Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Brady, Robert

  So, screw it. Terok had lost his son, had his daughter deflowered, all for one man who had then stolen the profits from his beer wagon and then left without saying goodbye. The profit part wouldn’t make him hate me any less. I stood, nodded to the two of them, and walked out of the tavern to go get my horse. I didn’t want to be too near the inn where the rest of the team stayed. War didn’t bring me here to run for man of the year.

  “Passage to Outpost IX fer you and that big colt, aye?” the toothless man asked me. He looked about eighty, with thinning gray hair and permanent squint lines around his eyes. More likely he was ten years older than me. He stood at the brow, or gangplank, of a fat merchant ship. The ship rode low in the water, obviously carrying a good trade in supplies to the Island of Trenbon.

  “Yep,” I told him.

  He looked me up and down, obviously put off by my armor. Blizzard pawed the ground, his steel shoes grating on the cobblestone wharf.

  You usually don’t see a wharf made of cobblestone; they are wood or packed earth with a heavy retention wall. Debris from the sea and slops and such things as commonly come off of ships will slime the cobblestones and make them unsafe. Wood will absorb these and dry; even though it deteriorates it is a lot safer. Volka must spend lots of money and man-hours at night cleaning her wharves. They looked almost new.

  He looked under Blizzard. “Has he his sea legs?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. Why lie?

  “I don’t want no stallion to kick hell out of my hold. It is two days with fair winds to Outpost IX, an’ I can’t have him up on the poop, neither. He’s a hazard to my other passengers and crew.”

  “He’s a calm horse,” I lied. I had never seen Blizzard pick a fight with another stallion, but he kicked, he bit and he made his presence known. Blizzard might look at lesser horses with disdain, but he had no problem going after people.

  The man reached for Blizzard and the stallion raised his head out of his way. “I wouldn’t handle him, though,” I said, placing a hand on his.

  “Well then how do you suppose we load him?” the man asked.

  “I will,” I said. “I was a sailor for four years.”

  He looked into my eyes. He spat on the pier next – I wouldn’t think you needed your teeth to spit, but judging from the results, you really do.

  “Pfaw,” he said. “With yer baby white skin? You never sailed.”

  I put my hand on my sword. “Are you calling me a liar, my friend?”

  One thing you see on a ship is a strange camaraderie. You might hate someone you sail with, but that is your shipmate when it comes to someone else threatening him. The ship’s compliment of fifteen, busily loading their ship, came to a halt as one the moment I looked hard at their toothless mate.

  “An’ if I am?” he asked.

  I growled and looked around on the pier. Seeing a long bit of rope, I picked it up. Loop, loop, turn, loop – pull, twist (the tricky part, when you have to half undo it and then tuck one part through and pull it tight) and then tighten, and I handed the result to him.

  It was called a monkey’s fist. You used it when pulling in, to attach your ship to the pier cleat until you could tie off with permanent, heavier lines. The seaman took it and looked it over as one might a dead fish. For a moment I wondered if they didn’t use something completely different, but he tossed it to another of his mates and looked back to me.

  “Don’t prove nothing,” he told me.

  I pointed out several different parts of the ship: the brow, where the crew embarked and debarked, and the forecastle, pronounced fo’csle, at the front of the ship, where the anchor lines were laid. You never step over the anchor line. I pointed out the wheel deck and quarter, from where the ship was piloted, and the fantail, or stern. The main mast and the jib (also for steering) and the yard arm where the sails hung, crow’s nest, rat lines, belaying pins –

  “OK, enough, ye’ve been shipboard, mate,” he said, laughing. “Though I say, by the skin of you, you spent every moment below decks. Can the stallion sail, or no?”

  “He can. I will sit with him if I have to.”

  “Will you want to ship for work, or will you pay, then?” he asked.

  I felt tempted to work. I kind of missed the sea. At the same time, I had picked up most of the jargon I knew from working one summer at a marina. In fact, I wasn’t that sort of sailor and they would figure that out fast.

