by David Drake
The odors of the goods in the vast hall mixed with the miasma of the mudflats on which the vessel stood. The combined smell was a thing Sharina felt she could touch.
The pallet nearest to her held a pile of small sharks; they’d been sliced down the middle, sun-dried, and pressed flat. Blotches of orange mold grew on their dull gray skins. Next to them was a pallet stacked with dried sea cucumbers whose salt pungency reminded Sharina of the marsh grasses along Pattern Creek in the borough. The goods farther down the line continued the varied assortment of the sea’s produce. Few of the items were food in Barca’s Hamlet—or, Sharina suspected, in Carcosa either.
Chalcus and Sidras were examining a large unglazed pot which sat on a tray sealed with pitch to hold an inch of seawater. The bottom of the pot was dark because water was wicking through the raw earthenware.
Sidras lifted the lid; the smell of camphor breathed over the air around. The men bent forward cautiously, keeping well back from the opening as they looked within. Sharina hadn’t heard their discussion; she stepped closer.
“Careful!” Sidras warned. “The camphor keeps them quiet, but you don’t want to take chances with these.”
Sharina glanced over to see that Ilna was examining bolts of dyed linen which had probably come from Blaise. Nodding—Why do I feel responsible for Ilna, who’s managed her life with as little help as anyone I know?—Sharina peered into the pot. For a moment she saw only slick iridescence; then a small oval head rose.
“Enough,” said Sidras, straightening up. He replaced the lid.
“Reef snakes,” Chalcus explained. He grinned, but there was sweat on his brow. “They’re little things that live on the reefs west of Haft and hunt fish. I’ve never heard of one longer than a man’s arm.”
“If they bite your hand,” said Sidras, “it feels like you’ve stuck your arm in molten bronze. You start to swell right away, and after an hour or so you die.”
“If you’re bitten, you die,” Chalcus said. His fingers were twitching where his swordhilt would’ve been if he’d not left the blade behind to seem less threatening. Some men fear spiders, some fear cats; and some men, even unquestionably brave men, are terrified by snakes. “And you’re screaming to the end.”
“The Serians eat these too?” Sharina asked. Compared to the sea cucumbers, a meal of snake meat didn’t strike her as particularly disgusting.
“I think their healers use the poison,” Sidras said, shaking his head. “They buy the snakes live and pay well enough for them, let me tell you. They have to, for there’s few enough fishermen willing to risk the bite. I’ve heard men say that there’s no real danger if you’re careful, that they’re sluggish devils and near-sighted besides. But I’ve never known anyone to gather them unless he was in more need of money than usual.”
Ilna hadn’t seemed to be paying attention, but as Chalcus looked up from the container of snakes she opened her hands to display the pattern she’d woven while she was turned away. Sharina caught a flash of it and felt momentarily warm, as though a cat had brushed her leg. Chalcus looked fixedly into the knotted cords for a moment, then hugged Ilna tight.
“You must think I’m a weak, frightened man, Master Sidras,” he said with a laugh. He stepped away from Ilna and bowed to the factor.
“I do not,” said Sidras. “An assistant of mine reached into the container on a dare once. He was a clumsy boy, and a fool, and a pilferer besides I shouldn’t wonder. But he didn’t deserve that death. Nobody does.”
“Now these...,” said Chalcus, moving to wicker baskets of conical seashells packed in straw mats to keep them from chipping one another. “Are new to me. You fish them from these waters?”
“We do now,” said Sidras, pulling out one of the shells. It was slender and only a little longer than the merchant’s middle finger. When he held it to catch the light, it shimmered with the colors of a brilliant sunset: purples and magentas and reds that shaded suddenly into indigo. “Lusius does, at any rate. Three years back the sea bottom rose west of the Calves—” He glanced at Sharina and raised an eyebrow.
“Those are the three islands north of Haft,” Chalcus explained. “Commander Lusius has his base on the easternmost, Corse.”
