The Rose Sea

by S. M. Stirling

  The woman's mind was nailed to that bedamned horse-piller, Konzin decided. Absolutely nailed to it "I'm beginning to remember things," he said.

  The mediciner cocked an eyebrow at him and remarked drily, "I'm sure you are. Why don't you tell us what you remember, and we'll see whether your recovery is good enough that you can skip treatment."

  So Konzin told them his tale of heroism and woe—of how bandits attacked the ranch hands on their way home from the city, of how they killed Brunnai and the rest, except for him and Karah; of how he had fought valiantly to save them, but to no avail. And of how the bandits had robbed Karah of her hard-earned money. "Twenty-two hundred forty-six crowns," he said. That amount would be on record at Bemmah and Daughters of Derkin. He made sure he told it to them correctly.

  Partway through the story, Iano and several of the ranch hands came into the room. The expressions on their faces were identical—and grim.

  Konzin finished his story by telling them how the bandits had killed Karah, and left him for dead as well.

  Konzin's audience listened quietly. When he was done, Iano Grenlaarin said, "So they robbed the lot of you of every piece of silver you had, and killed my Karah… and thought they'd killed you, too."

  "Well, none of us had any silver. I had a few coppers, and Karah had the draft—well, perhaps a crown or two of her own money. I suppose the other hands had coppers, but nothing much. But the bandits took the draft, and…" He hung his head and let a tear run down his cheek. "And yes, they… they killed Karah. I wish it had been me."

  "So do I," Iano said "Especially since you had eleven hundred twenty-three crowns silver hidden in a carved hole in your saddle tree. We found it when we were checking your horse."

  Konzin could feel the blood drain from his face. The room started to spin for real, and only the look in the mediciner's eye kept him from fainting.

  Iano continued "We'll have to send a messenger to let Jawain know what has happened—he has friends in Derkin, and no doubt he'll be able to find out about any robberies or murders on the road from there to here. Meanwhile—" he paused and looked from one burly ranch hand to the other. "Meanwhile, put this animal in the branding stocks. If I find out he's responsible for my daughters death, I'll do worse than brand him."

  "Hey, girl! Out, out! Roust yersel' or I'll have t' swim fer the boat."

  Karah rubbed sleep from her eyes and stretched. The air was still hot, but was now wet and sticky as well. She crawled out of the tent into chaos. Every living soul in the camp was striking tents, loading wagons, yelling and shouting and swearing.

  How did I sleep through this? she wondered.

  She ran to the jakes, dodging people and animals on the way, and when she came out, dodged them again while she looked for Bren.

  She found him checking off weapons and armaments from a long list with his sergeant.

  "First Captain!" she shouted.

  He looked up, annoyance plainly showing on his face. Then he recognized who she was. He handed the ticksheet to the sergeant and walked over to her.

  "What did the medic say?"

  Medic? she wondered. Then she vaguely remembered he'd instructed her to go to the infirmary when she woke. She'd forgotten.

  "I haven't been yet. I just woke—but I'm fine. I won't need to go to the infirmary—"

  That was an order," he snapped "Not a request. I need to know if what you have is contagious. The priest says it isn't malign magic, so maybe it's medical. I can't have all my troops glowing in the dark when we get to Tarin Tseld—that would be a hell of a thing, wouldn't it? Try to get into position around an enemy encampment while we were all lit up looking like the Child's Festival of Lights."

  "I guarantee you this isn't contagious. Besides, I'm not glowing now—and I'm not going to Tarin Tseld. I have duties and obligations at home—duties to my family. Maybe you don't know about family, First Captain Morkaarin. Maybe family doesn't matter to Morkaarins—but it does to Grenlaarins."

  His face flushed dull red and he glared at her. "Go… to… the… infirmary…" he said "Right… now…"

  Karah crossed her arms and stuck out her chin. "We're going to settle this."

  Bren's voice went soft and sweet. "You're going to end up spending the rest of your natural life in the stockade, sore from a flogging, Grenlaarin or not," he said, and smiled gently. "If I don't decide to court-martial and hang you for insubordination."