  “I better just pay, as the horse may need me with him,” I said.

  He nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “A gold each, then.”

  I knew he was screwing me, and said so. We argued and his shipmates got back to work. We finally settled on a gold for the two of us, and he insisted on weighing it. I gave him one of the Dwarven pieces I still had.

  “That does include meals,” I said.

  “For you, not the beast, mate,” he argued.

  “When’s the tide?” I asked. The ship had no engines and would go out with the tide, with a breeze to her back. Judging from the tidemarks on the timbers in the wharf, I would guess soon.

  “You’ve an hour,” he said. “There’s a ship on the next berth loading Sentalan hay. Like as you could buy a bail.”

  I thanked him and went to mount my horse.

  “Your name, mate?” he asked.

  I thought a moment. It was time to change it, I knew. I mounted and looked down at him, the sun behind me.

  “Mordetur,” I said. It meant death or the act of killing in Latin. I had pretty much grown into it.

  “That your first or last name?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked up at me, squinting, and then laughed. “Fine,” he said. “For a gold piece, that fills the register. Be back in half an hour, Mordetur, or we sail without you.”

  It ended up that I only needed fifteen minutes.

  Chapter Ten

  Politics on a Far World

  We left on time and were in Outpost IX in two days. A ship at the beck and call of the wind is a different animal. By day, the canvas sails snapped as they rippled to the shifting wind. By night, I could once again see all of the stars forming unfamiliar patterns but still every bit as glorious as those of the Earth I remembered. Once again, my nostrils filled with the saltwater smell that I hadn’t realized I missed until it surrounded me. In my weeks here I had let my hair grow from just over my ears down to the bottom of my earlobes. The wind had my blood pumping, running through it like Aileen’s fingers.

  Keeping the rust off of my armor normally took about an hour a day. I polished it alone on the poop deck as we neared the harbor-side of Outpost IX. A warship moored about a mile out of harbor pulled up her anchor and unfurled her jib, setting course to meet us. She sported a light catapult on her forecastle and a stand of archers by the wheelhouse. I watched intrigued as she approached, her bow jumping out of the waves and she turned a wide arc to meet us.

  Earth hadn’t seen her kind in 100 years, I thought. That was sailing. Wood and canvas and your own will against the incredible might of the ocean, skimming along the surface with just a whisper of a wake.

  When I served on the Truxtun, only a 9,000-ton displacement, I used to wait for bad weather. That’s when the ship really felt alive, pitching and rolling, sometimes as much as 45 degrees. There would be footprints a third of the way up the white walls of the passageways, and everything not bolted down, which is to say practically nothing, flying across the spaces or sliding on the deck.

  On a ship as small as this one, maybe 120 feet long and thirty wide, that happened almost every day. On her, you measured how much weight you dared take on against how bad the weather you expected would be, and paid the high price if you were wrong.

  The other ship exposed only one triangular sail, the wind filling it and picking her up out of the ocean, to travel even faster across our path.

  Finally, it occurred to me that the ship sailed against the wind. Tall and proud, her sail now full; she plowed the waves with no regard fo
r the air currents that moved us. The mate I had first met, Forn, turned toward me from the wheel and laughed as I watched.

  “Thar’s a new ‘un, Mordy,” he shouted to me. This is what the crew liked to call me. This name had been a mistake. “She’s called a Tech Ship, the latest and greatest product of the Royal Trenboni Shipyards. She can sail against the wind, she can fire a load of burning oil at you or, if she’s feelin’ particular ornery, she can cough up a bolt of lightning right down your gullet, as would raise your keel from the swells. Never has a more peppery bitch rode a wave, Mordy.”

  I didn’t mind admitting to being impressed. “Are they the only ones with this technology?” I asked.

  “’Tain’t no tech-no-gee, Mordy,” he said, his voice hushed, the word obviously unfamiliar to him. The Tech Ship had already come close enough to board us. He wiggled his fingers in my direction. “’Tis magic, pure and simple. Ye go to Outpost IX, Mordy. The home of the Uman-Chi.”

