"Ship's master," the scribe continued to Shree, becoming much brisker, "I'll be able to issue you with the Affidavit of Clearance after all, but there will be a delay. It should not take long."
Smoothly, Shree hooked a ringer in my father's belt and tugged him away from the scribe. "How long?"
"Not," the scribe repeated, "very long. Your ship will remain here until the documents are ready. If the delay drags on, I shall have fresh water sent to you. Welcome to Gil."
Later, we all agreed that last remark was a nasty joke. We did not feel welcome, or anything resembling it. A cloud of uneasiness hung over the Fifth long after the scribes had moved on to their next victims, much of it because of the way the entire boarding party watched Tigrallef from the corners of their eyes for as long as they physically could. I got one or two curious looks as well, but characterized more by puzzlement than awe, as if they'd seen me somewhere before and were trying very hard to think of my name. The last trooper to leave our deck began to whisper something in my father's ear, until a peremptory shout from the chief scribe sent him hurrying over the side. Tigrallef stared dreamily after him.
"What did he say to you?" Calla asked.
Tigrallef focused his disconcerting smile on a point behind her shoulder. "He called me lord. Laughable, really." He commenced laughing, in a way that was wild and innocent, like a simple shepherd in a field of daisies, and also wild and fiendish, like an axe-wielding berserker in a field of simple shepherds.
Kat turned on her heel and climbed to her usual refuge on the foremast.
Even without the garniture of later events, this "lord" business was dismaying. Tigrallef had been taken for a madman many times before, not without good reason, but he had never been taken for a lord. Greatly disturbed, Calla steered him back to the forecabin, leaving the rest of us to keep an anxious watch over the moorage platform.
The second distressing factor was the treatment we saw being meted out to the other four ships that were escorted to the customs moorage that afternoon. In essence, nothing happened to them, nothing at all. Not one of them was held for more than an hour, not one had to wait for clearance documents. The last of the four, a medium-sized trawler, was off and headed for the inner harbour less than forty minutes after it first moored. That made us feel unpleasantly distinguished.
The third distressing occurrence happened well after dark, when Shree had retired to record the day's events, Chasco and I were dividing up the night's watch, and Kat finally climbed down from the foremast. I had saved some supper for her, which she accepted with a mumble of thanks. She stood beside Chasco at the rail as she ate, overlooking the moorage platform, and after a few bites she said, "He's back."
I looked down. No scribes were visible, just troopers of various ranks standing in alert formation around their spearchuckers. They appeared ready to repel a full-scale assault, though nothing was moving in the mirror-calm outer harbour except three of the little wolf-boats, and the Fifth was the only ship at the moorage. "Who's back?" I asked.
Kat took another bite and motioned with her head towards the corner of the blackstone customs shed that ran along the rear edge of the moorage, where it connected with the breakwater. A youth in a plain dark tunic was standing there, barely visible until he moved a little and was sidelighted by a lamp on a nearby pole, apparently talking to someone out of sight around the side of the building. As we watched, the youth held out his hand and received something that might have been a bundle or might have been a message packet, then turned and ran shorewards along the walkway built just below the crest of the breakwater. We lost sight of him in moments, but I glimpsed a tall thin figure poking cautiously around the corner of the customs shed and drawing back as soon as my face turned towards it. Brief as the glimpse was, I recognized him as the chief scribe from the afternoon boarding party.
Kat swallowed. Before she could fill her mouth again, I intercepted the hand holding the bread and cheese. "Who's back?" I repeated.
She glanced at the customs shed. "Never mind, he's gone again."
"Who? Who?"
"I told you, fishbrained brother. The messenger who just left. That scribe sent him off with a message packet hours ago, about ten minutes after I went aloft, and he only got back a few minutes ago, and now he's gone again. Let me eat."
"Did it never occur to you—" I began, but Chasco nudged my side pointedly and quite painfully and shook his head, so I broke off and left the child to her bread and cheese. A few minutes later she bade us both good night and wandered aft towards the tiny cubbyhole we called her cabin. Chasco waited until she was out of earshot, then said in a low voice, "Don't trouble her. There's no good reason to think those messages had anything to do with us."
