Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  "It could be a jackal following us hoping for scraps," Davus said conversationally. "There's jackals in these parts."

  He let the two walnut-sized pebbles he'd been juggling along with a larger stone fly off to the side as he bent. He snatched a block of quartz out of the dirt, fist-sized and jagged.

  "There's other things as well," Davus added, grinning at his companions. "Things that the jackals follow, hoping for scraps."

  They saw the crops before they noticed the houses, a double-handful of them on the other side of alternating fields of lentils and grain—oats, Ilna thought, but it might've been barley. The low buildings were made from chunks of pale limestone which'd weathered out of the ground. They were set on one another without mortar. Though the houses were close together, there wasn't a wall around the whole community.

  A man with a girl of ten at his side stepped between two houses and raised his hand. "Welcome, strangers!" he called. "We're just in from the fields. Come join us for dinner."

  More people were appearing in the spaces between the dwellings. None of them were armed. A boy of three or so stared at Ilna, his thumb in his mouth. Suddenly he gave a cry of fear and ran behind a woman breastfeeding an infant. He continued to watch from between her legs.

  "Since the King's law died with the Old King...," Davus said. He fed a thumb-sized lump of chert into his pattern so that he looked like a juggler executing a complex pattern instead of a man ready to bash skulls by throwing stones. "I can't swear that their hospitality is more than a lure. But if something's prowling about us now, I'd as soon have stone walls around me in the dark."

  The three of them continued to saunter forward together. Chalcus raised an eyebrow to Ilna. "Agreed," she said, looping the lasso back around her waist. It would shortly be too dark for her knotted patterns to be of much use, but the noose was no help at all against a whole village-full of people.

  If they were enemies, which they certainly didn't seem to be.

  "Thank you, good sir," Chalcus called cheerfully. "We're three travellers far from home who thought we were going to spend another night under the stars. Though we've no intention of putting you to trouble—we've slept rough in the past and can do so again."

  "Why do you suppose they have no defenses?" said Davus, speaking quietly but without seeming furtive. "For I can tell you that even in my day, there were things in this part of the land which were less innocent than we are."

  "Some claim there's a part of the world that the Gods bless and cherish," said Chalcus in a similar voice. "Mayhap they're right. Though the chance the likes of me would ever see such a spot, that I find hard to credit."

  The field had been plowed, not planted in separate holes made with a dibble. A cow lowed, and as they walked toward the houses down three parallel furrows Ilna caught the smell of cattle. There was also another animal odor, one she didn't recognize.

  "I'm Polus," said the man who'd first greeted them. "This is my daughter Malia. Ah, are you traders? We don't get many traders here."

  Polus wore a kilt and separate poncho, both of a vegetable fiber that Ilna hadn't seen before. The material had possibilities, but the workmanship was crude and the embroidered decoration was childishly bad.

  Ilna smiled minusculely. Not the sort of work she herself did as a child, of course.

  "Not traders, just travellers on our way north," said Davus. He caught his small rock and a large one in his left hand. The other large one remained in his right. "If we could sleep in your cow byre tonight, we'd appreciate it."

  They'd walked between two houses and found themselves on the front side of the village; the community, anyway—it wasn't half the size of Barca's Hamlet, which seemed tiny in recollection now that Ilna had experience of the largest cities in the Isles. The houses were built as single rooms on three sides of a square, around a courtyard of tamped earth. All the dwellings faced the same way.

  Though there wasn't exactly a street, the long drystone corral ran parallel to the line of the dwellings at the distance of four or five double-paces. Everyone in the community stood in that plaza, watching the strangers.

  "We can provide you with a room to sleep in," Polus said. "There's one in Anga's house they could use, isn't there, Anga?"

  "If they don't mind sharing with storage jars, I guess," said another man, stocky and heavily bearded. He rubbed his neck. "We'd be honored, I guess."

  "And dinner, you'll have dinner, won't you?" asked the woman suckling the infant. She seemed to be Anga's wife; at any rate, she'd moved closer to him when he spoke, accompanied by the child still clinging to her legs. "That is, we don't have enough cooking, but others...?"

