The Starfollowers of Coramonde

by Brian Daley

  Springbuck’s chin was against his chest. “But our roster here is short. Militarily speaking, this is farce.”

  “Practically speaking, it is inescapable,” she parried. “You not only lack the means to shore up your throne. You lack the time.”

  He resettled himself in his plush chair, considering that. The three were met in the palace of the King of Seaguard, who’d kept fealty to the Ku-Mor-Mai. Though the drapes were fastened against night airs, the conferees could hear the gulls mourning over Bold-haven Bay. “The Mariners are waging war on the sea, and winning against the Southwastelanders. The King of Seaguard would give the ships needed.”

  “Few as we are, we have small hope to conquer the Southwastelands,” Hightower reminded him, “much less lay siege to the Masters.”

  Gabrielle, exasperated, tapped her toe. They knew it was a danger signal, and listened. “You do not understand yet, nor does Springbuck; your goal is to penetrate through to the Necropolis, and not in order to mount some crude siege.

  “I told you of the seance with Gil MacDonald, when I gave him the Ace of Swords. Since that night I’ve had my busy ear to the half-world and the tidings its creatures carry. I have read auguries and scrutinized the stars, deciphered the fall of the knucklebones, and taken the meanings of entrails.” Where she was usually light-spirited, even in the gravest matters, she was somber. “This upheaval is conceived to fend us off from the Five and their pursuits; it is the sort of thing about which Andre warned. The Masters think you two can launch no offensive, all in your disarray. Before we can act, they are confident, their real labors will bear fruit.”

  Springbuck played with the basket hilt of his sabre, Bar. No more ceremonial trappings for him; he’d chosen to wear his old attire of an Alebowrenian bravo on his excursion to Seaguard. He’d undoubtedly have more use for vambraces and war mask than brocade and silk.

  “What would be their crop?” he wondered.

  “Ultimate spellbinding. It could wipe away the world.”

  “Can it be stopped?”

  “Everything can be stopped, even time itself, Ku-Mor-Mai. But this endeavor cannot be foiled from here. Shardishku-Salamá is like some smelting furnace of magic; it cannot be extinguished by half-measures, or from afar. We may go to it and do what arms and enchantments can, but from Coramonde we can achieve nothing.”

  Springbuck clicked his tongue and tapped Bar’s pommel. “Then you prevail, Gabrielle. I’d hoped to avoid this war for a time.”

  High tower was on his feet. “As easy to reject the flood or deny the avalanche. Spare us your regrets; you know little enough of what awaits you.”

  His tone dropped. “We may yet see a time of cataclysm like no other. Drums tell the world to march. Cast out your wise men, Ku-Mor-Mai! Drive them from you and listen to the epistles of your flesh; the gales of war speak your name tonight! Take the rede your hackles send you; study the writ of your bowels. There’s where verity resides now.”

  “My Lord Hightower.” The sorceress stopped him. “Cast no more shadows. Salamá has thrown quite enough of those.”

  He subsided, going to monotone. “Preparation may prove futile, and forethought will be no protection; I did but warn him.” To Springbuck he added, “There will only be the guidance that lives in the marrow.”

  The younger man rose. “If that’s the shape of things, we’ll do as best we may, to stop this thing unknown by thaumaturgy or hand-strokes. But first we must look upon it.”

  She whirled on him, enraged. “Unknown to you!” In a temper she was capable of anything, and a Protector-Suzerain was no safer than any other man. Springbuck held himself carefully.

  “We have had our glimpse at it, your Warlord and I,” she continued, her hand to the old man’s cheek. Hightower’s chain-mailed arm encircled her. Springbuck left, closing the door behind.

  His name was called. Captain Brodur caught up, breathing hard, his bared sword in his hand. It was he who’d brought the first warning of revolt, because his home fief had been first to be lost. Brodur, visiting his family, had risen from bed to enter the fray in breeches and shirt, without bothering to take up armor or arming girdle. He and his family had been driven out though, their land taken. Brodur had made the painful recognition of his duty and carried the news. He was carefree no more; men called him “Brodur-Scabbardless” for, having begun with a bared blade, he’d vowed not to cover it until his family had their lands returned.