"She should still have told us earlier. And what else could they have been about?"
"Any number of things," Chasco murmured tranquilly. "Scores of ships pass through the customs post every week, and wainloads of provender have to be arranged for the troopers quartered in the outer harbour, and there would be orders and reports to exchange with the harbour master, and—"
"But what if the message did concern us?" I broke in. "Suppose these damned Gillish bureaucrats are the first to see my father for what he is?"
He pondered my question while we watched the troopers just below us. A maintenance crew had arrived and was lovingly dripping grease into the mechanism of the spearchucker. At last Chasco said, "They were seeing something in him, but I don't think it was the Pain. Cheer up, Vero. My feeling is that Tig was right to bring us here."
"But why?"
"I couldn't say why. Who knows? I'm going to sleep now. Don't forget to wake me for the second watch."
Alone, I hung over the bowrail and traded occasional cold glances with the spearchucker crews, but mostly I watched the lamps of Gil City wink out in ones and twos, until the illuminated tracery of windows that marked the castle seemed suspended over darkness, a lighted ship sailing on a calm unreflective sea. Even by night, Gil City was too picturesque to be taken seriously.
But what struck me as odd was this: at no port larger than a small village had I ever encountered a waterfront as dead as this one. Not a single shout reached my ears from across the harbour, no screams, no tavern ruckus, not one burst of music through a brothel door as some hapless drunken patron was thrown out on his ear; just a bell that tolled out the watches of the night, and the gentle sucking of the wavelets around the Fifth's hull when the light breeze blew across the water. It was so disquietingly quiet that I could not face going to my pallet in the aftercabin when I woke Chasco for his watch. I just hung the heavy Gafrin-Gammanthan belt over the wheel and rolled up in a blanket by the foot of my father's special deckchair, and slid into an uncomfortable sleep.
I was wakened at dawn by the arrival of another trawler at the moorage platform. Rolling over, stiff and sore, I saw Chasco standing near the bow where I had stood the night before, taking his turn at enjoying the spectacle of the Gilgard. Surprisingly, Tigrallef was beside him. Together they were watching the early sun flame on the upper pinnacles of the mountain, which was floating on the white pillow of mist that still lay over the city and the inner harbour. In the attenuating light, the great plug of solid rock looked as frail as a blown-glass bubble. The three palaces terraced up to its heights were more unearthly than ever, palaces poised on a cloud, far too fine to be the work of human hands.
My father beckoned me over with an enchanting smile. He was fully himself for the moment. "Look at that, Vero! What did I tell you? Beautiful!"
"Beautiful," I agreed, not very happily. Not only was I still half asleep, but I could not forget the Fifth was under detention in a strange and unwelcoming port. I caught myself counting and recounting the spearchucker crews, coming to the conclusion that the moorage was almost twice as well manned as it had been the day before.
"And to think," Tigrallef went on, "that in all the world, Gilgard Castle is the only monument to the Harashil that hasn't been burned or drowned
into a sad state of ruin. There must be some significance to that, if only . . ."
"What does a trawler need with that many crew?" Chasco interrupted, speaking to himself, but out loud. "I sailed on one like it before the liberation—it needed no more than seven or eight of us."
The newly arrived trawler's stern was only a few spans from our bow, with its high afterdeck not far below our feet. It did seem to be over-supplied with crew, many more than ten or even twenty, not counting those who may have been on the main deck but occluded by the stern. Chasco nudged my arm. Three of the little black galleys were hovering just off our port side, effectively blocking us in. A fourth was just being warped in at the far end of the moorage platform, well beyond the trawler. I began to get a very bad feeling.
"Chasco, Vero, you mustn't resist."
I could not make sense of that for a moment; then I turned angrily on my father. "They're about to spring a trap, aren't they?"
