The Starfollowers of Coramonde

by Brian Daley

“Open those gates,” the trumpeter directed. “The High Constable of Region Blue will enter.”

  Gale-Baiter hefted a cutlass. Other Mariners appeared on the wall, with bows and javelins. Among them were Wavewatcher, the giant red-haired harpooner and Skewerskean, his smaller partner. “Be you gone,” the captain told the Sisters of the Line, “for we know you to be no true Glyffans.”

  Some cavalry women had bows out, nocking arrows; others shook lances, hollering angry denials. Gil dismounted, a sure sign that a cavalryman wanted no trouble and offered none. He swept off his battered hat with its bobbing quill.

  “Gale-Baiter, it’s me, Gil MacDonald, remember? I swear, these are really Glyffans. We’re dogging Yardiff Bey. You’ll let us in, right?”

  The Mariner was taken off guard. He swapped uncertain looks with Wavewatcher and Skewerskean. “’Tis assuredly he,” the harpooner admitted. Gale-Baiter ordered the gates opened. Swan was pondering the American.

  “You have friends in unlooked-for quarters,” she remarked. He bowed.

  “We had been told you would be enemies,” Gale-Baiter explained when they’d joined him inside. There were twenty or so seafarers. They were swaggerers, dashing figures. They wore embroidered shirts and brocaded tunics, bibs of coins at their necks, chains of them at their wrists. Thick armlets and bracelets glittered, and on their buckles gemstones sparkled. But their cutlasses, bows and javelins were unadorned and well-used. Wavewatcher and Skewerskean stood warily to either side of their captain. The harpooner wore a sealskin shirt and a big scrimshawed whale’s tooth on a thong against his hairy chest, and his barbed throwing-iron was in his hand. His smaller friend’s sleeves were sewn with tiny bells that jingled as Skewerskean moved. “It was said impostors were abroad,” the captain said.

  “By whom?” Swan rapped.

  “Our Prince’s special ambassador, who set sail this morning, after arriving in great hurly-burly.”

  Gil blasphemed, clenching his fist in the air. Soon, it was established what had happened. The Mariners’ fleet had shattered Southwastelander sea power in a two-day engagement in the Central Sea, then pursued remnants to this area. The seafarers had laid waste to Death’s Hold, to deny the southerners future sanctuary and erase their foothold in Glyffa. Afterward, the bulk of the Mariners had sailed northward after their surviving foes, leaving several ships on patrol in local waters. Gale-Baiter, remembering what Gil had said in Earthfast, had mentioned to his Prince that travelers from Coramonde might be coming to the ruined fortress. The Prince of the Mariners had assigned him to the patrol, ordering him to check upriver at Final Graces periodically, where wayfarers would logically stop first, to gather any recent news. Gale-Baiter had done so once, a week before. Three days ago he’d returned, but his ship had been damaged by a submerged rock, barely making Final Graces.

  He and his men had hove down their ship, the Long-Dock Gal, for repairs. The following day, another craft had appeared flying Mariner colors, bearing the ensign of an ambassador extraordinary. Her master’s papers showed she was on a mission for the Prince of the Mariners, awaiting a diplomatic entourage from the Glyffans and Veganáns. The newcomer’s crew couldn’t even aid Gale-Baiter’s in repairing the Gal; their orders were to stand ready for instant departure.

  Only hours before Swan’s squadron arrived, the expected party had appeared, worn from strenuous riding, and ducked aboard their ship. Hooded and cloaked, they hadn’t been seen by Gale-Baiter’s men. Their horses, used up, had died at their tethers within minutes. Before their summary departure, the entourage had dispatched word that they might have been trailed by Southwastelanders masquerading as Glyffans.

  It had to have been Bey and his men, using a contingency plan. But in leaving Gale-Baiter to cover his withdrawal, Bey had been unaware that Gil had met the captain, and could dissuade him from a bloodletting.

  Gale-Baiter testified, “I had seen the papers they bore. Their ring-seal proved their mission was of highest priority. I was angry they would not assist our repairs, but could make no objection. Unhappy am I that I cannot go on their wake right this moment.”

  “’Tis well-sent that you were repairing damage,” Swan observed, “or they might have worked some ill to stave off pursuit.”

  “Rot him! I shall set sail on that liar’s course. The body of the fleet is overdue to return, and there are other ships patrolling. We will take him; the Prince boasts vessels swifter still than mine.”

