The Starfollowers of Coramonde

by Brian Daley

  Bracing himself with his left hand and leaning out carefully, he spotted Birds fluttering at the eaves of a lesser tower, darting in at nests there. Interest became surprise; they behaved like parents bringing food to their young, but the Birds of Accord had bred no offspring since they’d been driven out of the branches of the Lifetree.

  The Horseblooded cocked an ear and listened. The shriller, more disorderly notes came from beneath the eaves. He recovered the folio and hurried off to find Silverquill. The Senior Sage had been a willing tutor, anxious to hear about life on the High Ranges. It was now their habit to seek each other’s company when the mood struck, a mutual privilege.

  Silverquill was politely skeptical of Ferrian’s claim that the Birds had hatched young. Still, the old savant dropped what he was doing—comparing several copies from original manuscripts of Arrivals Macabre in an effort to learn what secret Bey had been after—and went off with the brawny Horseblooded to see.

  They eventually found the correct face of the right tower. The issue was partially settled before they got there; high chattering of young Birds filled the confines of the peaked roof. They edged carefully around a last beam, and saw slots of light from the eaves. Birds of Accord fed and nurtured impossibly small, vocal hatchlings.

  Silverquill shook his head, dumfounded. “This is unprecedented! The Birds may breed only in the branches of the Lifetree, and it was uprooted and destroyed an age ago, when the Great Blow fell.”

  “Demonstrably untrue.” Ferrian grinned wryly.

  “Even so. But that is no explanation.” They drew back, so as not to disturb that amazing scene.

  Ferrian was snapping his fingers distractedly. “The Birds roosted here when their Lifetree was destroyed, and in all these years never bred. But now they have; it remains to discern why. How long is it betwixt their mating and the laying of eggs, and from that unto the hatching?”

  “Who may say? Yet, let us venture that those are much as with other birds. What is your thought?”

  “I bethink me of only one incident here in any reasonable span of time, and that is when Bey came, and we after him.”

  The Senior Sage stroked his trim beard. “Aye, yet what can that mean? Surely the small glamour he used on Gil MacDonald cannot be the influence that has affected the Birds. Nor can it be attributed to the Guardian, with its fiery destruction, nor to Andre deCourteney’s Dismissal; they are of no nature to cause the Birds of Accord to beget.”

  “Perhaps the terror of the day? Many of them perished from that.”

  “All the less reason to think it made them bring forth young.”

  The Horseblooded’s lips pursed. “What else then? I was wounded, and did not participate in what came after.”

  Silverquill studied the weathered rafters, rubbing his thumb across his Adam’s apple. “The others came the next morning, the Trustee and her troops and Lord Angorman. They all met together in the rose garden and conferred. Thereafter, they parted ways.”

  “Hmm, that seems of no relevance either. Perhaps we are not—”

  “Hold!” The savant’s face lit excitedly. “There was another thing of it. All those combatants were under arms, and I bade them put those aside; Ladentree had seen enough of weapons. When Lord Angorman hesitated, the Trustee put him at ease, laying her Crook of office with Red Pilgrim, against a trellis. I remember seeing the Birds of Accord flitting round and round, alighting and hopping about, even on the Crook itself.”

  Ferrian’s brow knit. “You are theorizing that the Trustee’s staff is crafted of wood of the Lifetree? She never gave hint of that.”

  “True. Well, but, at least we have a glimmer of what drew the sorcerer here. The Lifetree is connected with it; armed with that fact, we may plunge into the assembled knowledge of Ladentree, and seek the rest.”

  The tall Horseblooded concurred eagerly. The Trailingsword had set many things in motion, he saw. “Two men are often too many to keep a secret from Salamá; more is too great a risk, for Bey may yet have ears here. This hunt across paper and parchment falls to you and me, dear mentor.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  For all, that here on earth we dreadful hold,

  Be but bugs to fearen babes withal,

  Compared to the creatures in the sea’s enthrall…

  Edmund Spenser

  Faerie Queene

  COMMITTED to one more trial of war, the Mariners amazed Gil with their unanimity.

