Fortune's Blight

by Evie Manieri

 

  She cocked her head to one side.

  He had run out of arguments so he followed her past the wheelhouse and Nisha’s cabin and up the last short ladder to the stern look-out. He went to the little crook where the two railings came to a point and looked out, but he could see nothing but the rippling black silk of the water. Hela stepped up to the polished rail by his side. He could feel the heat of her body pulsing around her, and he could smell her hair: a blend of the salty sea air and the heavy mauve smoke.

  said Hela, as she turned around and leaned against the rail. The light from the lantern above dappled her honey-colored skin with purple shadows.

 

 

 

  asked Hela. Even with her blunt foreign accent, he could feel her dismay.

 

  said Hela,

  said Rho. He leaned his elbows on the rail and looked down into the water, seeing the gleam of a ripple here and there and hearing the splash of what might have been Hela’s selkwhales.

 

  He wondered if she could feel the bitterness burning in his chest.

  “Oh, Rho,” Hela said aloud, turning her round-cheeked face up to him.

  He hadn’t realized she was so small: the top of her head only just reached his shoulder. She wore a green shirt with the collar untied, and kept twining one of the strings around her fingers. The movement drew his eyes, then he stopped to linger over the curve of her breasts. She tucked a few tendrils of her light hair beneath her scarf and wet her lips.

  she said. He could feel her sliding closer in his mind.

  he began, formulating his refusal, but she let him get no further.

  she said.

  Although at the moment, he was noticing the way she was gently biting her bottom lip. He cleared his throat, even though they were still speaking Norlander.

  Hela laughed again, softly this time.

  He should have figured that out on his own.

  Hela put her head to one side and regarded him for a moment with serious eyes. But then her sly smile returned and she reached out and ran her fingertips along the back of his hand and up his wrist, a feather touch which sent a blaze of heat shooting up his arm.

  Rho struggled to keep his breath from quickening.

 

  Rho pushed his hair out of his eyes, only to have the breeze blow it right back again. He wanted her. There was no denying that he wanted to grab her and kiss her, right there on the deck, kiss her hard enough to make her cry out. He wanted the pleasure they could give each other, but she was right: he wanted the pain even more.

  He reached for her, but Hela spun suddenly and backed up against the rail. “Did you feel that?” she asked, her voice thrumming with excitement. She pointed at the sails that had been hanging like neglected washing for the last two weeks. From the light of the lantern in the crow’s nest above he thought he saw the top sails’ belly, just the tiniest bit.

  The clang of the ship’s bell rang out over the deck and Grentha appeared on the roof of the wheelhouse, already bellowing out orders. The women on the deck scrambled for their posts and others came up from below decks. Hela gave Rho a crooked smile of regret and slid down the ladder. Nisha and Sabina emerged a moment later, both dressed in their regular clothes.

  “Here we go, girls!” called out the captain. “Look sharp!”

  * * *

  The Barrels had no intention of letting the Argent go without living up to its reputation, and the raging storm was worse than anything Rho could ever have imagined. The wind came at them in a constant scream. The waves were so high, the troughs so deep, that Rho and his companions were forced to lash themselves to the struts to keep from being tossed around like Dramash’s rag-doll. So loud was the creaking of the tortured timbers that Rho was sure the ship was about to break apart, and it was too dark to see a thing—there was no point trying to light the lanterns, not when the heaving of the vessel continually knocked over the candles into the sand on the bottom. After one attempt to open the cabin door, which resulted in an inch or more of freezing water cresting over the raised threshold and washing across the floor, Rho resigned himself to staying put—not that he would have been any help to the Nomas; he felt so ill that he began to wish the ship would capsize so he could drown in peace.

  He was relieved to see the storm’s ferocity didn’t bother Dramash, except for the personal inconveniences it caused. After falling off the stool he’d pulled over to the porthole so he could look out at the waves, he complained that he didn’t like having only ship’s biscuits to eat, though there was no way anyone would be able to keep a cookfire alight in the galley. Then Dramash found Eofar’s sword, Strife’s Bane, in one corner of the cabin and settled down in Rho’s hammock with the hilt in his lap. The boy sat there in the dark, stroking the silver triffons and whispering secret commands that Rho strained to hear over the noise of wind and rain and straining planks. Rho wondered if Dramash was trying to find the right words to bring the creatures to life. Sometimes, instead of murmuring his incantations, he sang to himself: a song of nonsense words, maybe something his mother might have sung to him when he was a baby.