  Gil pounced on that. “You’ll be ready that soon?”

  “Aye, and if those were Occhlon scum, they can set only one course. North of here Mariners still scour the oceans. There is but unending water to the west. South will they voyage; the first hospitable landfall they can make is Veganá.”

  “Uh-uh,” Gil told him, “Veganá’s no good anymore. The Occhlon got whipped by the Crescent Landers.”

  “Then, to be safe, they can make no nearer port than the Isle of Keys. We shall catch them in open seas.”

  “But where would Yardiff Bey have gotten Mariners’ safe-passage letters and seals?” Swan mused.

  “There is only one place I wot of,” Gale-Baiter said darkly. “The Inner Hub, whose destruction started this war.”

  Gil concurred. He himself had fooled enemies during the thronal war with phonied dispatches. That the scam had been turned around proved how fast Bey learned.

  “’Tis to be sea chase,” the captain was telling Wavewatcher. The hulking redbeard nodded happily, scratching the tangle of rust-red curls on his chest. “See the repairs finished,” Gale-Baiter continued, “with all speed.” The harpooner went off, Skewerskean by his side.

  Gil took the captain’s elbow. “Hey, hey; I’ve gotta go along.”

  Gale-Baiter sized him up. Gil avoided meeting Swan’s gaze, proceeding: “You’re headed south and the seas belong to the Mariners, right? You’ll overhaul Bey, most likely; if you don’t, you’ll still get me south a lot faster than I could get there on land. The Crescent Landers have a whole load of real estate yet to take back from the southerners. I can’t wait that long; you promised me passage whenever I wanted.”

  The Mariner scratched his head. “Very well. I gauge the Isle of Keys will be our next objective, saved for last.”

  They all went to the dock. The Long-Dock Gal had been moved to the quayside for final work. Seamen were laboring with caulking irons, mallets and grease wells. Braces and bits, carpenter’s hatchets, rave hooks and augers lay nearby. She was a small brig, carvel-built of finely sawn, smoothly trimmed planks, more a thing of the sea than those ungainly cogs the Crescent Lands used. The Gal didn’t have her name on her bow, what with literacy uncommon. She bore instead a painting, a winking blonde. Right away, though, the American saw she had no ram or ship-fighting engines.

  “Your boat doesn’t look like it can protect itself,” he pointed out.

  Gale-Baiter winced, collecting his self-control. “She is not a ‘boat,’ nor is she an ‘it.’ She’s a ship, you see? On open sea she dances rings ’round anything not best friends with her. No southern scow can match a Mariner craft. We come alongside and board; that is the long and short of it.” He took in the progress his men had made. “We will not be done by nightfall, and I won’t navigate this poxed river in the dark. First light, then.”

  Swan billeted her troops in the dusty, deserted houses of Final Graces. For herself, she took the cobwebbed inn. Gil found her seated in a rickety chair, helmet put aside. She’d just finished writing up the day’s report in her journal, and had a compact ledger open, balancing expenditures and funds of Region Blue. She looked up.

  He was having a tough time getting started; she broke the silence. “This damnable war has leached away monies I needed. It was my hope to squeeze into the budget a bridge project. Trade would have doubled.” She sighed. “Impossible, this year, and there will be extra hardship for that. But you didn’t come to give ear to administrative woes, did you?”

  He stared into heavy-lidded brown eyes. “I thought,”
he began, halted, then switched from what he’d wanted to say. “I thought you might not mind taking Jeb with you. You could leave him with Ferrian at Ladentree.”

  She closed the ledger. “I shan’t be stopping there. It falls upon me to rejoin the Trustee with all speed.”

  “Oh.” He fooled with his hat, thumbing its creases. “Will you tell me what’s the matter?”

  She leaned on the chair’s arm. “You are being rash. Your friends may need you, in Veganá, and I mislike what is in your mien when you speak of him, the sorcerer. Does he look the same, do you think, when he talks of you?”

  “No. I mean, he’s one pretty cold fish.” He lost patience. “Are you holding this against me, or what? Every Mariner alive is heading for the Isle of Keys; this whole thing could be over before the Trustee and the others get the baby to her home city. Angorman and Andre don’t need me, but Dunstan does. Swan, I can’t depend on anyone but me. Can you tell me you wouldn’t hang in for the whole distance, in my place?”

  Her severity failed. “No. No, I should imagine I couldn’t tell you that.”