He was back to admiring the Gilgard. "Oh, it was sprung some time ago. But when they come aboard, which will be any minute now, you mustn't resist. Chasco, no, don't sound the alarm. Let the others sleep in comfort while they have the chance. It'll make no difference in the end."
Chasco stopped with his hand already on the rope of the alarm, looked steadily at Tigrallef for only a few seconds, dropped his hand without ringing the bell, and stepped away towards the rail. His face was pale but without expression. I could not credit his ready compliance, especially as I could see a large party of troopers in dun-coloured tunics moving along the moorage platform towards the Fifth.
"Raksh take you both," I hissed, pushing past Chasco towards the wheel, where my belt was hanging. He leapt after me and grabbed my arms from behind.
"Your father has told us not to resist," he said firmly. "We must do as he says."
I easily wrenched free. "Chasco, he's affected by the Pain. He doesn't know what he's saying."
"No I'm not," said Tigrallef behind me, "and yes I do."
I turned on him again. "We may be in a trap, Father, but why should we surrender without even a token struggle? Unless," I added cruelly, "you're planning on handling this in your own way, like you did in Itsant."
Chasco glared a warning and reproof at me, but Tigrallef smiled sunnily. "Action for action's sake—you take after your mother, Vero, fortunately. But sometimes the best action is no action at all."
I hesitated. It was depressingly clear that resistance could get us killed, and could not possibly get us free. Perhaps my father was just being sensible. He did that sometimes. Already we could hear the scratch of a gangplank against the starboard side, a voice giving terse orders in tones low enough to hide the words. A breath later, two helmets poked above the scuppers side by side.
"Verolef, remember what I said. I think this is going to be very interesting."
Interesting. He could not have chosen a more inflammatory word. Tigrallef defined interesting in the way the rest of us defined hideously dangerous or impossibly bizarre. My hesitation ended. I lunged for the weapons cache in the midmast, but found my father blocking me with his hand raised in a calm-down gesture and a new and strange kind of brightness, scintillant rather than glowing, in the pupils of his eyes. It called to my mind the flickering of the fires of Itsant, the rain of bright brands arcing down to meet their reflections in warm black water as the tops of the ancient towers exploded. Uncertainly, I backed away. Then a more familiar cast overtook his features, and I knew his respite from the Pain was over.
"Don't resist them," he repeated thickly. "Let them take us." He swayed on his feet.
Chasco and I grabbed an arm each and hauled him a safe distance away from the rail. Movement caught the corner of my eye: the chief scribe was on deck and moving towards us with six troopers in a neat double rank behind him. They were not the guards who had come on board the day before—their tunics were black instead of dun, and showed no insignum except a narrow green band high on each forearm. Tigrallef was the lodestone of all their eyes.
"The harbour master's compliments and regrets," the scribe said smoothly, "but we need to clarify a few minor matters before your ship can be allowed to proceed."
He was only a few steps away. I neither heard nor saw him give a signal, but suddenly the troopers had bows in their hands, and arrows the size of small harpoons were aimed at Chasco and me. Nothing was aimed at Tigrallef.
"Get away, Tig," Chasco said in the language of Gafrin-Gammanthan. "Go over the side if you must, but get out of here."
"Go, Father," I urged him in the same language. I called him "Father" only when I was annoyed with him, or when I was trying to impress on him the importance of something, usually his own safety.
He gave us a reproachful look, marred by the peculiar flying sparks deep in his pupils. "Don't be rude to our hosts," he said. "You must speak to me in Gillish, or they'll think you're telling me to run away."
"No need for that," said the scribe soothingly, "you're in no danger, any of you, if you do as you're told." He nodded to one of the troopers, who stepped past him and headed straight for Tigrallef. In his hand was a small scarlet sack of some fine material. While Chasco and I stood paralysed by the arrows at our throats, the trooper pulled this sack over my father's head, in a manner I can only describe as reverent, and secured it by means of a drawstring at the neck.
I bellowed at the indignity—and also at the chilling reminder of Itsant, where such masks, eyeless and scarlet, along with heavy stone fetters for the hands and feet, constituted the entire ritual attire of human offerings to the Bloody Spirits of the Sea. I half expected the troopers to pick my father up and throw him overboard. The arrows suddenly didn't matter.