  She looked around at her neighbors. Ilna, following the woman's gaze up the plaza, saw a great cat holding a child between its paws.

  Ilna dropped her knotted cords—only an owl could see well enough for her patterns to work in this half-light—and snatched the lasso free again. Chalcus had drawn both his sword and dagger in shimmering arcs, and Davus cocked the stone in his right hand back to throw.

  "Wait!" cried Polus. "What's wrong?"

  The cat got to its feet with lazy grace. The child, a girl of three or four, rubbed the creature's ear while continuing to stare at the strangers. It wasn't really a cat: its thick, jointed tail had a curved sting at the tip like a scorpion's. The lithe body was tawny, with gray and brown mottlings which almost perfectly mimicked the pattern of the corral against which it'd reclined with the child.

  "The beast!" said Chalcus, lifting his chin to indicate the creature rather than using one or the other of the blades he held. A sword's point was a threat even when meant only as a gesture.

  "Why yes," said Polus. "He protects us. He's always lived here."

  The cat sauntered toward the strangers, its head high and its long ears pricked up in interest. The boy hiding behind his mother suddenly darted back to the creature instead. He tugged at the long whiskers for a grip. The cat turned peevishly and licked the child's arm away, while the little girl on the other side said, "Don't pull, Ornon! Play nice or I won't let you play at all!"

  Chalcus sheathed his sword and, after a moment of consideration, his dagger as well. His hands remained close to the pommels, however. Ilna bunched the lasso in her hands, but she didn't loop it back around her waist.

  "He eats porridge and offal when we slaughter a cow," said Anga's wife. "And he hunts for himself. There's deer and wild hogs in the valley."

  "They'd eat half our crops if it weren't for him," Polus said. "And there's other things that'd find us sooner or later. They don't dare."

  The cat, as Ilna'd decided she might as well call it, was nearly the height of a heifer at the shoulder though of much rangier build. Two double-paces short of Ilna it sat on its haunches and began to groom itself. Its eyeteeth were curved and as long as her index fingers. While it licked and combed itself with its dew-claws, one eye or the other remained on the newcomers.

  "I've never seen a fellow who looked quite as this one does," said Chalcus, watching the cat as carefully as the cat watched them. "What is it that you call him?"

  The cat suddenly shifted as smoothly as quicksilver flowing, bounding halfway up the plaza to where it flopped on its back. Children, all the children in the village who could walk, it seemed—cried out in delight and ran after it to throw themselves on its belly.

  "Him?" said Polus, the village spokesman by default if not in more formal fashion. "We call him Friend, because he's the friend who keeps us safe."

  "Such a creature is no friend to men," Davus said. He hadn't relaxed even as much as Chalcus and Ilna did. "I do not, I will not, believe that it can be."

  Polus shrugged. "Folk in your land have different customs than ours," he said. "But please, it's getting dark. Won't you have bread and porridge with us?"

  He gestured toward the central courtyard of the nearest house. Anga's wife had swung the infant over her shoulder to burp it. She trotted into the door in the left-hand wing, murmuring something
like, "Not enough bowls!"

  "Aye," said Chalcus, gesturing Ilna ahead of him into the open court. He smiled broadly. "If it won't offend you, though, we'll sit with our backs against the wall as we eat. I'd be pleased to be wrong, but I worry that your Friend is not necessarily our friend."

  He laughed to make a joke of it; but it was no joke, as Ilna well knew.

  * * *

  The Star of Valles rocked as water coalesced out of the glowing stars beneath her keel. Sharina gripped the railing with one hand and put the other around Tenoctris' shoulders, just for safety's sake.

  The four remaining vessels of the squadron settled with faint slapping sounds behind the flagship. The nymphs who'd been guiding the sea worm now released the hawser. The great creature undulated toward the depths, growing faint and vanishing long before it could have drawn away in physical distance.

  The eastern horizon—it was a shock to have a horizon again—was bright enough to hide the stars. Sharina thought the ship might be at the mouth of the River Val, but even in full daylight she wasn't enough of a pilot to be certain of one landfall against another.