“Aye,” agreed Sidras. “And if I did refuse to deal with folk because of the way they live, it wouldn’t be the Serians and their idols I’d start with. But Lusius controls the belemite shell, and there’s no lack of buyers for it.”
He handed the shell to Chalcus, then drew out another one and offered it to Sharina. It was as delicate as eggshell, with a faint spiral pattern. She could see the shadow of her finger through the side.
Chalcus held the shell up and turned it. He said, “So the bottom rose and these—the belemites?”
“Aye,” said Sidras, nodding. “They’re little squids with shells, and that’s what Lusius says they’re called. He’s got a wizard with him who learns things, I don’t know how.”
Sharina heard the strong implication that Sidras didn’t want to know what wizards did. Sharina knew more about wizards than most people did—and based on her experience, Tenoctris was the only one who didn’t deserve Sidras’ prejudice.
“And the winged demons came at the same time?” Chalcus said.
“The Rua, right,” said Sidras, scowling thoughtfully. “I don’t know about them being demons, but they fly. They’re sure not men like live around here.”
He barked a laugh. “They fish for the shell too,” he added, rummaging between baskets and coming up with a swatch of coarse fabric.
A net, Sharina thought, but Sidras shook it out and she saw it was a bag. The meshes were open enough hold objects the size of belemite shells but nothing smaller.
“Lusius fights the Rua for the shell,” Sidras explained. “From what I hear he doesn’t do a lot better than he does keeping them from raiding ships, but one of them dropped this bag when an archer pinked him.”
“May I look at that?” Ilna said. Everybody turned, startled to be reminded that she was still present. Grinning wryly she went on, “I’m not interested in snakes or seashells, but cloth is another matter.”
“Of course,” said Sidras. Chalcus had already swept the bag from him and offered it to Ilna. She held it in one hand and ran the tips of the other fingers along the loose meshes.
Chalcus and the factor began talking about the Commander of the Strait and his troops. Sidras seemed to have lost his wariness of Chalcus, and their mutual dislike of Lusius added to their warmth.
Sharina examined the shell again. Then, turning her head, she glanced toward Ilna. Her friend was motionless; her eyes were open, but they weren’t looking into anything in this world.
Sharina looked away, licking her lips. Ilna had a talent for fabric; it told her things that no one else could hear.
But Sharina herself had learned that not all secrets are good to know.
***
“Your highness...,” said the servant, his face lowered so that he wasn’t actually looking at Garric. He was one of the staff Lord Tadai had summoned from Valles, not a member of Count Lascarg’s establishment. “The delegation from the Temple of the Lady of the Sunset has arrived under Senior Priest Moisin bor-Sacchiman.”
The room Liane and Reise had chosen for Prince Garric’s public business was on the ground floor of Lascarg’s palace; Garric supposed it was meant for small entertainments or the overflow from large ones. The high ceiling had scenes painted in each coffered cell, though even now in daytime there wasn’t enough light to be sure of the subjects. They weren’t terribly well drawn, either: the Counts of Haft didn’t attract artists as able as those who decorated the palaces of nobles on the more powerful islands.
From above shoulder height the sidewalls were frescoed with a design of birds on a seashore, but the lower walls were wainscoted in age-darkened oak. During a party there’d be crowding and drunken spills; rough usage wouldn’t harm the wood, but plaster would flake off with the expense of repairs.
“His highness will see them now, Master Bessin,” Liane said coolly, then returned her attention to the three stacks of documents laid out on the long table before her.
During the intervals between petitioners, she and Garric were going over proposed lists of officials for the new royal government on Haft. All of Garric’s senior staff had clients and relatives to place, so the decisions had to be made as much on politics as merit.
Garric would’ve been happier to answer the servant himself—by Duzi, he’d rather have opened the door himself!—but everybody else seemed to want things complicated. Part of the point of his travels through the capitals of the western islands was to convince people that Garric was a prince, not some mumbling shepherd from the boondocks as they might have heard. That meant he had to act like a prince, however silly and uncomfortable he felt doing it.