  He took her hand. Rising, she pressed to him. He kissed her, taking the pins from her hair deftly, familiar with them now. She shook out the flowing blue-blackness. Her finger hooked for a moment at the chain that held the Ace of Swords to his breast. When he pulled her toward the stairs she didn’t resist; events were shifting again; their respite was almost done.

  They took one another hungrily. Neither had expected their exemption to last forever. They made a last denial of any truth but their own; it wasn’t altogether futile.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Who thinks to wrest the sea from us

  Or rule us with the sword?

  We grappled Occhlon vessels nigh,

  And gave our brief, complete reply,

  “Pikes, cutlasses, and board!”

  from “The Southwastelanders’ War,”

  a Mariner song

  GIL came up the gangway just after sunrise, thankful to find the Gal’s deck firm under foot, forgetting she was still quayside on a quiet stretch of river.

  He went to Gale-Baiter, who stood calmly by the rail. “Anything I can do?”

  “Only in giving these lads room. We are overdue for rendezvous with the fleet, and shall back-and-fill down this river. At least the ebb tide’s with us.” He sniffed the air. “It be against a head wind, though.”

  The American didn’t know what any of that meant. He kept out of the way, along with his saddlebags and the wrapped bundle of Dirge. Crewmen were freeing berthing hawsers from their bollards, while men in a longboat readied to warp the Long-Dock Gal into the current. The harpooner was bawling orders aloft; Gale-Baiter’s first officer had been lost in sea battle, and Wavewatcher was serving in his stead. Skewerskean seemed everywhere, noticing each detail, his sleeves’ bells sounding each movement. Gil liked the crisscross lines of laughter in the little man’s face.

  Swan had led her column out shortly before, one of the troopers towing Jeb Stuart’s rein. They’d been near the end of any words they could say to one another.

  “When I come back,” he’d insisted, “I’ll come through Glyffa, get Jeb, and see you in Region Blue.”

  “In Region Blue,” she’d supported his contrivance. Then she’d taken up the mirror-bright helmet of her rank. Watching her horse being brought up, she’d added, “Once again now, you have nothing more to risk than your life.”

  She’d never looked back. He’d felt an awful hollowness threaten, and made himself go to the dock imitating high spirits.

  The Gal got into the current’s fairway. The longboat was brought aboard and topsails set for maneuvering. The Wheywater was green and wide here. The Mariners were calmer away from the quay. They’d be happier still on the open sea. His own discomfort, Gil thought, would grow proportionately.

  Gale-Baiter didn’t have many men aloft; few were needed to man the topsails.

  “Note how some of them be singing whilst others are a-sulk?” the captain inquired. “After repairs were done, some of them slicked up and went to try their fortune with your Glyffan playmates. And some were kindly received, and some not. Well, this is one place where the ladies’ decisions are not to be questioned; even these jolly-boys know that. I put the lucky ones up in the yards, where they are safe until the rest get over their snit.”

  He spoke a command that Wavewatcher relayed with a roar, “Back that mainyard! And hop to; you move like a damn bargeman!” Backing the mainyard made the Gal drift broadside down the current’s fairway. Gradually, a bend in the river came in off the bow.

  The captain had the foremast topsail backed too. Wind hit both sails’ forward surfaces, and the Gal took a stern-board. Gil began to think they were going to back downriver.

  The brig was in position to stand fairly down the Wheywater. Yards pointed into the wind that came from the sea; she floated with the current and the ebb tide, moving with beautiful economy. Ahead, the green waterway spread broader. Gil congratulated himself on bypassing the campaign for this more pleasant transportation.

  Later, Death’s Hold came into view around a point of land, alone on a wide gray delta to the north. Black smoke seeped from its cracked battlements and rose from its gutted spires, where the crab and the gull had dined on bloated carrion.

  Gil was mesmerized by it, shivering. Death’s Hold was the place he’d glimpsed in the Dreamdrowse, but this devastation hadn’t been part of the vision. Gale-Baiter had assured him no Horseblooded had been found there. The American’s hope, redirected to the Isle of Keys, was more the product of insistence than of faith.