  Karah stared at him, shocked into silence. The Grenlaarin name had always opened doors for her. She'd never really tried to take advantage of who she was. She'd always known she could—and because she was of one of the oldest and most respected of Tykissian families, she had been careful of the feelings of those whose bloodlines were not so old or so good. But she realized suddenly that the majority of her compassion for the less fortunate came from knowing she didn't have to be compassionate if she didn't want to be. She'd always simply assumed if she really wanted something, she'd get it. Because she'd earned it, preferably, but because of who she was, if necessary.

  The First Captains eyes showed no hint of doubt, no uncertainty about who would come out the winner in a confrontation between the two of them. If my parents were here, with horses and money and the weight of the old families of Tykis behind them… she thought, and stopped herself. This time, she was on her own, and the First Captain had the weight of the Tykissian Imperial Army behind him.

  She turned without another word and walked toward the infirmary. For the first time she began to believe she might not get out of her predicament—that her parents might not arrive in time to cut her loose from the army's ties. She considered the implications of that as she walked down the hill through the dust and dry grass.

  Tarin Tseld. The foreign sounds were interesting. She'd never been on a ship. She'd never gone much of anywhere. If she had to go, it might be interesting to see far-off lands and strange people. War—that was not such a fine idea, but she would be a scout. She would ride her horse, and sneak in and out of places. She wouldn't have to do any real fighting unless she got caught.

  She'd just be sure she didn't get caught, then.

  And on the day she got an opportunity to beat the hide off First Captain Morkaarin, she would be sure to take advantage of it.

  She entered the infirmary. Several men and women lay on the cots in the small front room. Karah thought none of them looked particularly ill. Shirking, she thought uncharitably, and then winced. That seemed an opinion she'd be better off keeping to herself.

  A plump young woman in mediciner's garb but with sergeants piping on the seams stepped out of the back room and snarled, "What do you want?"

  Not a thing, Karah thought, and was grateful she could blame the visit on her commander. "First Captain Morkaarin sent me here. Said he wanted to be sure I wasn't contagious."

  "What are your symptoms?"

  "I feel fine," Karah said. She looked down at her arms and legs, and realized her opportunity to get her revenge on First Captain Morkaarin had just arrived. "First Captain said he wanted to make sure glowing in the dark wasn't contagious."

  The woman stared at her. "You jest,"

  "No, sergeant. Told me if I didn't come right down here, he'd throw me in the stockade for insubordination."

  The sergeant eyed her narrowly. "Did he?" She snorted. "Turn around."

  Karah turned.

  "Can't see a thing. C'mon back here. Not dark enough in that front room t' tell."

  Karah followed her back, and when the sergeant closed the door to the inner room and pulled the shutters, stood patiently in the darkness.

  "You don't glow in the dark."

  "No, sergeant. I don't."

  "Hmph. First Captain Morkaarin, you say?"

  "Yes, ma'am. XIXth Regiment."

  The mediciner shoved the shutters open again, and said, "You're fine. Get back to work. And…" She grabbed a scrap of paper off her desk and scribbled a note on it "You read?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

 
"Well, don't. Give this to First Captain Morkaarin before you get back to work."

  Karah kept her smile inside, and accepted the folded scrap of paper. "Yes, ma'am."

  She left, and carried the note to Morkaarin.

  "What the medic say?"

  "Said I'm fine and I should get to work."

  The First Captain wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of a hand and squinted at the horizon. Small fleecy clouds were blowing in from the south—and the breeze was wet and sticky. Karah guessed he was suspecting a storm in the next few days. That was what she would have worried about.

  "Damnall," he muttered. He looked back at her. "Fine. Get to work. Strike your tent, pack your gear, then get with your horses and get ready to move out We don't get out of the harbor and around it fast, we're likely to end up in the middle of a damn storm."

  "Yes, sir," Karah said. She started to turn away, then, as if it were an afterthought instead of the revenge it was, turned back and handed him the medic's note. "Mediciner told me to give this to you."

  The First Captain took the paper. "What is it?"

  "Don't know, sir. She told me not to read it."

  He looked at the paper thoughtfully, then said, "Fine. Go on."

