Opposite was a tavern called the Green-something; the sign’s missing lower plank had turned the name into a riddle and intellectual challenge. A moment later, Nimue became engrossed by her attempts to guess what—apart from frogs and lettuce—could be green. She was startled out of her reverie by a loud discussion being conducted on the tavern’s steps by a small group of regulars.
“The Prophet Lebioda, I tell you,” ranted one of them. “The legendary brig. That ghost ship that vanished without trace more than a hundred years back with all hands. And would later appear on the river when misfortune was in the air. Manned by a ghostly crew; many saw it. People said it would continue to appear as a spectre until the wreck was found. Well, and they finally found it.”
“Where?”
“In Rivermouth, on an old river bed, in the mud, in the very heart of a bog what they was drying out. It was all overgrown with weed. And moss. After they’d scraped off the weed and moss they found the inscription. The Prophet Lebioda.”
“And treasure? Did they find any treasure? There was meant to be treasure there, in the hold. Did they find any?”
“No one knows. The priests, they say, confiscated the wreck. Calling it a holy relic.”
“What nonsense,” hiccupped another regular. “Believing in them childish tales. They found some old tub, and then at once: ghost ship, treasure, relics. I tell you, all that’s bullshit, trashy writing, foolish rumours, old wives’ tales. I say, you there! Wench! Who be you? Whose are you?”
“My own.” Nimue had a ready answer by then.
“Brush your hair aside and show us your ear! For you look like elven spawn. And we don’t want elven half-breeds here!”
“Let me be, for I don’t incommode you. And I’ll soon be setting off.”
“Ha! And whither do you go?”
“To Dorian.” Nimue had also learned to always give as her destination only the next stage, in order never, ever, to reveal the final objective of her trek, because that only caused great merriment.
“Ho-ho! You’ve a long road ahead of you.”
“Hence, I am about to go. And I’ll just tell you, noble gentlemen, that the Prophet Lebioda wasn’t carrying any treasure, the legend doesn’t say anything about that. The ship vanished and became a ghost because she was cursed and her skipper hadn’t acted on good advice. The witcher who was there advised them to turn the ship around, not to venture into an offshoot of the river until he’d removed the curse. I read about that—”
“Still wet behind the ears and such a clever clogs?” pronounced the first regular. “You should be sweeping floors, wench, minding pots and laundering smalls, simple as that. Says she can read—whatever next?”
“A witcher!” snorted a third. “Tall tales, naught but tall tales!”
“If you’re such a know-it-all you must have heard of our Magpie Forest,” interjected another. “What, you haven’t? Then we’ll tell you: something evil lurks there. But it awakes every few years, and then woe betide anyone who wanders through the forest. And your route, if you’re truly headed for Dorian, passes right through Magpie Forest.”
“And do any trees still stand there? For you’ve cut down everything, nothing but bare clearings remain.”
“Just look what a know-it-all she is, a mouthy stripling. What’s a forest for if not to be cut down, eh? What we felled, we felled, what remains, remains. But the woodcutters fear to enter Magpie Forest, such a horror is there. You’ll see for yourself if you get that far. You’ll piss in your pants from fear!”
“I’d better be off then.”
Vyrva, Guado, Sibell, Brugge, Casterfurt, Mortara, Ivalo, Dorian, Anchor, Gors Velen.
I’m Nimue verch Wledyr ap Gwyn.
I’m headed for Gors Velen. To Aretuza, to the school of sorceresses on the Isle of Thanedd.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“You’ve made a pretty mess, Pudlorak!” Javil Fysh spat furiously. “You’ve got us in a pretty tangle! We’ve been wandering around these offshoots for an hour! I’ve heard about these bogs, I’ve heard evil things about them! People and ships perish here! Where’s the river? Where’s the shipping channel? Why—”
“Shut your trap, by thunder!” said the captain in annoyance. “Where’s the shipping channel, where’s the shipping lane? Up my arse, that’s where! So clever, are you? Be my guest, now’s a chance to distinguish yourself! There’s another fork! Where should we sail, smart aleck? To port, as the current carries us? Or perhaps you’ll order us starboard?”
Fysh snorted and turned his back on him. Pudlorak grabbed the wheel and steered the cutter into the left branch.