  I had heard of them. There had been an era when Tren Bay had been the Plains of Cheya. An ancient race called the Cheyak had lived there and ruled the plains and surrounding lands with an iron hand and, according to legend, a vastly superior magic. They had built huge cities called “Outposts” and established governorships and huge treasuries. After a huge eruption of some kind had created Tren Bay, there had been nothing but some of the abandoned outposts and the Men, Uman and Dwarves that remained. The Uman-Chi are a hybrid race, the product of dalliances between the Cheyak and their slaves, the Uman, and possessing the Cheyak magic. They had risen in the wake of the Cheyak and had taken over two of the remaining outposts, IX and VIII.

  The Uman-Chi are princes, dukes and kings. They never marry outside of their race and they never live anywhere for long other than Trenbon. They are wealthy, but aloof and haughty. Supposedly they live for centuries, and children among them are rare.

  The Tech Ship pulled up alongside of us and threw grappling hooks. We were made fast and boarded without any of them asking permission. I saw a crew of Uman and three men in expensive-looking blue overcoats that hung down to their knees, wearing narrow hats lengthways on their heads in the manner of ancient French admirals. They were taller and fairer than the Uman, and more graceful. All of them had green hair and silver eyes with no pupils or cornea.

  One stepped across from his ship to ours and asked, “Who is the captain of this… vessel?”

  “I am,” one of our sailors growled. He had not introduced himself to me and I saw no reason to speak to him. “We carry a cargo of produce, a passenger and his livestock.”

  “Your manifest, then, if you would?” he asked. His nose pointed like a crossbow from the center of his face, picking targets. He waited quietly while Forn got the papers prepared by the teamsters from the Volkhydran shipping company, then read them word for word after they were delivered.

  “Your passenger?” he asked, boredom in his eyes.

  I looked up from my armor. A symbol like a sunburst adorned his shoulder, sewn into the fabric of his surcoat. One of the other two wore a single silver braid, and the other (who had stayed onboard the Tech Ship, by the rail) wore two of gold. All three had several medals.

  “Right here, Captain,” I said, hoping the term meant here what it did on Earth. I had theories about how everything that came out of my mouth made sense to the people around me but had really not had the ability to experiment with it. There were a finite number of languages and, once that buzzing came and went in my head, I never had a problem again understanding or speaking in the language of the natives.

  He smiled condescendingly. “Alas, sirrah, only a Commander.” This put him one step below the rank of Captain. “What is your business on the Silent Isle?”

  I had never heard it called that before. “I am an emissary of King Hvarl to the Fovean High Council,” I said, to gage his reaction.

  He expression stayed blank, Forn’s became more interesting. “You never did say that,” he accused me angrily.

  “I didn’t see it as important,” I said.

  The Commander turned to Forn, still holding the manifest. “You are aware, of course, that foreign emissaries are by law announced beforehand to the Trenboni government,” he said, in the same bored tone. “In violation of that law, your ship and cargo are confiscate.”

  I heard some particularly angry grumbling and the Uman archers onboard the warship pulled back their bows as one. You really had to admire the training. In one sentence I had damned an entire crew.

  That didn’t seem right to me. In the long and short of things the crew of this ship meant nothing to me, still they had done nothing actually wrong by me and didn’t deserve to lose everything because of my mistake.

  As well, this brought back a lot of memories of the dumb bureaucratic technicalities that I remembered from my own naval experience. This commander seemed no different to me than the Captain who had watched me take a fall and not told me until afterward that I had no way of winning.

  “There was, of course, notification,” I said. The Commander looked back at me.

  “By whom?” he asked.

  “By myself, via fast ship from Kendo at the Volkhydran post, response received and logged with the Volkhydran Harbor Master the day I set sail, which is why I set sail on that date,” I said. I adopted his same air – that haughty “I am right by virtue of my birth,” demeanor.

