TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  Pricked to explain before the captain's puzzled interest, Dakar spewed on in riled contempt. 'The scrap wood you've shipped in this vessel's hold is a priceless commodity in Vastmark.'

  'What's there to gain?' The captain shrugged his broad shoulders, amused, but watching through hot, slitted eyes. 'Unless you want wool bales, the shepherds are poorer than field mice.'

  'They have archers.' Dakar slammed to his feet and confronted Arithon. 'I should've guessed, when you shot down those wyverns. You jumped at the chance to finagle a welcome to bid for their fighting potential!' The notion fit with a damnable perfection. Through sheer need for survival, the shepherds of Vastmark were the finest bowmen on the continent.

  The quelled lash of temper in Arithon's carriage seemed proof that the sally struck home. His response came bracingly cool. 'The arrangement will be strictly mercenary.'

  'Ath, but who'll pay them?' Dakar cried in emotional contrast. 'We know you're in debt. Or shall the tribes receive scrapwood and faggots for their loss when their young men lie dead on the field?'

  Arithon countered in diamond-bright malice. 'Lysaer's going to pay them. Fine gold. When the tide crests at dawn, I'm going to ply the time-honoured trade of my family.'

  'Piracy,' the hired captain drawled. He tossed back his wine, kindled to rich laughter, then sobered as fast to frank awe. 'Yon golden-haired prince had best look to his wife.'

  'Lysaer, poor man, doesn't yet know it's necessary.' Arithon's straight glance drank the light like sheared tourmaline as he scorned Dakar's challenge in mockery. 'Did you think I launched the Khetienn as a berth for the freeloading barnacles?'

  * * *

  Born in the landlocked city of Etarra, acquainted with ships only as a notation in ledgers which outlined the cost of moving trade goods, Princess Talith of Avenor acquired a lasting distaste for sea travel. Her plan to rejoin her royal husband in Southshire had suffered rough setbacks since the grizzled veteran captain in command of the city garrison gave flat refusal to provide her with suitable escort.

  Thwarted in her efforts to gain the deference which should have been royalty's due, informed in blunt language that her prince's loyal officers would enforce his direct wish to keep her home, Princess Talith resorted to subterfuge.

  Avenor's younger officers proved less resistant to her beauty, their tender sensibilities no match for her hand at connivance. The seedier vessels out of Hanshire had masters less enamoured of Lysaer's protective constraint. These were pleased to board her small party of servants and guardsmen, and take payment in gold to hide her plans. The princess changed ships three times to throw off determined pursuit. The men-at-arms who trailed her to uphold Lysaer's honour and drag her back into confinement could not follow across the border into Havish.

  The vessel she engaged from King Eldir's port of Cheivalt was a dowdy merchant brig with scuffed paint and slack stays named the Arrow. Laden to her load line with baled fleece and hides from the Carithwyr steppelands, and barrels of tallow, wax, and rum, she reeked in the damp. Odours from the penned hogs that had been her last deck cargo seemed permanently ingrained in her planking. The sailhands were given to layabout habits and a hatred of the purser's watchmen, who caught them swaggering through the hold at odd hours, singing, or fist swinging, or morose, as the whims of stolen drink moved them. Arrow's master was a rotund, cheerful man with pouched cheeks and a pug nose. He kept a rat-skinny mate who wore a fixed grin, even when prodded to mete out each morning's round of ship's discipline.

  Lady Talith did not keep to her cabin as the captain of the Arrow clearly wished. The stupefying impact of her beauty fouled his sail drills. Amid the watchful presence of her liveried men-at-arms, and a handmaid with no stomach for coarse company, the princess strolled topside each day. The leers and the slangs she met unflinching, her Etarran bent for intrigue quick to sort out the byplay between those in authority and their underlings. The Arrow's first mate was slack with the whip. His sailhands scarcely took his floggings to heart, but did as they pleased; another drunken sailor would stagger through his watch come the evening.