"Leave him alone!" I pulled the dagger from my belt and leapt for the scribe's throat; a half-moment later I was flat on the deckboards, and it was Chasco who had put me there. He kept his knee on my chest for a few seconds—"Sorry, Vero, but Tig told us not to resist"—before climbing off and helping me to my feet.
I shot him a look of pure disgust. He shook his head sadly in something like apology as rough hands yanked my arms behind me and wrapped enough rope around my crossed wrists to have raised a highsail on a tall ship. Tigrallef, however, having obligingly turned around and clasped his hands behind his back, was left unsecured.
"Just these two," the scribe said. "Hurry, they're waiting for us ashore. Mollo knows what to do with the others."
As our small party swept towards the gangplank, a more powerful reverse current began to sweep up it, a spring tide of troopers in dun-coloured uniforms, armed and businesslike. Turning my head, I could see another such tide leaping the short distance from the moored trawler to the bow of the Fifth. There was no shouting. The only sound was the thudding of their boots. A last glance, snatched as I was shoved on to the gangplank, showed a silent press of troopers around the spot where Chasco had been standing, and others moving purposefully towards the cabins where the rest were asleep. When I tried to cry out a last-minute alarm, somebody's mailed hand shoved a leather mouth-stopper between my teeth.
The fact that I was furious can be taken for granted; and it was a comprehensive fury, encompassing not only our captors, the gods, the Pain and the entire population of that damnable island, but also Chasco and especially Tigrallef. Mixed in with the anger was a strong element of mystification: as I stumbled along the smooth stone pavement surrounded by guards, I became wildly obsessed with how little sense this trap made. Why? Why? Why bring up fifty or sixty men to capture six persons, three of them sleeping, one of them a girl hardly out of childhood—at that reminder of Kat, fear hit me for the first time. I was still enraged with Chasco, but now there was fear for him as well, and for my mother and for Shree; but the fear I felt for my sister was like a sharp knife in the heart. In the peculiar silence that now hung over the moorage, I found myself listening for her screams. The fact that none came was no great comfort, giving rise to visions of the poor child lying in her bed with a cut throat, or—or worse.
The thought of "worse" made me frantic, to the point where my guardparty saw the wisdom of stopping to tie my feet together as well as my hands, because they preferred carrying me to being kicked by me. One of them noticed the lethal nature of the shark tooth hanging at my throat, and snapped the thong.
Ahead, I could see Tigrallef being handed gently into the little black galley moored at the end of the platform. When my turn came, they simply threw me into the bow. Stunned and breathless, it took me some time to regain any interest in events; and when at last I was able to sit up and look over the side, we were passing through the second breakwater and into the heavy mist that still shrouded the inner harbour. Visibility was no more than twenty or thirty feet; dim ghosts of ships rocked at their moorings all around us.
Still hooded, Tigrallef was sitting quietly in the stern on a pile of large cushions. Someone had even put a sheepskin around his shoulders, while I sprawled on the bare deck chilled by the mist and collecting splinters through the thin cloth of my britches. I raised my head again as the prow of the little galley nosed up against the end of a quay. Tigrallef was helped tenderly to his feet by the scribe himself; I was hauled bodily out of the boat between two black-clad troopers.
The shore was still hidden, but my eyes were caught by a massive grey form hovering behind the mist at the far end of the quay, a great vague circle shadowed with random darker patches, like the moon. I watched it as we proceeded down the narrow walkway. The circle grew; the dark patches resolved into a pattern, an eerie impression of eyes and mouth in a face that reminded me of a child's sketch of a demon, malignant and grinning; but gradually, as we came even closer and the mists thinned before it, the malignancy softened, the demonic features clarified and became human, though impossibly huge—stone features on a stone face the size of a cottage, set on shoulders thirty feet broad. Dimly behind it rose the serried ranks of the buildings along the corniche.
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 6