  Karah walked back to her tent—but watched from the corner of her eye.

  The First Captain read the note, and his face turned the same shade of red it had earlier. He ripped the note into shreds, and dropped the shreds, then ground them into the dust with his boot. The whole time, he swore. Then he gave a sharp order to his sergeant, and stomped off toward the infirmary, every line of his body speaking his rage.

  Karah watched him with satisfaction. When he vanished into the infirmary, she went about the business of getting ready to ship out.

  * * *

  "So Gonstad hates you, too, hey?" Bren Morkaarin asked, stamping the orders. "Or did you look sideways at the Grand Admiral?"

  "Willek?" Chevays said with feigned innocence.

  "The same."

  "Not that I know of, sir."

  The First Captain chuckled and said, "Well, I guarantee you did something wrong somewhere." For a moment his expression was serious and bleak. "At least this will give us one trained soldier in that troop."

  Chevays studied him behind an expression of blandly obedient enthusiasm. The First Captain's face was nowhere near as memorable as Eowlie's; he might have been any minor nobleman from the central provinces, with an ox-strong look about him. A fast heavy man, from the way he moved. Very skilled, from what had happened to the unlamented Valwer Tornsaarin. But he was the man in the image box.

  Two down, the assassin thought, and a sign from the gods that I'm on the right track.

  The right track can be disgustingly long, he thought a few hours later.

  "Heave."

  Chevays heaved. The box thudded down on the wagon bed beside all the others.

  "What's in there—lead?" he asked.

  "That's right, trooper, lead," the sergeant said. "Ingots fer bullets."

  Not for the first time, Chevays reflected that while the gods seemed to enjoy inflicting pain, they had no sense of finesse. His cover required him to play common soldier, and play it he would, even though it was like being on the wrong side of the bars in the monkey cage at the Imperial menagerie.

  The wagon creaked away. The rest of the Scout troop were rolling their tents and packing their personal kits, rather more than most soldiers would have, since they were mounted.

  Soldiers, or imitations thereof, Chevays thought He'd heard the two team leaders didn't like each other, that the majority of the unit consisted of whores who'd gotten the assignment because they knew how to ride horses—that information given with a snickered aside about the other things they knew how to ride—and that there wasn't a single soldier in the Scouts who'd ever been in the field.

  So the question becomes, he thought, am I here to find these people, or am I here because Willek decided having me find these people would be a good way to get rid of me?

  Paranoia was a part of his business. Killers who failed to be sufficiently paranoid died young.

  The easy solution would be to kill his targets and get out of the unit Give Willek some story to explain his taking them out before notifying her.

  No. He couldn't He didn't know why, but when he thought of murdering them, his entire body locked up, and he almost couldn't breathe. Odd response for him. He was capable of thinking about his response rationally—capable of reminding himself that he liked killing people. But the killing… no. No. That he simply couldn't consider.

  "Hey, you!" Someone jammed an elbow in his back and shouted, "Don't stand in the way, stufid donkey! We have to ve out of here vefore the tide goes."

  He spun, ready to rip apart whoever had hit him—

  —and found himself face to face with her. Eowlie. She glared at him. He noted her claws sliding in and out of their sheaths. She'd drawn her lips back to bare her fangs, and he noticed the upper ones were nearly as long as his thumb. Fear thrilled down his spine, and with it the sense of challenge she posed. He could conquer her, he thought. And he would Willek would wait for her news.

  He realized he was standing in the path, staring at her, grinning like an idiot.

  And he realized, too, that she was studying him, her expression that of a hunter who has crossed paths with a beast it doesn't recognize, and is trying to decide if the animal is, or is not, prey.

  Goose bumps rose on his arms, and his grin spread broader. His heart raced. She scared him and excited him. She would be a hell of a ride. If he survived.

  He stepped out of her way and watched her pass.

  "Yes," he whispered as she carried her load past "You're mine."