  Rho tried very hard not to remember the last sound Dramash’s mother had made: that wet little gurgle as he cut her throat …

  Rho was more worried about Eofar. The storm didn’t frighten him either, but he had traded the intoxication of wine for the visceral violence of the weather. His emotions mimicked the waves: dark troughs of anger swelling up into white-capped swells of mad euphoria. The rain was merely the sky, weeping for a wife and son taken from him; the wind was his scream of fury. Rho began to worry that Eofar’s sanity would be washed overboard with everything else before they even reached Norland.

  It took four long days for them to come out the other side of the storm.

  The sailors took stock of the damage. Two crew-members had been lost: Arva, the bursar, had slipped over the side, and Katie had broken her neck after courageously climbing the rigging to secure one of the sails which had ripped loose. Almost everyone else was injured, including Leth, the cook, who had taken the worst of it when the foremast splintered off and smashed through the galley. Sabina had a deep gash in her arm that was already
looking infected, and even Dramash’s friend Yara, the little cabin girl, had a broken wrist. Sheer exhaustion and four days of constant freezing wind and rain had put a quarter of the crew down with a fever, including Mala, the ship’s healer, who dosed herself up and dragged herself around to tend to the others.

  The Argent herself was in equally bad shape. As well as the loss of the foremast and the galley, most of the sails were damaged, and all sorts of important things had been lost or broken beyond repair, including one of their two landing boats. Still, the mainmast had survived in one piece, and the keel was in pretty good shape.

  From the way the sailors kept repeating those two facts, Rho realized they were lucky to still be alive and afloat.

  And somehow, through all that, Nisha and Grentha had kept them on course, and not even a week later, the Argent glided into the harbor at the lower town of Ravinsur.

  Everyone who could stand upright put on as many layers of clothing as possible and came out on deck to watch. They’d cut down a fur coat for Dramash and then used the offcuts to make mitts and a hood in the Norlander style that covered his whole head except for his eyes. Even under the circumstances, Rho was amused by the sight of the boy trundling across the deck like some rotund little forest creature.

  A heavy mist drifted over the dark water and every sound had a muffled quality, like someone had wrapped it all up in rags. Even the chunking of the ice floes as the Argent’s prow nudged them aside had a dream-like distance to it. It was a Norland silence, and Rho hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it until it settled over him again.

  Eventually Ravindal’s crowded towers started to appear, the black shapes barely visible through the mist. Their upper stories were further hidden by a perpetual ring of wood-smoke from the city’s streaming chimneys. Torchlight and firelight glowed behind green-glass windows offset in the thick stone towers and watch-fires leaped in great braziers on the city walls. Rho had once patrolled those walls as an Arregador guard, alongside resentful mid-clan comrades and other high clansmen too young or lazy to go soldiering. Steam from the warm springs beneath the castle shrouded the immobile waves of the frozen waterfall tumbling from the cliffs. The buildings of the lower town of Ravinsur rose up in a series of steps from the docks, separated from Ravindal by the wide, sharp ascent of the Dock Road. Ships jostled each other in the deep harbor, and through Nisha’s spyglass Rho could see the usual collection of stevedores, dock-wardens, merchants’ scribes, children and dogs congregating on the docks. Dramash nuzzled up beside him, asking an endless series of questions through his fur hood. Rho answered every one he could understand.

  Not everything matched his memories. The last hours before dark usually had a certain quietness to them as the lower clans prepared the evening meal and the nobility prepared to eat it. Now he had counted at least a dozen triffons coming and going in just the short time he’d been watching, and there was new scaffolding around sections of the walls and towers which were swarming with activity, apparently repairing or adding to the fortifications—but Ravindal had not come under direct attack since the end of the Second Clan War a century ago.

  Nisha gave orders to drop anchor and lower their remaining landing boat; Rho paced the deck as the sailors hurried to furl the sails. A few moments later he heard the weighty clanking of the chain as four sailors walked the capstan round, but they walked in silence instead of singing the cheeky little song that had been Rho’s favorite. The captain came up onto the foredeck to stand beside him at the rail and started scanning the expanded docks.

  Nisha asked after a moment.

  Rho conjectured, looking away to the shore.

 

  A sense of expectation hung over the city that might have been dread. Maybe Rho was imagining it. Maybe he was bringing the dread with him.

  asked Nisha. Her feelings, slippery things that normally tripped by so nimbly, now eddied like a muddy stream.

  said Rho, pitching his words across the ship.

  said Eofar, stomping across to them. He cut an imposing figure with his hood down and his cowl up. Even the hilt of Strife’s Bane looked less gaudy in the colorless light.

  said Rho.