“A lot of life is play-acting, lad,” remarked the grinning image of Carus. “The silver plate on your armor won’t turn a blade one whit better than plain bronze, but you have to wear it so that all your men can see you there leading them.”
Behind Garric trilled birds in a silver cage, a gift from the Shepherd’s priesthood earlier this morning. The birds were literally gold: four creations of metal which fluttered on their perches and sang with undiminished musicality so long as anyone was present in the room. A system of weights powered the device; the priestess who delivered the automaton said that it should be wound every the morning, but that the task could be performed by any scullion capable of turning a spit. The birds’ song was oddly soothing, more so than the music alone should have been.
The servant made a signal to the ushers on the other side of the door; they drew back the double panels and bowed. Moisin, a tall man in silken robes, entered. He was flanked by a pair of Blood Eagles. The priest was bald to mid-skull and had an ascetic expression, belied perhaps by the fact his garb must have cost as much as a good horse. Behind him, four underlings carried a large object draped in brocade on a hand barrow.
Moisin bowed deeply. “Your highness,” he said, “the congregation of the Lady asked me to bring this token of our joy at your visit to us here in Carcosa.”
He turned and nodded an order to his juniors; they set the barrow on the parquet floor and stepped aside. With a conjuror’s flourish, Moisin whipped off the cover. Beneath was a wide-mouthed urn more than four feet high. It was made of translucent, gray-green stone polished to a mirror sheen.
“It’s lovely,” murmured Liane under her breath. She got up from the table where she’d been working on accounts and walked toward the urn as if entranced. Moisin smirked minusculely. “The pattern is... lovely!”
Garric rose also, even more impressed than he’d been by the mechanical birds. Neither gift would change his behavior toward the priesthoods of Carcosa, but they were marvelous things beyond question.
Light from the room’s north windows behind him struck a pattern through the walls of the urn. The gray to gray-green to green shadings were as faint as the mergings of color within a rainbow, but they made Garric feel happier and safe; as safe as when he was an infant wrapped in his featherbed, knowing his parents would protect him.
“The stone is cryolite, ice spar,” Moisin said, anticipating the question which Garric hadn’t gotten around to asking. “It’s only found on the Ice Capes and rarely in blocks so big as this one. Some say that it’s ice from the bottom of glaciers, compressed into stone.”
“It’s lovely,” Liane repeated. She reached out but didn’t quite permit her fingers to touch the smooth walls. They had the sheen of liquid light; it was hard to tell where the stone ended and the air began.
“I want to be very clear,” Garric said, raising his voice beyond what his arm’s length separation from Moisin required. “My government will almost certainly make major changes in the structure and power of the priesthoods in Carcosa. You already know that. Absolutely nothing you give me, not this—”
He gestured without looking. It was hard to keep his train of thought and his necessary harshness if the urn were in his line of vision.
“—not a pile of gold as big as this palace, nothing, will affect the decisions of my government.”
“That much gold would pay the army’s wages for three years...,” mused Carus. His image was smiling, but his reminder that everything—even rectitude—required moderation was serious.
“Of course the congregation of the Shepherd understands your honesty and the needs of the kingdom, your highness,” Moisin said, bowing again. “Our concern is only that you realize that those who worship the Shepherd rejoice as warmly in your visit to Haft as every other citizen does.”
The priest smiled knowingly. His half-nod might have been meant to indicate the birds twittering in their joy.
Garric cleared his throat. “Very well,” he said. “You may assure your fellows that their gift has been accepted on the terms that they offered it.”
Moisin bowed again and turned. His underlings continued to stare at the urn, as entranced as Liane herself. With an angry snap of his fingers Moisin recalled them to their duty; they trailed from the room with him. The Blood Eagles marched out also, though one darted a final glance over his shoulder at the stone’s lustrous beauty.
Liane’s hand sought Garric’s. Only when she touched him did she meet his eyes and smile, then walked back to her duty.
“I’m leery about accepting gifts from the priesthoods,” Garric said, “even if we’re not going to change our minds because of them. But I guess these things may as well be here with us as in vaults in the basement of some temple.”