  Roping needles darted unceasingly, turning out hills of extra sail. Fish and meat were salted, fruit and vegetables barreled or dried, medicines prepared and leagues of line and hawser run from the ropewalks of the Outer Hub. Shipwrights, pressed for impossible labors, delivered.

  Forges clanged and glowed by day and night. From them poured new cutlasses, arrow- and spearheads, shields, grappling hooks, axes and boarding pikes, and armor and helmets hastily done up from metal lozenges on leather. Aboard the ships that mounted them, fighting engines were refurbished. The Mariners prepared their volatile fluid in giant vats for defense of the harbor. The stuff’s base appeared to be naptha, but the seafarers had their own combinant secrets.

  Many crafts were ratcheted up the ways, or hove down in bustling shipyards for swarming repair crews and caulkers. Cargo ships took Mariner treasure, to procure supplies wherever they could. More came in each day with stores for the fleet, and against blockade. Fresh water was rationed, to build a reserve for the Hub and fill ships’ casks.

  Gil stayed out of people’s way, impatient to leave but fascinated by life among the seafarers and the incessant buzz of their preparations. But Bey was somewhere across the water, scheming, contriving, and that seldom left the American’s mind, even when he was wondering how Dunstan was or, as happened with surprising frequency, when he thought of Swan.

  Even Wavewatcher and Skewerskean were busy; the Prince of the Waves filled their time with tasks, saying it was high time two such capable Mariners shouldered more responsibility.

  Less than two weeks after the advent of the Trailingsword, the Children of the Wind-Roads sailed out again. It took hours just to maneuver into formation, with Osprey in the lead and the larger vessels around her. Tubby cargo bottoms were at the center, with lean brigs and barkentines flanking.

  Gil, aboard Osprey, was billeted with his friends in the same little storeroom they’d used on the way out. Landlorn had yielded, for now, to the partners’ pleas that they be allowed to ply their old trade as topmast hands. Serene was also in the ship’s company, having absolutely refused another separation from her husband.

  The fifth day out, a storm came up. In alarm, the American watched whitecaps come up and swells grow, and nausea hit him for the first time. As the ocean rose in sudden temper, ships’ bows began slamming into the troughs with greater and greater force. Osprey and many of her sisters could have run before the wind with a good deal of sail, but it was vital that the fleet not be scattered. Landlorn ordered most canvas taken in, as the following seas exploded tons of water around the barque. The flagship did well enough, her fore topmast staysail set and the main lower topsail taken up goosewing-fashion, presenting a fan shape to the squalls, the remainder heavily lashed to prevent its chafing fully open. The Prince commanded his captains to keep careful distance but rig lanterns, and not become too dispersed. Each craft coped as her captain judged best, most of them goose-winging like Osprey, or rigging a three-cornered cross jack.

  Gil, clinging to the lifelines, watched Landlorn clinging to a rail up on the quarterdeck, the Prince’s cloak snapping around him like a whip as he surveyed his fleet. Salt spume, gust-driven, pumiced the skin like a sandblaster, numbing it in seconds. He noticed Gil, and called, “Be not so despairing. This is only a middling blow; we will ride it out.”

  Gil, jaws clenched on the sour taste of vomit, nodded gratefully. Landlorn, mistaking that for stoicism, smiled with approval, and motioned for the American to get himself below.

  By four the next morning, when the middle watch was ov
er, the wind had died enough for eight bells to be heard clearly. At daylight the storm was blowing itself out. The ships picked their way through sluggish seas, back to a loose formation, tallying losses.

  Several vessels were no longer with them, three lost and as many more unaccounted for. Other lives had been taken by the weather as well. A great deal of sail had to be replaced, and water pumped from bilges. Masts had snapped here and there, and there was too much minor damage to calculate. That evening at sundown, Landlorn recited the brief Service for the Lost, though all hands aboard Osprey had survived. He told the crew—as captains throughout the fleet were doing—that their brothers were rejoined to the eternal flow of the tides, as all men would one day be. The sea, in Mariner creed, shall not yield up its dead.

  Debris was cleared, and shipboard routine resumed. As were-gild for the men it had killed, the ocean granted them a fair, easy ride in the next days with a fresh, following wind. They accepted it thankfully, making the Strait of the Dancing Spar in good time.