  "Come on, you lazy scuts!" Master Rincale shouted, dusting his palms together in enthusiasm as he strode sternward along the catwalk. "Oarsmen to your posts! We've got three leagues against the current before we dock in Valles! Move! Move! And you bloody landsmen, get your asses off the lower benches unless you're willing to pull oars!"

  The sailors don't doubt where we are, Sharina thought.

  The nymph rose toward them. At first she was only a glint in the water far below their keel, but she wriggled into full sight before Sharina had time to wonder what the object was. The nymph swam with her body and webbed feet, keeping her arms flattened back along her torso except when she wanted to turn abruptly in the water.

  "This is as far as we will take you, missie," she called. Her eyes had the opalescence of pearl shell, and the pupils were slitted rather than round. "The water here hasn't enough salt for comfort, and going farther up the river's course would poison us. We have kept our bargain, missie, have we not?"

  "You've kept your bargain," Sharina said, touching the hood covering her bare scalp instinctively. "Go with, with my blessing!"

  She'd intended to say, "with the Lady's blessing," but she realized before the words left her tongue that these nymphs and the Goddess might be... not on the same side, say, even if they weren't enemies. The nymphs had helped Sharina and helped the kingdom; she didn't want to insult them.

  "Perhaps we will sing to you some day, missie," the nymph called. She arrowed away, once waving back toward Sharina.

  "We hope to sing for you, lovely missie," caroled the chorus of her sisters from invisibly far to seaward.

  "Given who they are," said Tenoctris with a faint smile, "and where it is they sing, I rather hope that neither of us take them up on their offer. Though no doubt it was well-meant."

  The soldiers and oarsmen were shifting places, the former with more enthusiasm than their relative clumsiness justified. The Star of Valles rocked side to side; common sailors, not just the officers, shouted curses at the landsmen. When Sharina glanced over the railing, she saw that all the narrow-hulled triremes were wobbling similarly.

  Lord Waldron walked forward, looking haggard. He hadn't hidden in the belly of the ship the way most of his men did, but neither had he cared to stand in the prow and watch the great worm swim through the waste of stars.

  "Your highness," he said in a tired voice, nodding in a sketch of a bow. "Lady Tenoctris. Your highness, I, ah.... I'm in your debt for the time you've saved us in returning to Ornifal."

  "We're all acting in the interests of the kingdom, Lord Waldron," Sharina said, trying to sound as cheerful as she'd been when her mind had settled down. She could see in the old warrior's haunted eyes how little he liked the means by which they'd voyaged, but he was too much of a man not to acknowledge the debt regardless.

  "The kingdom?" Waldron said with a snort. "Oh, the army could serve the kingdom's need without having to hurry. I'd have to resign, of course, but your brother wouldn't have to look far for a replacement. If he even bothered! He's got a real man-of-war's head on his shoulders, Prince Garric does."

  No, thought Sharina, smiling. But he has a real man-of-war's ghost in his mind.

  Aloud she said, "Garric's very pleased that you're willing to undertake this dangerous task with minimal force, milord. He doesn't want to rule the Isles with his sword."

  Waldron snorted again, this time in bitter humor. "Willing?" he said. "I'm forced to by the fact my cousin Bolor is an idiot. An idiot or a knowing traitor, and I prefer to believe the former. We bor-Warrimans have had our share of fools, but never before a traitor. If that's what Bolor is."

  He took a deep breath, scanning the shore. The vessel's officers had sorted out the rowers by now. All the long oars were in position, hanging just above the water to either side of the hull.

  "And aye, I know Prince Garric doesn't want to rule with his sword," Waldron went on. "His sword or his army's swords. He's the right king for the Isles now, your highness."

  He turned and glared at Sharina as though he expected her to disagree. "He's the right king, wherever he was born or whoever his ancestors were," he said forcefully. "On my oath as a bor-Warriman!"