The leadsman gave a cry. Then a moment later Kevenard van Vliet yelled, but much louder.
“Away from the bank, Pudlorak!” screamed Petru Cobbin. “Hard-a-starboard! Away from the bank! Away from the bank!”
“What is it?”
“Serpents! Don’t you see them? Seeerpents!”
Addario Bach swore.
The left bank was teeming with snakes. The reptiles were writhing among the reeds and riverside weeds, crawling over half-submerged trunks, dangling down, hissing, from overhanging branches. Geralt recognised cottonmouths, rattlesnakes, jararacas, boomslangs, green bush vipers, puff adders, arietes, black mambas and others he didn’t know.
The entire crew of the Prophet fled in panic from the port side, yelling at various pitches. Kevenard van Vliet ran astern and squatted down, trembling all over, behind the Witcher. Pudlorak turned the wheel and the cutter began to change course. Geralt placed his hand on Pudlorak’s shoulder.
“No,” he said. “Hold the course, as you were. Don’t go near the starboard bank.”
“But the snakes …” Pudlorak pointed at the branch they were approaching, hung all over with hissing reptiles. “They’ll drop onto the deck—”
“There are no snakes! Hold the course. Away from the starboard bank.”
The sheets of the mainmast caught on a hanging branch. Several snakes coiled themselves around them, and several others—including two mambas—dropped onto the deck. Raising their heads and hissing, they attacked the men huddled up against the starboard side. Fysh and Cobbin fled aft and the deckhands, yelling, bolted astern. One of them jumped into the water and disappeared before he could cry out. Blood frothed on the surface.
“A lopustre!” shouted the Witcher, pointing at a wave and a dark shape moving away. “It’s real—unlike the snakes.”
“I detest reptiles …” sobbed Kevenard van Vliet, huddled up by the side. “I detest snakes—”
“There aren’t any snakes. And there weren’t any. It’s an illusion.”
The deckhands shouted and rubbed their eyes. The snakes had vanished. Both from the deck and from the bank. They hadn’t even left any tracks.
“What …” Petru Cobbin grunted. “What was it?”
“An illusion,” repeated Geralt. “The aguara has caught up with us.”
“You what?”
“The vixen. She’s creating illusions to confuse us. I wonder how long she’s been doing it. The storm was probably genuine. But there were two offshoots, the captain’s eyes didn’t deceive him. The aguara cloaked one of the offshoots in an illusion. And faked the compass needle. She also created the illusion of the snakes.”
“Witcher tall tales!” Fysh snorted. “Elven superstitions! Old wives’ tales! What, some old fox has abilities like that? Hides rivers, confounds compasses? Conjures up serpents where there aren’t any? Fiddlesticks! I tell you it’s these waters! We were poisoned by vapours, venomous swamp gases and miasmas! That’s what caused those hallucinations …”
“They’re illusions created by the aguara.”
“Do you take us for fools?” yelled Cobbin. “Illusions? What illusions? Those were real vipers! You all saw them, didn’t you? Heard the hissing? I even smelled their stench!”
“That was an illusion. The snakes weren’t real.”
The Prophet’s sheets snagged on overhanging branches
again.
“That’s a hallucination, is it?” asked one of the deckhands, holding out his hand. “An illusion? That snake isn’t real?”
“No! Stand still!”
The huge ariete hanging from a bough gave a blood-curdling hiss and struck like lightning, sinking its fangs into the sailor’s neck: once, twice. The deckhand gave a piercing scream, fell, shaking in convulsions, banging the back of his head rhythmically against the deck. Foam appeared on his lips and blood began to ooze from his eyes. He was dead before they could get to him.
The Witcher covered the body in a canvas sheet.
“Dammit, men,” he said. “Be heedful! Not everything here is a mirage!”
“Beware!” yelled the sailor in the bow. “Bewaaare! There’s a whirlpool ahead of us! A whirlpool!”
The old river bed branched again. The left branch, the one the current was carrying them into, was swirling and churned up in a raging whirlpool. The swirling maelstrom was surging with froth like soup in a cauldron. Logs and branches, and even an entire tree with a forked crown, were revolving in the whirlpool. The leadsman fled from the bow and the others began to yell. Pudlorak stood calmly. He turned the wheel, steering the cutter towards the calmer offshoot to the right.