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Imperial fleet was huge, large enough that it could only leave the harbors of Derkin in waves; the army embarking was large enough that much of it had to wait outside the walls, to leave the roads free enough for movement. The XIXth had spent most of the night sitting around on a hillside overlooking the twin round basins with their narrow exits to the sea. The scouts and their horses stayed together, off to one side, while the rest of the XIXth spread out over a part of the hill. Everyone was in full kit, and the corselet rubbed Karah in unfamiliar places; while it had certainly been made for a woman, it seemed to have been made for a flat-chested one with slightly narrower shoulders. She shifted again, and Glorylad rested his head on her shoulder and blew into her ear.

  "I'm tired of waiting, too," she said.

  One of the Shillraki's—Borte—laughed, then went back to playing mumblety-peg with her sister and Doe, the ludicrously misnamed Tseldene. Doe had blossomed surprisingly, considering that she'd been a slave all her life—from what she'd said, all women were slaves over the sea in Tarin Tseld. That made Karah glad the army was moving to crush the last remnant of the Old Empire—An Tiram had been a capital city for ten thousand years—although not so glad she had to take part in it herself. The Tykissians had fought their way south over the North Shield Mountains, and farther south to the Imperial Sea; most of the wars had been victorious, but none of them were easy. As Pa said, you could get killed just as dead winning…

  The sun reached rose-red fingers in the west, framed by the three moons. Shadows moved through the streets and squares of Derkin, and lit the edge of the harbor and the forest of masts. Morning mist lay on the water, and for long moments the ships seemed to float disembodied on a sea of cloud. Then sunlight struck fire from the bronze caps on the masts of the galleys from Old Tykis which made up the first division, anchored furthest out.

  The lean hulls were painted red and black down to their copper-clad bellies, the tall prows carved in fearsome shapes. Some of the ships bore the Fathers savage falcon head, some the Mother with her fangs gleaming, and some the image of the Wolf-Child, snarling. The steel-clad ramming spikes gleamed in the sun, and light bronze cannon peered over the bows. Three banks of oar ports lined the sides of each ship—Tykissian
s had been pirates before they became conquerors, and they built their fleet for speed and agility… and piracy, still. Karah had listened to her mother's tales of her fierce ancestors and their raids up and down the coast from the time she was a babe in arms. She felt a swell of pride, watching those lean, ferocious ships. The finest ships on the sea, she thought, and my people built them.

  Gold and silver flashed as priests on each foredeck made the morning sacrifice; the tubular bells and long horns called across the waters and echoed from walls and hills. Karah lifted her hands palm-up and prayed with them, hearing other voices around her echoing the chant.

  Most of the Imperial ships were less awesome, built to an ancient pattern common to the southern sea. They were as round-bellied as pregnant women, and relied entirely on their sails and rudders for maneuvering. They had no banks of oars, no dire godheads on their prows. Instead, they wore fanciful carved knots and vines, or fish and sea serpents—but even the sea serpents, to Karah's eyes, did not look particularly fierce. And the colors! Why, she wondered, would anyone paint a single ship in tiny squares of orange and yellow and purple and green—much less paint a whole fleet that way? True, they had a few cannon on deck, while the Old Tykis ships did not, and each of the Imperial greatships carried a boarding bridge on the foredeck—but to Karah's eyes, the southern ships looked threatening as flower-bedecked children at Festival would, were their parents to hand them play muskets.

  "The greatships will be used for transporting land troops and supplies," Amourgin said when she asked. "They have more storage space in the hulls. The Navy uses the Tykissian ships for itself—they're warships. The best. But they don't have big cargo holds. A fleet has to have caravels and carracks as well as galleys and corvettes."

  Further out in the harbor were vessels that looked like a compromise between galleys and greatships—sailing ships, but longer and leaner, without the high forecastles and a sterncastle only one deck high. Gunports showed along their sides, sometimes as many as ten a side. Those were the race-built frigates, the newest and deadliest ships in the Fleet Most bore the daggertooth-skull emblem of the Imperial family, but some carried flags that read ITESC—Imperial Tykissian Eastern Seas Company, the great guild who managed the new colonies in far Melcan and traded even further. Karah looked at them avidly; they sailed for far lands, exotic peoples—well, like Eowlie—wealth beyond dreams, adventure. Although right now they'd be convoying the fleet south to Tarin Tseld.