  While this morning's yelling miscreant was unlashed from the hatch grating and hauled off to the forecastle by his commiserating friends, Talith set her elbows on the gouged and peeling rail and gazed astern. To the north, the horizon which masked the shores of Tysan met sky in flat jointure with blue waters. Through the tar-blacked cord of the ratlines, the high, golden headlands of Carithwyr etched the morning haze to the east. Talith pecked chips from blistered varnish with her nails, bored to mischief, while over the screeling complaint of diving gulls, the ship worked and drove her lumbering, creaky course southward. She was too staid a tub to throw off much spray, even when she wallowed through a trough. The vessel's plump captain trod an uncertain, hovering line between his royal passenger and his man at the helm, whose cow eyes kept drifting off the compass. The mate stalked the waist, his unctuous voice raised as he chivvied idle seamen to patch a holed sail on the maindeck.

  The passage round the cape at West Shand stretched ahead, twenty days of punishing ennui, until the lookout called down from the masthead. 'Vessel bearing down off our windward quarter!'

  'From the sea side?' The captain clumped over to the rail, his gawp of surprise like a fish which had spat something bitter. 'Is she damaged, do you think?'

  'Damaged? No.' The lookout seemed awed. 'She's in mean fine trim and held sharp to her course like a cleaver.' Her lines, he resumed in admiring salty terms, were like nothing else seen in any port amid the westlands.

  Surrounded by open air and full sunlight, Princess Talith clenched her cloak through a sweeping, claustrophobic chill. She snatched back the skirts the breezes mired against her shins and said to the captain, 'We're in danger. Whatever defences you have on this vessel, I ask that you engage them immediately.'

  Arrow's master blinked as though she had just taken leave of her senses. 'My dear princess, what's to fear? No renegade in these waters would risk the executioner for a haul of raw hides and wax.' His dimpled hand swept through a deprecating gesture that encompassed the broached locks amidships. 'Surely not for a few casks of grog. Not that I'd miss them. Malingerers and pilfering have left them a sorrowful sight less than full.'

  'My husband has enemies,' Talith contradicted, chin raised as she balanced against Arrow's nosing slog from the cresting roll of a swell.

  Warmed to bated breath by the dazzling, amber slant of her eyes upon him, the captain straightened his doublet. The wrinkles tugged smooth above his lumpish paunch resettled in rucked curves beneath his belt, no more tidy, but at least past his view as he sniffed. 'These waters are under King Eldir's sovereignty and Havish is firm in neutrality. The Master of Shadow and his minions scarcely dare to turn their feud against a vessel under Cheivalt's flag of registry.'

  He was wrong, Talith sensed. The oncoming vessel breasted the sea's edge to show taut-bellied, tanbark sails and a line as lean-waisted as a wasp. The heading she held was a falcon's stoop, straight for the isolated brig.

  The captain chewed his moustache through a gusty, long sigh. 'It seems rather silly. Who would kill for a few crates of candles?' Yet he gave his grudging order for the crossbows to be fetched out of storage. Weathered covers were unlaced from the arbalests. The first mate had scarcely rousted his sailhands from their mending to man weaponry when darkness clapped down, soundless and dense as felted sable.

  The first mate screamed in panic and pandemonium broke loose on deck.

  The brigantine's prey was never chosen by mistake. Set after by shadows and fell sorcery, the Arrow floundered through the darkness like a wing-broken dove before a snake. Her mouldered chests of crossbows showed their dearth of handling, even for routine firing and maintenance to clean the rust off their latch pins. Lent no hope to repel boarders, afraid her person was the prize for an appalling set of stakes, Talith snatched her only chance. She must tuck herself away, and hope the Arrow's loutish crewmen would establish through incompetence that
they worked a cheap-rate hauler of no consequence.

  Above the din of wild cries and running feet, Lady Talith gave orders to her bodyguard. 'Strip off your surcoats and disarm. Pretend you're common sailors when the Shadow Master boards us. Let no one mention my presence.'

  'Go,' said her officer to the man posted nearest. 'Find her Grace's servants and tell them the same.' He gave a last, firm squeeze to his princess's arm before she left to grope her way below.

  Two sailhands cannoned into her before she crossed the deck. Dishevelled, breathless, her lip bitten hard in an anger to scald her very blood, Talith fumbled through the aft companionway. Her guardsmen were well trained, but young, their ranks bolstered by five stout mercenaries hired in extreme circumspection from Havish; no match for the Master of Shadow in a raid. She feared to see them lose their lives in her behalf, when the most effective tactic was to stay hidden and pray that the louts who came to search delved no farther than the rum casks in the hold.