“Uff!” He wiped his forehead. “Just in time! Would have been ill if that whirlpool had sucked us in. Aye, would have given us a right old spinning …”
“Whirlpools!” shouted Cobbin. “Lopustres! Alligators! Leeches! We don’t need no illusions, these swamps are teeming with monstrosities, with reptiles, with every kind of venomous filth. It’s too bad, too bad that we strayed here. Many ships—”
“—have vanished here.” Addario Bach finished the sentence, pointing. “And that’s probably real.”
There was a wreck lying stuck in the mud on the right bank. It was rotten and smashed, buried up to the bulwarks, covered in water weed, coiled around with vines and moss. They observed it as the Prophet glided past, borne by the faint current.
Pudlorak prodded Geralt with his elbow.
“Master Witcher,” he said softly. “The compass has gone doolally again. According to the needle we’ve moved from an eastwards course to a southern. If it’s not a vulpine trick, it’s not good. No one has ever charted these swamps, but it’s known they extend southwards from the shipping channel. So, we’re being carried into the very heart of them.”
“But we’re drifting,” observed Addario Bach. “There’s no wind, we’re being borne by the current. And the current means we’re joining the river, the river current of the Pontar—”
“Not necessarily,” said Geralt, shaking his head. “I’ve heard about these old river courses. The direction of the flow can change. Depending on whether the tide’s coming in or going out. And don’t forget about the aguara. This might also be an illusion.”
The banks were still densely covered in cypresses, and large, pot-bellied tupelos, bulbous at the base, were also growing more common. Many of the trees were dead and dry. Dense festoons of bromeliads hung from the decayed trunks and branches, their leaves shining silver in the sun. Egrets lay in wait on the branches, surveying the passing Prophet with unmoving eyes.
The leadsman shouted.
This time everybody saw it. Once again, she was standing on a bough hanging over the water, erect and motionless. Pudlorak unhurriedly leaned on a handle, steering the cutter towards the left bank. And the vixen suddenly barked, loudly and piercingly. She barked again as the Prophet sailed past.
A large fox flashed across the bough and hid in the undergrowth.
“That was a warning,” said the Witcher, when the hubbub on deck had quietened down. “A warning and a challenge. Or rather a demand.”
“We would free the girl,” Addario Bach added astutely. “Of course we would. But we can’t free her if she’s dead.”
Kevenard van Vliet groaned and clutched his temples. Wet, dirty and terrified, he no longer resembled a merchant who could afford his own ship. More an urchin caught scrumping plums.
“What to do?” he moaned. “What to do?”
“I know,” Javil Fysh suddenly declared. “We’ll fasten the dead wench to a barrel and toss her overboard. The vixen will stop to mourn the pup. We’ll gain time.”
“Shame on you, Mr. Fysh.” The glove-maker’s voice suddenly hardened. “It doesn’t do to treat a corpse thus. It’s not civilised.”
“And was she civilised? A she-elf, on top of that half an animal. I tell you; that barrel’s a good idea …”
“That idea could only occur to a complete idiot,” said Addario Bach, drawing out his words. “And it would be the death of us all. If the vixen realises we’ve killed the girl we’re finished—”
“It wasn’t us as killed the pup,” butted in Petru Cobbin, before Fysh—now scarlet with anger—could react. “It wasn’t us. Parlaghy did it. He’s to blame. We’re clean.”
“That’s right,” confirmed Fysh, turning not towards van Vliet and the Witcher, but to Pudlorak and the deckhands. “Parlaghy’s guilty. Let the vixen take vengeance on him. We’ll shove him in a boat with the corpse and they can drift away. And meanwhile, we’ll …”
Cobbin and several deckhands received the idea with an enthusiastic cry, but Pudlorak immediately dampened their enthusiasm.
“I shan’t permit it,” he said.
“Nor I.” Kevenard van Vliet was pale. “Mr. Parlaghy may indeed be guilty, perhaps it’s true that his deed calls for punishment. But abandon him, leave him to his death? I will not agree.”