  Gil was sitting with his back against a hatch cover, enjoying the day and idly trying to calculate how much horsepower Osprey was cajoling from the wind, when Wavewatcher and Skewerskean went by, on their way aloft.

  They stopped, and Gil asked what it was like to haul canvas ten stories up. They asked what a story was.

  “Not easy to tell,” Wavewatcher decided. “Why not come up and see? Sight of the Isle of Keys cannot be far off.” Before Gil could say he’d give that a miss, the red-beard was calling for permission to take a new hand up the ratlines.

  Landlorn came to the quarterdeck rail. “Go; encounter the sky,” the Prince of the Waves told the American, curious what this fey landsman would make of the experience.

  Gil put one foot on the rail, thought better of it and sat down to take off his boots. He returned to the side. It was easy enough getting around the deadeyes and lanyards, onto the ratlines. Then he looked up the shrouds, their gathering at the top only adding to the feeling of height, and had his doubts. Osprey’s pitch and roll didn’t help.

  He started. The mere mechanics went okay, just demanded care that his foot was firmly on the ratline before he hoisted himself for the next step. Wind played its song in the rigging, and he found it appealing. There were spiderweb vibrations along the hard, coarse shrouds. Skewerskean raced past him, and when he chanced a look backwards, Wavewatcher grinned up at him. He steeled himself, going on.

  He would have liked to look around at the play of air against sailcloth and study intricacies of the ship’s rigging and running, but narrowed his concentration to ratlines and shrouds, one step at a time. He could hear the rush of foam from the keel.

  When he got to the base of the tiny platform that was the main top, Skewerskean was standing on it, smirking, fists on hips. Gil knew he was supposed to do it properly, pulling himself up the futtock shrouds and angling his body out, up onto the top, but played it safe instead, snaking up through the lubber hole. He sat there, one hand white on the ratlines, the other arm around the topmast. Wavewatcher joined them, making things, in Gil’s silent opinion, way too crowded.

  “Well, come on,” said Skewerskean.

  “What ‘come on’? Where?”

  “Why, aloft. You don’t think you are there yet, do you?”

  “I know that, goddammit! There’s a whole bunch more of this flagpole I’m hanging onto, isn’t there? But what makes you think I’m going up it?”

  “Wanted a view, did you not?” hurled Wavewatcher. “Fie, the mess-boy climbs this high to call us down to lunch,”

  The idea had its appeal; if the main top was this exhilarating, what would the crosstree be like? He got, but cautiously, to his feet.

  The main topmast shrouds, descending from the little topmast crosstrees, stretched almost vertically past courses of sail realized in stately arcs, were much less roomy than the first leg of the climb. Again, Skewerskean preceded him as Wavewatcher brought up the rear. Under his breath, Gil cursed the other Mariners watching from the yards, now and then calling out a jibe or encouragement.

  The wind up here blew his hair around in constant fluttering. He gritted his teeth, made the dubious safety of the topmast crosstree. Wavewatcher stayed in the shrouds below, and Skewerskean hung casually to one side, a hand in the shrouds. Gil reswallowed lunch and turned his head upward. The topgallant mast waited above, shrouds bunched, ratlines far too insubstantial. Then, for the first time, he took a good look around. The rigging, spars and sails were a middle kingdom in themselves, with logic and beauty of their own. Below, the hull was plainly too small to need or support these regal mansions of billowing sailcloth and creaking hemp. Here, the winds themselves were divided into components, seduced to service. To the north, he could see the southernmost coast of Veganá, and to the south the hazy shoreline of the domains of Salamá.

  He pulled himself to his feet, got one ratline without thinking. He never really decided to go the rest of the way up the topgallant mast; begun, the climb had its own destination. The two Mariners stayed behind, leaving him to his mood. Past memory and thought, he pursued sheer sensation.

  He went painstakingly, because the ship’s movements were exaggerated by the mast’s height. Here, where the halyards closed in, the mast’s body was slimmer. With exacting care, he pulled himself up onto the topgallant crosstree. Above him, the mast truck stood only a few feet higher, flying Landlorn’s sea-horse emblem. He was level with the mainroyal yard, close to the sky as he’d ever been. Here was a terrible solitude, uninhabited but for sea birds hovering over the cryptic fluxes of the Wind-Roads.

