gammanthan fighting chain but found the throwing disks more effective, and my mother preferred the little knives in the calf-sheaths of her britches. Then there was the razor-edged shark tooth on a thong around my neck—relic of a Bloody Spirit of the Sea who made the mistake of trying to eat my father—with which I once removed most of some pirate's throat when we were attacked near Amballa. I toyed with it idly, ready to snap the thong.
The chief scribe, not a happy man, looked away from Tigrallef long enough to scowl at his subordinates and the troopers, one of whom was now grovelling on the deck. "Get up, thickheads," he said, "any more of that and you'll find yourselves on the Mosslines. And not as guards, either." As Tigrallef floated past him, the scribe closed his fingers around my father's arm. My father stopped and surveyed him with a pleasant smile. The scribe did not smile back. "You, lad," he said, moving his hand up until he could dig his fingers into my father's shoulder, "you're this Tilgo who's been seasick, is that correct?"
We all stopped breathing, but after my father had spent a rapt moment examining the chief scribe's hand on his shoulder, he said, "Tilgo? Yes, I suppose I must be." His eyes dropped to the device on the scribe's tunic, and his smile became broader and more delighted.
By this time the rest of the boarding party had struggled back to their feet—presumably out of fear of fetching up on the Mosslines, whatever they were. None of them had reached for his weapons, and they all looked more thunderstruck than hostile, but trouble still seemed much too possible. Kat and my mother were poised to throw open the lid of the bench they had been sitting on, which is wher
e we kept an emergency cache of swords and knives. Chasco was hovering beside the slot in the midmast that held another supply of throwing disks. On the underside of the rail not far from where I stood was the switch that would release the anti-boarding nets and buy us a bit of time, though I doubted it could buy us enough. We were seriously trapped: the spearchuckers and their crews were primed on the moorage platform and four little armed galleys were now in sight, not to mention the black fleet and the watchtowers standing between us and escape. I saw a vein swelling in Shree's neck, a reliable indicator that he was preparing to give a familiar signal. It was my father, though, and not the chief scribe, whom Shree was watching with such grim and fearful intensity.
But wait, I said to myself. Perhaps we were still seeing a threat where none existed. The worst those tinpot Gillish officials had done to us to that point was wave us over and document us half to death. On that basis, it seemed the most likely procedure for a suspected health hazard would involve a thick sheaf of forms filled out in quadruplicate. But why, then, the armed guardparty? Why the primed spearchuckers? Why the wolf pack of little galleys and the mention of "stern measures"?
Tigrallef was gazing at the gold-stitched glyph of the Lady on the chief scribe's tunic, cheerfully blind to the man's searing close-range scrutiny. The others of the boarding party were standing still as wooden posts, barring a few nervous tics when Tigrallef happened to glance around at them. As the silence lengthened, I shifted along the rail and positioned my hand near the switch. Another armed galley hove into view.
"Well, he looks healthy enough to me," the chief scribe said abruptly, releasing my father's shoulder. I almost pulled the switch anyway, out of plain shock. One of the underscribes dropped his writing board. My father beamed. Oddly, there was no lessening of tension on the deck of the Fifth, the troopers were still pop-eyed, we were twitching with the need to keep Tigrallef calm in case the dangerous glaze on his face turned into something else, and we heartily wished our guests would leave. I felt like the host on the final day of one of those two-month sacramental picnics the Plaviset love so much.
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 5