  Talith fought her way through her cabin. She extinguished the lamps, at each step slammed and bruised where she fetched up against the bulkheads as the Arrow's helmsman lost the heading. The brig rounded up, to wallow and roll and lose way. The thumping skitter of hurried feet and the oaths of scared seamen muddled through the thunder of loose canvas.

  Her handmaid crouched in paralysed despair on her berth. 'Your Grace, we're to die. That cruel spinner of darkness will spill our poor blood for use in his unclean rites of magecraft.'

  'Hush, that's ridiculous.' Talith grabbed her servant's wrists and bullied her onto her feet. 'I met the s'Ffalenn prince years ago in Etarra. He's wily, yes. A hard man to know, but no fool to murder a hostage who's of far better use to him alive.' Too late to regret that as a weapon to bend her royal husband from his purpose, her captivity would lend an edge without parallel.

  'Come on.' Princess Talith towed her maid by touch through the darkened companionway and into the cramped starboard passage. On impulse, she elbowed the door to the mate's quarters open. The cubicle reeked of sweat-rancid shirts and the fishy exhalation from the bilges. Talith fumbled past the noisome berth, tripped on a discarded pair of seaboots, and crashed shoulder first against the hanging locker.

  'Here,' she whispered to her maid. 'Get inside.'

  Voices filtered down through the hatch grating amidships, shrill in contention over who kept the store of bowstrings. Through somebody's rapid-fire pleas for Ath's mercy, unseen hands winched to span an arbalest. The screeching ratchet of its corroded pawls set Talith's teeth on edge.

  A muffled sneeze from the locker and a flurried crackle of oilskins marked the maid's attempts to burrow into cover.

  'Hurry.' Talith squeezed into the cranny that remained, then swore like a mule drover as she skinned her elbow on the sharpened edge of the hinge. The closet was painfully small. Pressed full-length against her quivering servant, she sneezed from mildewed woollens, squirming to fold her skirts behind the mate's unsavoury garments. She scraped her wrist trying to claw the locker door closed, then cursed her gold bracelets when they hooked by ill chance on the jutting tang of the latch.

  Then she had nothing else to do but wait in sweaty, breathing stillness and total darkness.

  Through the slosh of waves against the weedy hull and the banging flog of canvas came shouts as the men blundered to take up arms. The princess strained to piece sense out of chaos.

  The press of used clothing grew stuffy, then suffocating. The close air turned Talith dizzy. Terror caused her plump maid to snivel. On deck, something metallic fell over to a nerve-wrought rejoinder from the captain.

  Then somebody bellowed in challenge and a bowstring twanged. The slap of the swell changed timbre as the attacking vessel closed to windward. Talith chewed her lip in unbearable tension, her jewellery clapped silent against her wrists by the shaking grip of her hands.

  A crossbow discharged with a clipped ping of wire; the quarrel, released, thumped wood.

  'Dharkaron show mercy, she's on top of us!' somebody cried.

  Even through the planking, over the chafe of slackened gear, Talith picked out the thrum of the wind through taut rigging. Snapped orders filtered through while the enemy vessel wore ship; then the bang of crisp canvas as her sails caught aback and she shouldered the waves alongside.

  Arithon's cloak of shadows must have lifted then, leaving Arrow's crew bemused and blinded in full sunlight. A streak of illumination filtered through the chink in the deck beams and a command cracked across roiled waters. 'Heave to or burn with your timbers!'

  Perspiration slicked Talith's temple. She repressed a stab of fear, aware even from the confines of the locker how the Arrow tempted fate through her tardy response.

  Movement flurried topside. A bowstring whined. An eruption of shouted insults came whipcut by a hiss as an arrow creased the air. The shot struck to the sickening, dull thump of a broadhead into flesh. The planks overhead thudded to the weight of a fallen body. Wet gasps ripped through an unseen victim's torn throat.

  Then the brig veered off station to a scream of freed cables as her wheel took charge, untended.

  'That's a warning!' an incisive voice called through the bedlam. 'Deliver your passenger into my care and nobody else needs to die.'