  One of the hands aloft exclaimed and pointed. Two smaller craft had put out from the other shore, some way ahead. One was a dory-boat, the other a longboat of eight oars. They were packed with men, the sun splashing from brandished weapons. Their course was for interception. Gil counted a dozen men and more in the longboat, plus whatever the dory held. Besides himself and Gale-Baiter, there were nine men on deck to meet them. The captain called several more down from the yards; boarding was clearly the order of business. “That lice-ridden masquerader must have kept more men hidden below decks,” he rasped, “if he can afford to throw this many at us in a diversion, leaving them behind.”

  Wavewatcher, who’d put his harpoon away, was feeling the point of a lance with his thumb. Other Mariners collected cutlasses from the racks, took up boarding pikes or strung bows. Gil tucked Dirge behind some coils of hawser and drew the Mauser. His satisfaction in his decision to sail had evaporated. When the last few rounds were gone it would be sword’s point, with him no different from anyone there. He’d have hocked his soul for a handful of bullets.

  Gale-Baiter barked more orders, including one that the master’s cabin shutters be secured. The fore topsail filled, and the Gal drew ahead, her bow swinging slowly to the fore. The two boats pulled madly, the dory falling behind the longboat. Waiting at the rail, Gil heard Skewerskean mutter something about their luck that it was only two boats. Gil didn’t think their luck was running so hot. Men aloft in the yards waited anxiously for their captain’s orders to fill all, but the brig hadn’t cleared the river’s shelves yet, and Gale-Baiter bided his time.

  The longboat was preparing—clumsily, Gil thought—to come alongside. A man stood in its bow with grapnel and line. Skewerskean had taken up his re-curve bow. He drew, aimed, released. The shot was long, the arrow missing by an arm’s length, but shields were raised in the longboat. The next shaft was true, but buried itself in leather plies.

  The raised shields bore the naming mandala of Yardiff Bey. The Mauser came up and blasted twice, Gil’s reflex reaction to the sorcerer’s blazonry, prodded, in part, by the Rage sleeping within him. The shots went wide. The Mariners were aghast, except Gale-Baiter, who’d heard a handgun at the White Tern. The American restrained himself. The shots hadn’t deterred the Occhlon; perhaps Bey had prepared them for the possibility of gunfire.

  Resting both elbows on the rail,
Gil squeezed off the Mauser’s last round. The man in the bow pitched into the water, his mail shimmering once, and was gone. Another rushed to replace him, and the grapnel whirled round and round.

  Gil brought the Browning Hi-Power up carefully, resolved not to shoot unless he was certain he’d hit, and that it would make a difference. Gale-Baiter hollered, “Do for the coxswain, their steerer!” If the boat were pilotless, it might let the Gal slip by. Gil fired twice, too quickly. Tongues of spray leapt in the longboat’s wake.

  “Should’ve saved ’em,” he rebuked himself. Holstering the Browning, he tugged Dunstan’s sword free. His hand gripped, loosened, gripped tighter on it. Skimming his hat aside, he considered removing his byrnie, in case he had to swim for it. Compromising, he only loosened its lacings.

  The man in the longboat threw his grapnel, missed, and began reeling in furiously, aware that the brig could soon make faster way. He waited behind a shield through the next salvo of arrows and javelins, then cast again. The grapnel missed the rails, where the Mariners might have chopped it loose, and lodged where tiller connected to rudder across the sternpost, impossible to get without someone’s exposing himself to archers in the boat.

  Wavewatcher saw what had happened. Gil, standing near, saw the man’s big, freckled paw reach for the belt knife hanging at the middle of his back, sailor-style, where either hand might take it. Gale-Baiter stopped him, saying, “It is my place. Stand away.” He took his own knife in his teeth and vaulted the rail.

  Gale-Baiter let himself down quickly by the few handholds there were. Men in the longboat were hauling line rapidly, ducking under Mariner covering fire. The captain dropped the last few feet, to cling to the sternpost. The dripping line being too taut to release, he began sawing with his blade. Bowmen in the longboat hadn’t shot at the Mariners on deck, having no clear targets. But now arrows began to hiss, drilling the air.

  One transfixed the captain’s leg to the rudder. Two more sank home, one in his thigh, one just below the scapula. Gil had one second’s look at Gale-Baiter’s face as the captain, pasted to the rail, realized he was dead. Falling, he tore loose the arrow holding his leg to the rudder. Rings of water sprang from his impact. The line remained. One Mariner got a leg up on the rail, meaning to retrieve his captain. Skewerskean caught his arm and flung him back. “He was dead, fool; so will we all be, if we do not stand together.”