  I know the Navy and I know bureaucrats. They both love paperwork, but the bureaucrats encouraged so much that the important information always managed to get lost in the shuffle. Manifests, notices, and warnings – those semi-important leaflets circulated by sycophants whose only job probably was to create and circulate those leaflets – were commonly late in coming, if at all.

  “I was not informed,” he said, as a last ditch effort.

  “You will, no doubt, address that with your peers, Commander.”

  He lowered his eyebrows at me. Political emissaries mean political problems. Careers rise and fall on politics. It had to be frustrating to lose the confrontation, but winning might not be worth the consequences for the Commander. “No doubt I will, Emissary Mordetur.”

  He took a cursory look at the cargo and a serious look at Blizzard. I could see him trying to figure out a way to confiscate the big stallion by the look in his eyes. Blizzard helped us a little by biting him. I couldn’t have put it better myself!

  They guided us into port and released us to the Trenboni Harbor Master, the first fat Uman I had ever seen. Having met a few Harbor Masters, I began to believe there to be a minimum weight requirement for the job. Had I been waiting for thanks from the ship’s crew I would have been disappointed – they were justifiably angry that I had endangered their ship and cargo, and were unloading as fast as they could. Had I misjudged the Commander or the Uman-Chi Navy, I could have walked away clean but they would have had a hard time of it in Outpost IX.

  The city itself formed a perfect circle with walls over two hundred feet high encasing it in invincible armor. My opinion of walled cities changed right then and there. Admittedly, these were the best that I had ever seen. Volka’s outer wall had reached perhaps fifty feet above me and no more than eight feet thick at the base. Outpost IX sported a tower no less than one hundred feet across on either side of a heavily armed gate facing the harbor. Along the wall more towers blossomed, one every thousand feet or so. Each flew a different colored pennon denoting a different noble house responsible for the security on that part of the wall. The King’s guard controlled the gate.

  Within were flying bridges and huge buildings surrounded by another wall, this one no less magnificent and no less heavily guarded than the others. To manage such a place, the city guard would have to number in the thousands. The streets were cobbled, and other horses, wagons and carriages traveled the miles between the outer and the inner wall.

  A huge bazaar had formed outside of the gates and around the wharf. I saw only a few warehouses and wondered what they stocked for export and import. Again
, the wharves were stone, not wooden, and clean. Even the pylons were mortared stone; quite a feat of engineering seeing as that meant they couldn’t have been made where they were standing, but instead would have to be prefabricated and installed.

  I could tell that this hadn’t always been a port city. The harbor had been built too small for the size of the city. The wall entirely circled the city and did not seem more heavily guarded at sea. The walls had obviously been ivy covered at one point (the stone showed grooves on its sides) but the seawater had stripped them clean. The bazaar, obviously a tradition, lessened the city’s defense.

  Its walls almost burned white, I kept thinking. The towers and the walls and the buildings, even the streets shone clean and white. I could smell the flowers in the air. Blizzard, less impressed than I, spontaneously relieved himself in the middle of the street, but even as I contemplated dismounting to find a pail, an Uman with a dogcart, followed by a flock of small, black birds, appeared with a small shovel.

  Blizzard bore his share of stares from passing Uman, the occasional Uman-Chi (who seemed to pointedly ignore everything) and the few Men I saw here. I saw no Dwarves, but I did notice a new, smaller race of man-like beings. They ranged around three feet tall, were clean-shaven except for a few and much lighter than Dwarves. Their demeanor seemed nothing like that of the Simple People.

  “You great, clumsy clot,” someone swore. It seemed to come from under my horse, which suddenly went stock-still where I’d ridden on their Main Way, heading toward the central wall for want of a better place to go.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  I felt a pressure on my left boot and looked down to see one of these little fellows looking up at me, an almost comically angry scowl on his round face. He had brown eyes and a brown beard, and dressed in a long cloak that bulged with pockets. On his head he wore a rakish hat with a long, orange feather. He tapped my instep with a dirk, the edge of which looked quite keen.