  Bedrin and several of his aides were talking with the sailing master beneath the trireme's curving sternpiece. There voices rose, but the words were still unintelligible to Sharina in the bow. The trumpeter blew a signal. Three of the following vessels replied, but the last did not.

  Bedrin snapped a command. The trumpeter signalled again, still without getting a response.

  "This is where the People landed," Waldron said, gesturing toward the shore. "Back when I was an ensign in Lord Elphic's regiment."

  He spoke in a tone of quiet reminiscence; partly, Sharina suspected, to calm himself by retreating into the past where he could forget the voyage just ended. "Here at the mouth of the Val. They paddled their ships like canoes instead of rowing them, and the hulls were made of bronze instead of wood."

  "Bronze?" said Sharina. "Weren't they awfully heavy, then?"

  "Not particularly, no," Waldron said. "Except at the ribs and keel, the metal wasn't any thicker than your own skin, your highness."

  He shrugged and went on, "I don't know how they could've sailed boats like that any distance, the way the sea would've worked them up and down, but they got here somehow. Thousands of them. For a long time afterwards, the price of bronze wasn't but half what it'd been in silver before all those boats were broken up and sold."

  The last ship of the squadron finally replied with a quavering trumpet call. Bedrin shouted an order. The trumpet and curved horn called together.

  The seated flutist began to play the rhythm of the stroke. The oars dipped down, splashed, and drew back in a bubbling surge. The Star of Valles started toward the river mouth hidden for the moment beneath a blanket of mist. The hull steadied as her speed reached that of a man walking at leisure.

  "Why didn't the People go on up the river, milord?" Sharina said. The question had occurred to her, but primarily she asked to make Waldron more comfortable by ordinary talk and to settle herself as well. "There's only fishing villages and small pastures in the marshes on this part of the coast."

  "I'm not a great lover of ships," Waldron said, smiling grimly to emphasize the degree to which he could put the statement more strongly. "But it was a good thing that we had ships on that day—had half a dozen triremes, at any rate, that Stronghand could crew and put in the water right away. It wasn't much of a fleet, but the People's boats were brittle as eggshells. They landed as soon as they reached Ornifal, because the Val is plenty deep enough to drown in—and that was the only choice, if the triremes caught them on the water."

  The old warrior shook his head at the memory. "They came down on us so quickly, you see. There was next to no warning and then there they were, like cicadas coming out of the ground. Tens of t
housands of them, all of them men. They had good swords and good armor, and they kept their ranks well. I wouldn't call them soldiers, rightly—they fought like they were hoeing rows of beans. But the city militia that stood between them and Valles was no better, and there wasn't time to raise the levy from all over the island."

  The mist was no more than a faint haze when the Star of Valles drove into it, though it continued to curtain the shores while the squadron kept to the center of the channel. A few small boats were on the water. Men with clam rakes stood in them, watching the warships pass.

  "We were the only real troops in the city, Lord Elphic's regiment," Waldron said. "Stronghand—though he was just Valence II at the time, he'd made a tour of his northern estates and we'd escorted him back to the capital. The People were marching up the right bank of the river, a quarter mile wide at low tide and only half that at high. They couldn't go inland because of the marshes."

  The sun was visible over the hills to the east of the Val's boggy floodplain. The mist had lifted, and the sound of cowbells drifted across the water. The Star of Valles cut the brown water at a fast walk, a good speed for her partial crew but not difficult to maintain over the short distance remaining before they docked at Valles.

  "Stronghand put the city militia in the People's way just below the Pool," Waldron said, his voice strong and his face suffused with a harsh pride. Waldron didn't boast, but his whole personality was shaped by the certainty that he and his—the cavalry of Northern Ornifal—were the finest soldiers in the Isles. "North of there the channel's bounded by firm clay soil for leagues to either side. If the People got that far, they'd be able to use their numbers—and there were twenty thousand of them, maybe more."

  "Who led the People?" Tenoctris asked. She'd taken a sliver of bamboo from her satchel but she didn't seem to intend a spell; she was just holding the little wand between her index fingers while she listened to Waldron's memories. "Were you able to tell?"