  Now he gasped his message to come and see what Omen had appeared. They found a hallway window. Moonlight and starlight over Boldhaven Bay was outdone by a new illumination. Seeing the Sign hanging in the southern sky, Springbuck shouted for Hightower and Gabrielle. They came running, the Warlord with his two-handed blade half drawn.

  Gabrielle confirmed that it was the Trailingsword. “My brother and the rest discharged their commission. Now you have a higher edict, Springbuck; the men left to you will go with you southward. Reacher will have seen it in Freegate, as will any who hate the Masters. Whether those will be enough or not, we shall learn, in seven times seven days.”

  Springbuck drew Brodur-Scabbardless aside.

  “Call together all leaders of the diverse elements. Have the King of Seaguard invited. You may pass my word: Soon many swords, like yours, shall leave behind them the estate of the scabbard.”

  Every scrap of their patience, stamina and imagination was subject to test, those next three days.

  “Your Grace, the septs of Matloo refuse to embark without their war-drays. I ask you, where have we room for those oversized wagons and horses?”

  “Hmm. Fill each dray with cargo, captain; they are capacious enough. Pack more in around them once they’re secure. Thus, we sacrifice little space. We may need those fearsome wagons. The horses will fit somewhere aboard the vessels designated for mounts. Some men of Matloo may accompany them.”

  “My Lord Hightower, the Ku-Mor-Mai directed me to you on a subject. A special tax is levied on profits of those buying goods from the departing Lords and soldiers. Where can be the justice in this? I am an honest man, seeking to aid our great cause, and take due earnings from that. The Protector-Suzerain would lack funds, had not we merchants opened our coffers, converting goods and deeds of land to hard specie.”

  Hightower’s reply blew the userer’s hair back. “Slight good will your monies do you, coin-caresser, if we fail! When before this have you bought bullocks so cheaply? When has land been rented or sold to you outright at such low sums? Bah! Better men than you are sailing in one more day while you, squealing piglet, are best gone from my sight, else I hang you by the heel at the ramparts.”

  “The problem is as follows, Ku-Mor-Mai,” said Brodur-Scabbardless. “The men of Teebra object that the volunteers from the Fens of Hinn are allowed to fly their flag. They say rebellious Hinn is rightfully theirs, and this should not be permitted.”

  “The men of Hinn promised they would be first to the gates of Salamá if they could fly their standard. Besides, the Grand Council of Teebra had grown hardhearted to them, for in their shared religion, Hinn is more orthodox, making Teebra uneasy. See what you can do to soothe the Teebrans, but do not let them forget their fealty to me.”

  The captain made a note. Looking him over, Springbuck asked, “What device is that you bear upon your shoulder?”

  It was a stylized emblem, a longsword picked out in white, beaming hilt uppermost, on a field of stars. “Everyone seems to wear the Trailingsword now.” He made to go.

  “Just a moment, Captain; there is one matter the more. Lord Hightower will command the expedition under my lead, but will also general our regular legions. He needs a good man over all his cavalry elements. He selected you.”

  Brodur was evasive. “Lord, I have never even commanded a squadron, let alone regiments!”

  “You avoided it. It was permitted until now, but that is no longer tenable. Oh, I know you would rather keep peace of mind, but you’ll learn to live without it, as I have. Surely after the war yo
u can go your own way once more.”

  Brodur, ruffled, denied that. “There will be no peace, once my fine aptitudes are disclosed.” The Ku-Mor-Mai barked with laughter, but wondered how the captain would react when he was in charge.

  “Lord Hightower, many men take exception to these new rules. Being told to boil drinking water, and how and where a man may take his relievements, and the things they must do with their rubbish, and how they must bathe with soaps the apothecaries concocted, those lay much against their pride.”

  “You are a brave and able man, Lord Bantam. I remember your volunteering to stay behind and command my family’s garrison against siege during the retreat to Freegate last summer. But what happened? Half the men who remained with you took ill. The Hightower and its defenders would have fallen if Yardiff Bey’s general had had more time to spend on you. Attend me; these rules, as strange to me as to you, were given to Springbuck by the outlanders Van Duyn and Gil MacDonald. We will be careful about our drinking water and our—our sanitation, as they put it, and no man will stop short of our goal for sickness if I can help it. If you must, tell them it has arcane meaning. Or again, provoke their honor; this is part of their service.