  The accent recalled memories from the Fellowship's failed king-making, except that spiked, cold ring of authority had never been heard from the prince brought for his crowning at Etarra. The tone prickled the hair at the nape of Talith's neck. She squeezed her eyes closed and drew a stifled breath. Any second, she imagined the brig's pudgy captain would give way and spill word of her presence. Defenceless and mute with apprehension, she waited alongside her trembling maid for the bargain to be struck for her person.

  No word came. Only the groaning creak as the Arrow's lines chafed. Perhaps struck witless by jelly-legged terror as the grapples clanged into her rails and barefoot enemies swung to invade her sorry decks, the fat captain made no overture of capitulation.

  Instead, Talith heard Arithon snap in annoyance, 'Prudence, my good man. They'd burn you to your loadline for sheer pleasure. You're boarded and helpless. I'd say you'd best stop fussing and retire in comfort to your quarters.'

  The captain went under coercion. Talith followed the shuffling, dragged steps of a man bound and prodded at weapon point. As captive and escort thrashed down the companionway but a plank's width from the bulkhead of the locker, she felt the jounced impact of fists and shoulders, then overheard a moaning complaint over lashings tied hurtfully tight.

  'Aye well,' groused a sailor in a slurred southcoast accent, 'lucky for you it's not wire. You see the scars on yon devil captain's wrists? No? Somebody in his life maltreated him so. Fortune's with you, he's not one for grudges.'

  'Pipe down!' a companion said in a clotted whisper. 'He hears you gossip, you'll rue it. Unholy fires o' Sithaer are nothing to the heat he can raise with his tongue.'

  Talith swallowed. As nothing else had, those snatched lines of eavesdropping slapped home her plight, that the Master of Shadow had taken the Arrow with herself as his plotted quarry. While the ongoing jostles of captors and victim receded into the stern cabin, the brig groaned and rolled to the sucking slosh of her bilges. Splintery planks pressed the princess's hot cheek. The reek of dirty wool overpowered her. She had to fight in each breath. Her head spun, and her stomach had cramped from the tension that racked her in knots.

  She could scarcely distinguish which thumps and commotion were made by Arrow's crewmen being herded under guard into the forecastle, and others made by the searchers dispatched with lamps and candles to rifle cabins and loot the ship's hold.

  The maid at Talith's back jerked in sharp, convulsive movement as the door to the mate's quarters wrenched open. Sounds leaped into clarity, foremost among them the grate of a trunk or laden box of cargo being dragged up the aft companionway. Its egress was marked by a rumble across the decking above. Nearer at hand came the squeak of a board, then the rustle of cloth as if someone e
xplored the mate's berth.

  Talith wished the intruder a pestiferous infestation of lice. To judge by the odours ingrained in the bedding, the mate had not bathed since his congress with the trollops back in Cheivalt.

  The unseen brigand found a striker and swung down the gimballed lantern. The snap of the spark pocked the catcalls of pillagers busy ransacking the lockers farther forward. Arrow heaved with a splash through a trough. The motion wafted sooty smoke through the ill-fitted boards of the closet. Talith bit back an eye-watering cough. Then the latch to the hanging locker tripped up and gave, and its green, crusted hinges wailed open.

  Talith bit her lip to stifle her reflex to scream. No man would be gratified by her cry as he touched her, she vowed in quaking silence.

  Yet no prying fingers plucked back her curtain of oilskins. No hand reached to prod, nor did any triumphant male grasp snatch through fusty woollens to expose her. Nothing happened. No intrusion, just a nerve-racked, punishing interval through which the rattling noises of invasion died back and reorganized into retreat.

  The capstan's pawls thumped as the Arrow was warped alongside her pirate captor. Talith heard the cheerful calls of crewmen, vying with each other in colourful, coarse phrases as a halyard was rigged through a block on a yardarm to arrange the off-loading of spoils. Someone called orders to cast loose the bow lines.

  To all appearance, the pirates were leaving.

  Talith eased a sigh past her painfully constricted throat. Combed over by chills as the influx of fresh air fingered her crimped hair and dewed skin, she listened as the commotion abovedecks subsided. Soon nothing met her tense and waiting stillness but the slap of the waves against the hull, and the cranky, abandoned squeal as the opened locker door flopped on its hinges in time to the Arrow's lugubrious wallow. No invaders seemed in evidence. Thin through the creak of timbers and the flap of freed canvas, she could hear the sorry moans of the captain, left bound and gagged in his quarters.