  He got his breath and pulled himself erect, adapting to the mast’s sway. He burned with fierce, abstract pride in Osprey, then threw his head back, whooping, to a sky as much around as above him. Thronging ships of the fleet spread behind, like sheep on a meadow. He called down to his friends. They waved back, asking if he’d care to climb a little higher, and goose an angel or two.

  Sounds caught his ear, coming from nowhere he could see. He heard a dry creak like a turning wheel, the crackle of flame. He craned his neck, uncertain whether or not the glare of the sun suggested a fiery mandala. Too bright; his gaze was forced down to the ocean. Before he could lift it again, something caught his attention. “What’s that, another ship?”

  The Mariners were instantly attentive. Following his pointing finger they saw, just at the periphery of sight, a disturbance in the sea to the far west. With no sail, no oar, and the immense displacement of water from its way, something came toward them.

  Lookouts were giving the alarm. Wavewatcher turned to Skewerskean, saying, “Speedily, tell the Prince just what we see!” The little chanteyman turned, sprang lightly through the air and seized the mainroyal backstay with hands and feet, swooping to the deck in a controlled fall.

  Gil began the long descent to the deck. When he dropped at last to lean on the rail, men were scurrying in all directions to bos’n’s whistles piping battle stations, the timbers drumming to running feet. The entire fleet took up the stridence. A crewman, dashing by, dumped a cork life jacket into his arms. Weapons racks emptied as arms were issued out. He was gathering up his boots, life jacket under one arm, when Skewerskean found him.

  “I must go back aloft,” the chanteyman panted. “What’s coming off?”

  “No one is sure, but it may be all our worst suspicions come real; I think it is the Acre-Fin.”

  “The—that thingie you were talking about? Here? Why?” Fright was an ache down his spine.

  “It can mean us no good. The fleet will fight if it must, or disperse and evade. This tells us how the Inner Hub fell, but too late.” He hopped to the rail. “The Prince ordered that you stand abaft by the boat station; there is little safety on the sea today.” The shrouds vibrated to his climb.

  Gil made his way aft as frantic seafarers dodged around him in either direction. He reached a boat station near the companionway. Swells were up, and a strong wind from the west. No move had been made to
put boats over the side, but that could be done in moments. A coxswain, a man Gil knew only vaguely, was waiting by his station. To the American he said, “You are to stay here in all events, where you have been accounted, to avoid confusion.”

  Archers were in the rigging, and spearmen. Gil could see the catapult arm aboard Osprey’s sister ship, Stormy Petrel, being cranked down for loading. The coxswain climbed to the rail while Gil pulled his boots on and fastened his life jacket, painfully aware what an indifferent swimmer he was. The wind had lifted to a squall. Clouds raced in with the gusts, bringing light rain.

  “I see a wake beyond our last ships.” the coxswain said. “It sends forth a wall of water. Wait; I see it no more.”

  “Will it let us alone?”

  A shrug. “Who may say? Yet, it—there! It broke surface, a very mountain of froth.” He was yelling now, with the rising wind. “It’s dived now, I think.” The air flapped his shirt and tangled his rain-soaked hair.

  Gil hiked himself up for a partial view. All around the fleet, fish of every kind raced blindly eastward, leaping through the spray, shivering in silver and polychrome.

  Could it be another sending of Bey’s? He willed himself calm; he clung to his only substance, determination to reach Yardiff Bey.

  He was brought up short by recollection that Dunstan’s sword and Dirge were stowed in his quarters. He tugged the coxswain’s trouser leg and cupped his hand to his mouth. “I’ll be right back, understand?” He made his way to a ladderwell, as the Mariner called him to come back over the hundred other shouts and orders going back and forth.

  Gil had to go down two decks and farther amidships. The gloom was usually alleviated by small gymbal-mounted lanterns, but these had been extinguished when battle stations had sounded. He groped along, trying doors along the port side as Osprey raced with the sea. Deciding he’d gone too far forward, he retraced his steps and discovered that some jerk had padlocked the room, probably one of the Mariners who shared it.