  “And pass along my warrant that these rules are holy doctrine hereafter. The man who ignores them and his superior will both hear from me in strongest terms, clear? My gratitude, Lord Bantam.”

  Men grew sick, stomachs emptied their contents into the sea, and the leeward side of any troop vessel was a noxious, crowded place to be.

  The sailors of Seaguard’s flotilla were hugely entertained by so many landlubbers coming to grips with the sea at once. There would have been fights, Springbuck was sure, except that few of his soldiers wanted to do anything but lie or sit in their misery. On advice from older officers, he ordered that everyone was to stay topside whenever weather permitted during the day. Lingering below invited disease and apathy, and dampened morale worse than salt spray ever would.

  Hightower and Gabrielle spoke to him with more ease now that their renascent love was open fact, but usually preferred one another’s company to the Ku-Mor-Mai’s. Springbuck either talked to Brodur or the officers of his flagship, a ponderous fighting-carrack, or stood on the aft fighting castle.

  Though Brodur-Scabbardless had ample opportunity to gamble, he had little time, worrying about his new command and fretting about their horses’ well-being. A part of his outgoing spirit returned, but he still carried a bared blade.

  Nearly two weeks out, they sighted the Inner Hub. They asked one another what could possibly have made those immense breaches in the sea wall, and torn the harbor gates away so completely as to leave no trace of them. This was the older, the first of the Mariners’ citadels, and had boasted walls of marble and of beryl, gardens, halls and libraries and temples. Now there was smeared ruin. Mast trucks poked blackened pennants out of the surface of the harbor, grave markers. Ash and wreckage drifted restlessly on the water. Springbuck could only hope that, as Gabrielle had predicted, the Mariner vengeance would occupy the attention of whatever Southwastelander ships plied the sea.

  He was on the rear tower of the carrack, named Oakengrip. Hightower and the sorceress were on the forward castle, she sheltered under the long, warm sweep of his cloak. A gulf of loneliness yawned, even as a cold, analytical side of Springbuck came forth, telling him it would strengthen the expedition’s resolve to see this devastation and think what it meant in terms of home.

  Pulling his own cloak tighter, he paced to the other side of the deck and peered forward, toward the southern horizon. Unsteady in the unfamiliar rhythm of the sea, he’d been on deck most of the day, letting men know he shared “the ship, the weather, the situation altogether,” as the Mariner rhyme had it.

  The next day the sea became rough again, sporting whitecaps, and all landsmen who’d missed the agony of seasickness the first time coped with it now. Those who’d already dealt with it refamiliarized themselves. No ships were lost, and only a handful of careless men. The Ku-Mor-Mai was thankful he’d gotten off so easily. A day came, just short of three weeks after the Trailingsword’s appearance, when land hove into view.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The virtue of adversity is fortitude.

  Francis Bacon

  “On Adversity”

  IT was a peninsula of struggling, sunburned orchards and crops. Springbuck’s poor vision gave him only the vague details of modest white huts fronting a bleached, broad beach. Fishing nets had been draped to dry, and long canoes were pulled above the tide’s mark. The flotilla was on full alert; there was little information about this side of the Central Sea. The strand was unnervingly quiet, with no sign that their arrival had been noted. Unwelcomed, unopposed, they were used to no third alternative.

  Hightower ascended the aft castle. “Someone must go ashore, and there is not much time for it.” The Ku-Mor-Mai agreed; an alarm might already have gone out. The Warlord finished, “It is my intention to do so.”

  “I’m sorry, my Lord, but you are too valuable to risk at preliminary scout. Send someone whom you trust.”

  Brodur, a pace behind the old man, offered himself at once. Hightower insisted, “I will take any others you choose, Lord, but mean to go myself. It will fall to me to give the command to disembark. I must see what is there for myself first.”

  The younger man couldn’t dispute that. He conceded the point, and Hightower was soon in a longboat with Brodur and a dozen other volunteers. Springbuck followed them through a spying tube, squinting elaborately to make the scene come clear, but after they’d secured their boat and gone past the first line of houses, he lost them.