“It’s his death or ours!” yelled Fysh. “For what are we to do? Witcher! Will you protect us when the she-fox boards the craft?”
“I shall.”
A silence fell.
The Prophet Lebioda drifted among the stinking water seething with bubbles, dragging behind it garlands of water weed. Egrets and pelicans watched them from the branches.
The leadsman in the bow warned them with a cry. And a moment later they all began to shout. To see the rotten wreck, covered in climbing plants and weed. It was the same wreck they’d passed an hour before.
“We’re sailing around in circles.” The dwarf confirmed the fact. “We’re back where we started. The she-fox has caught us in a trap.”
“There’s only one way out.” Geralt pointed at the left offshoot and the whirlpool seething in it. “To sail through that.”
“Through that geyser?” yelled Fysh. “Have you gone quite mad? It’ll smash us to pieces!”
“Smash us to pieces,” confirmed Pudlorak. “Or capsize us. Or throw us onto the bog, and we’ll end up like that wreck. See those trees being tossed about in the maelstrom? That whirlpool is tremendously powerful.”
“Indeed. It is. Because it’s probably an illusion. I think it’s another of the aguara’s illusions.”
“You think? You’re a witcher and you can’t tell?”
“I’d recognise a weaker illusion. And these ones are incredibly powerful. But I reckon—”
“You reckon. And if you’re wrong?”
“We have no choice,” snapped Pudlorak. “Either we go through the whirlpool or we sail around in circles—”
“—to our deaths.” Addario Bach finished his sentence. “To our miserable deaths.”
Every few moments the boughs of the tree spinning around in the whirlpool stuck up out of the water like the outstretched arms of a drowned corpse. The whirlpool churned, seethed, surged and sprayed foam. The Prophet shivered and suddenly shot forward, sucked into the maelstrom. The tree being tossed by the whirlpool slammed against the side, splashing foam. The cutter began to rock and spin around quicker and quicker.
The entire crew were yelling at various pitches.
And suddenly everything went quiet. The water calmed down and the surface became smooth. The Prophet Lebioda drifted very slowly between the tupelos on the banks.
“You were right, Geralt,” said Addario Bach, clearing his throat. “It was an illusion after all.”
Pudlorak looked long at the witcher. And said nothing. He finally took off his cap. His crown, as it turned out, was as shiny as an egg.
“I signed up for river navigation,” he finally croaked, “because my wife asked me to. It’ll be safer on the river, she said. Safer than on the sea. I won’t have to fret each time you set sail, she said.”
He put his cap back on, shook his head, then tightly grabbed a handle of the wheel.
“Is that it?” Kevenard van Vliet whimpered from under the cockpit. “Are we safe now?”
No one answered his question.
The water was thick with algae and duckweed. Cypresses began to dominate the riverside trees, their pneumatophores—or aerial roots, some of them almost six feet tall—sticking up densely from the bog and the shallows by the bank. Turtles basked on islands of weed. Frogs croaked.
This time they heard her before they saw her. A loud, raucous barking like a threat or a warning being intoned. She appeared on the bank in her vulpine form, on a withered, overturned tree trunk. She was barking, holding her head up high. Geralt detected strange notes in her voice and understood that apart from the threats there was an order. But it wasn’t them she was giving orders to.
The water under the trunk suddenly frothed and a monster emerged. It was enormous, covered all over in a greenish-brown pattern of tear-shaped scales. It gobbled and squelched, obediently following the vixen’s order, and swam, churning up the water, straight at the Prophet.
“Is that …?” Addario Bach swallowed. “Is that an illusion too?”
“Not exactly,” said Geralt. “It’s a vodyanoy!” He yelled at Pudlorak and the deckhands. “She’s bewitched a vodyanoy and set it on us! Boathooks! All hands to the boathooks!”
The vodyanoy broke the surface alongside the ship and they saw the flat, algae-covered head, the bulging fishy eyes and the conical teeth in its great maw. The monster struck the side furiously, once, twice, making the whole ship shudder. When the crew came running up with boathooks it fled and dived, only to emerge with a splash beyond the stern a moment later, right by the rudder blade. Which it caught in its teeth and shook until it creaked.
Season of Storms Page 22