  Eofar waited for more.

  he said at last,

  After arguing for a while longer about who should make up the landing party, Rho ended up in the boat with Dramash next to him on the middle bench, Eofar in the back, and Grentha to row them all to shore. Unlike the rest of them, the first mate wore a hat instead of a hood—the cold didn’t seem to bother her.

  “I fell asleep once, on watch,” said Grentha. Her leaden eyes touched his for a moment. “I was mate on the Lady Bright. We hit a reef—tore a hole in the keel. Four girls and two babes drowned.”

  Rho just stared at her.

  “Want to know their names?”

  “Their names?” he asked, still confused.

  She rattled them off: “Cari, Lora, Embeth, Fen, Josep, Kelli.” The oars slid into the water and out again. “No other captain would have me after that, save for Nisha. Said she’d rather have someone who knew what a mistake felt like than one as never made one.”

  Rho, not knowing what he should say, said nothing.

  Grentha gave a dry laugh and kept up the rhythm, moving the blades of the oars in and out of the water, periodically spattering them both with icy spray.

  The town of Ravinsur climbed up the rocky steps beyond the docks, its structures looking like they were huddling together for warmth under a riotous blanket of thaw-vine. Most roofs had green-glass wedges set on top, designed to keep the snow from piling up and caving them in, and canopies of the same durable ice-glass arched over the narrow streets where the more prosperous mid-clansmen lived. The docks were divided into dozens of little craggy berths and ice crept up the hulls of the moored boats. No one paid any attention to their boat as they landed, and Rho began to understand why as he got a closer look at the crowd: there were soldiers everywhere.

  Eofar climbed out onto the ice-slicked dock and said,

  Rho had finally come home, after three long years, and yet all the voices in his head were telling him not to get out of the boat; to go back to the Argent; to just keep drifting.

  Chapter 12

  Rho led them past filthy snowbanks and heaps of rubbish—ice chunks, broken boxes and other trash—to the steps leading up into the cramped little town of Ravinsur. No one gave them more than a passing glance except for an old man shuffling along with an equally old dog at his heels, who stepped into a vine-covered alley so they could pass.

  asked Eofar as a group of four soldiers in Vartan tabards barged past, all talking at once.

  said Rho, watching those four imperial swords heading down the street and keeping Dramash as close as possible. His lungs, long used to the desert’s furnace, already ached from the cold.

  The alley he led them into split off in several directions, each one sliding gradually into darkness as it ended in a blank wall or sharp turn. Melting snow marked out a steady patter as it dripped through the warm thaw-vine branches and salt and gravel crunched under their feet, but little else broke the stillness. Rho could almost feel the silence weighing him down, just like the furs piled up on his shoulders. Even Dramash was affected, twisting around to look at the exotic sights all around him, but rarely speaking. The
boy looked wrong trudging along beside him, away from the sun and surrounded by gray: gray ground, gray walls, gray sky.

  Rho had once ended up drinking with a Ranjarian who believed that after you died, you walked backward through your own life as an observer, all the way back to the day you were born. He thought at the time that he might have lived his life differently if he had known he was going to have to watch himself slum away his evenings down here, enduring tales of how General Gannon had crushed yet another kingdom into oblivion with the fearsome warrior Trey Arregador by his side.

  They entered a wider street lined on both sides with two-story warehouses and busy with carts coming and going. Glow-globes imported all the way from Angor lit the doorways, even though Norland didn’t provide enough light for the living algae inside to keep them working for more than a few months. Green-glass statues guarded the doors and lined the walls: some of Onfar or Onraka, a few of the progenitors, and a great many more of generic naked men and women in improbable if entertaining postures. There were even green-glass windows in a few of the newer buildings, obviously owned by those rich enough not to care about the fuel they wasted in exchange for that little bit of light.

  said Eofar, stopping in the middle of the street and standing there, immobile, as a low-clan woman with a handcart piled high with kindling tried to get past without knocking into him. Dramash pulled his hand out of Rho’s and ran to stroke the smooth leg of the nearest statue.

  said Rho, hurriedly retrieving Dramash and warning him once again to stay close.

  As they walked a few more yards the houses became less grand and they found themselves in a district of taverns, run-down shops and single-story houses. Finally they came out into a tiny square with an old stone statue of an ursa in the middle. It had obviously once been part of a group, moved here from someplace else, but Rho had always liked it; he thought it had more power in its simple lines than all the curlicues and flourishes of the modern green-glass beauties. People dressed it up from time to time, just for fun; right now its blocky, chiseled head sported a tall mummer’s crown left over from Eowara’s Day.