  A half-hour passed. Springbuck ordered more boats readied, selecting a larger party to come ashore with him. Just then the longboat put out again from the beach, and in its wake came the canoes. Men of Coramonde loosened swords and tested bowstrings, but heard no war cries and saw no weapons or armor flashing.

  Hightower’s boat pulled alongside the flagship, but the others stood back. Their occupants had been warned that Coramonde, come to wage war, would be quick to misconstrue an act as provocation.

  The people were small, brown-skinned folk whose boats were painted in bright colors and fanciful designs. Most wore a sort of short kirtle; many had flowers woven in their hair, and there was a good deal of simple jewelry, childlike works of coral or shells. The Ku-Mor-Mai noticed, at this close range, that many were scarred, missing a limb, maimed, bereft of an eye or ear, or otherwise afflicted. Still, they sang a happy-tempoed tune of greeting, for all the fact that their faces were sad and wary.

  The soldiers and sailors didn’t know what to think of these little people, but called to them good-naturedly.

  Hightower and Brodur brought a representative to the Protector-Suzerain, a slender brown man older than most of his people, wearing a dignified chiton. He was in awe of Oakengrip. “O Ku-Mor-Mai,” Hightower boomed formally, “I present Kalakeet, who is Speaker of these people, which call themselves the Yalloroon.”

  The Speaker smiled, but clearly had misgivings. Springbuck was to learn these people had good reason to fear strangers. Kalakeet told him, “The great Lord Hightower has said thou art called Protector-Suzerain, and we beg thee to take us under the soldierly wing of Coramonde.”

  Springbuck was stuck for reply. Could he, in fact, be a Protector? “Why do you ask it of me?”

  The Speaker’s face lost composure, as if a hope faded. “We are tormented by an enemy, as beasts of the pasture or cooped fowl. In our whole history we have been unable to throw off the collar of Shardishku-Salamá, and we had thought, when the Trailingsword lit our sky night after night…”

  Thinking what it must have meant to have the Masters blight their lives for generations, Springbuck’s impulse was to tell Kalakeet’s people deliverance had arrived. But he had no wish to lie, and he spoke the only thing a Ku-Mor-Mai could dare to, the truth.

  “There is no wing mighty enough to preserve you in surety against Sal
amá, but if you will it, you have found determined allies.”

  Those listening thought it a good response, except Hightower, who clenched the hilt of his greatsword. Kalakeet seemed as if he were awakening from a dream. “I should have foreseen this; no plight like ours is thrown down in a day. My people saw this arrival with too much optimism, I should say, without meaning to offend.” He squared his thin shoulders. “There are many items we can tell one another; wilt thou come ashore?”

  “Thank you, yes.” He took a map from an aide. “First, we would like to know precisely where we are. Can you tell us?”

  They’d been blown east of their destination. That event was beneficent, in that the Yalloroon were hospitable. While Kalakeet was apprising Springbuck’s navigators and pilots of inaccuracies in maps and charts, the Ku-Mor-Mai took his Warlord aside. Hightower confirmed that the city was empty of armed men. Springbuck gave the order that unloading begin at once.

  Arrangements were formulated for some vessels to beach and others to unload by boat. Warships dropped back to form a defensive cordon. Blocks creaked and tackle groaned as supplies and equipment piled up on the beach. Those craft transporting horses took high priority; armored fighting men were the backbone of warfare.

  The town had no walls or defensive works at all; those had been banned by the Southwastelanders. Springbuck ordered three ships to disgorge their full cargoes of infantry, an augmented brigade of hardbitten pikemen from the late Bonesteel’s legions. The Ku-Mor-Mai would feel better when he had a ring of them around the city of the Yalloroon. Sharp-eyed archers of Rugor positioned themselves and their mantlets, hammering in their stakes, for supporting fire.

  Leaving the rest of the operation to subordinates, Springbuck repaired to Kalakeet’s austere little home. Gabrielle came along, and Balagon, Divine Vicar of the Brotherhood of the Bright Lady, Angorman’s rival. But Hightower said he had off-loading to supervise.