“Yes,” said Liane. “I think so too.”
And the birds trilled music sweeter than anything that came from a living throat.
***
Ilna stood silent, her mind looking out over the warm, lush world where the net bag had been woven. A shallow sea stretched from horizon to horizon, marked by coral heads and masses of vegetation which hid whatever land there was for them to root upon.
A soft wind barely riffled the water. Through it, some as high as the sun itself while others skimmed the glassy surface, flew the winged men, the Rua. They were as inhuman as so many cats, but like cats their slimly-muscular bodies were beautiful and their movements were perfectly graceful.
Ilna’s fingers stroked the bag, barely touching it. The long, strong fibers spun to form the meshes came from the inner bark of shrubs growing on the distant islets; she knew that as she would know the sun was shining by the feel of its rays on her skin. Her body wasn’t in this waking dream, but the senses that made Ilna a weaver like no other person alive saw and heard with a clarity that her eyes and ears could never equal.
The Rua called to one another in high, fluting voices. Had Ilna heard the sound in Barca’s Hamlet, she’d have taken it for gulls’ cries, but these were rich and didn’t have the birds’ metallic timbre.
When a flyer passed close to her vantage point, Ilna saw that its skull was more oval than a human’s and that its teeth were small and blunt. Its wings stretched from little fingers longer than a human forearm and back to its thighs. The material was stiff though thin as air, like a fish’s fin rather than the taut skin membranes of a bat.
Ilna was standing on—she was watching from; she had no body, only senses—the top of a volcanic cone which rose steeply from the water. Only a few shrubs with small waxy leaves managed to grow on the gray slopes beneath her.
One of the Rua coursed the sea just below Ilna’s vantage, dipping its legs with the quick, precise motion of a bird drinking. After each dab the legs kicked forward, tossing a gleaming object into the bag the creature held in both hands.
After the fourth grab, the creature flew up the side of the cone with the short, powerful wingbeats of a hawk. It—she: the Rua had two flat dugs to either side of her deep breastbone—swooped past Ilna to drop into the volcano’s sheer-walled interior. Her bag was full of belemites, their tiny tentacles writhing over their iridescent shells.
&nb
sp; Ilna opened her hands, feeling the rough fibers fall from her fingers. With the bag, the world of her vision slipped away. She blinked in the dim light of Sidras’ warehouse.
Sharina was watching her sidelong with a worried expression. Ilna smiled tightly, picked up the bag—it was only network of tough cord now—and handed it her friend.
“They’ll be delivered to your vessel tonight, then, and I wish you joy of them!” Sidras said.
“Aye,” said Chalcus with a laugh that wasn’t as wholly carefree as it usually sounded. Ilna’s eyes narrowed. He spat on his right palm and held his hand out to Sidras to grip, sealing the bargain they’d made while Ilna was in her reverie. “It may be that I’ll find myself in a place where they’ll be the only hope of joy there is. Though that’s not a thought that pleases me, Master Sidras.”
Chalcus threw up his outer tunic to reach the money belt he wore beneath it. Before he could open the supple leather flap, Sidras laid two fingers on his wrist.
“Hold a moment, lad,” the factor said. “You mean this cargo for Lusius, is that not so?”
“It may be that I do,” said Chalcus. Then with an edge of challenge in his voice as he went on, “Aye, if I deliver it at all, I’d judge it would be to your Commander of the Strait. What is that to you?”
“Just this,” said Sidras, withdrawing his hand. “Take the goods on consignment for me, then, rather than paying for them. I’m an old man or perhaps I’d go with you myself to help with the delivery.”
Chalcus laughed merrily and clasped arms with Sidras. “You’re not such an old man now, Master Sidras, that I wouldn’t press you to join us were not my crew full for the voyage,” he said. “But aye, I’ll deliver them in your name.”
He turned with laughter bubbling behind his eyes and said, “Now, my fine ladies, let’s take ourselves to the palace. You have your duties to attend, my blond friend; Mistress Ilna and I have good-byes to say and many a thread of business to tie up!”
