The Castle of the Winds

by Michael Scott Rohan

  Olvar nodded. ‘And stings your knuckles where the scales have skinned them, or the thumb you caught with the gutting knife. And come winter, the brine-meat gives you thirst enough to rush out and eat snow. But we used to watch for the salt-boats from here, nonetheless, for we could not pan enough on our own. That’s what paid for those pretty rooftops.’

  ‘That, and trade south,’ agreed Kunrad. ‘Now, though, I wonder. Are those masts commonly so crowded?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Olvar.

  They were coming in sight of the walls, and of the disorder beneath them. Saldenborg’s undertown was well named, a dark ragged ribbon smeared back from the road, a demented clutter of little shanties built of anything to hand, from raw tree limbs to shattered boat timbers. More than once the whole boat was there, upturned with its mud and barnacles still encrusting the half-rotten keel turned roof-tree. Windows flew open as they passed, mere hide or sacking flaps, or thin lath shutters. Men small and wiry peered out, beckoning them in for trade and drink. Bolder women sent other invitations, and hordes of children swarmed about their horses with mingled pleas, insults and threats. The noise and the stink were startling, and even Gille showed no urge to take up any invitation; he was too busy swatting small hands away from his saddlebags, his stirrups and even his boots.

  ‘I’ll sit on you!’ roared Olvar, and the children scattered screaming in mock terror and promises to bite his backside.

  ‘They’ll be dead in a day if they do!’ said Gille. ‘Get off, you little horror! And no I don’t want your sister – even if she’s washed more recently than you!’

  ‘Do you get the idea they’re a mite desperate?’ inquired Kunrad, fielding a small brown-skinned boy who was trying to manoeuvre his sword from his belt. He dangled him at arm’s length. ‘You, lad! Leave it! What’s the fuss? Aren’t there richer travellers than us to fleece?’

  ‘No, Lord!’ squeaked the infant. ‘I mean, master! Mortal few, and they quiet and near with their pennies! There’s folk here done die o’ starving wi’ all their bones stuck out, for true!’

  ‘I believe you!’ said Kunrad sombrely. ‘And what’s the cause? These corsair attacks?’

  ‘Aye, L – Master! Scarce a ten-part o’ the ships that were from here, they say, and they all huddled together like newborn pups for safety. Fewer yet t’ Suderney way! Best linger here, master, till all’s retted up again!’

  Kunrad set the child down on his feet, and tucked a small coin in his palm. ‘Wish I could spare more, boy! But leave my sword alone, or you’ll slice your own fingers off! I’ve had grief enough with folk who covet shiny things.’

  As they approached the city gate their tormentors fell behind. ‘Lost anything?’ asked Kunrad. ‘Nothing? Good. We’ve little enough to pay our passage.’

  ‘You were expecting that about the corsairs, Master-smith?’ asked Gille.

  ‘I’d heard, remember? This is still our best hope of overtaking Merthian. The Marshes won’t slow him much, he has a large enough force to get through the margins safely enough. The troubles will make it harder for us to get a ship, of course – but there probably won’t be much jostling for berths.’ He looked up at the tall buildings of the town, clasping together like fingers over the narrow streets to make the most of the space. ‘Even in a place such as this.’

  The lodgings the guard directed them to overlooked the harbourside market, where the bustle and the smell were past the power of pane or shutter to keep out. The younger, hungrier captains favoured it because it was cheap, and because it was no more than a short distance from their craft if trouble threatened. By the time they reached the street the smiths had been nearly thrown from their horses a dozen times, and bumped and barged when they dismounted to lead them over the slippery cobbles. The tavern they came to was a strange, smoky deformity of a house, with a sideways list from subsidence and a crooked roof whose warped tiles seemed held in place only by a century of seagull droppings. Its sign, creaking rhythmically in the breeze, might have shown a luxuriantly female figure rising out of a stormcrest to shield a foundering barque, if all the flesh-coloured paint hadn’t peeled. Only a dim, though striking, outline in the cloud was left.

  ‘Saithana,’ said Olvar, with a familiar salute. ‘A Power of the sea. Watches over honest men adrift and in peril. So this’d be the Sea Lady.’

  ‘Well, there’s worse places to start,’ said Gille. ‘Might almost be worth a little danger, a sight of her!’

  ‘Dunno about that. She only favours drowned men, they say. That’s a long way to go for it.’

  Gille swallowed. ‘Too far for me. No insult, lady, but I’m not worthy.’

  Inside the tavern was shabby and plain, but, after some of the roadside hovels, clean enough. There were rooms in plenty to choose from; and when they inquired after ships, the landlord clicked his tongue sadly. ‘Were there more ships, Mastersmith, I’d have fewer beds. As you say, it’s the corsairs, and nothing you hear about them’s an exaggeration this year. They’re out in force, and well manned, taking ships as it pleases them, and without let or mercy. A fair number of my regular skippers have miscarried so, good men too and brave drinkers, gone to feed the fishes. A bitter waste!’ He tugged at his whiskers. ‘So now the big ships huddle in harbour, and venture out only in convoys of force. Trade’s becalmed, and what’s left is mostly with the North.’

  Kunrad nursed a small tankard of ale. ‘And Suderney’s doing nothing?’

  ‘The sothrans? Oh, aye. They’re sitting at home blaming us. And some of our lads are blaming them – though to be sure I know of ships taken and blood spilled on both sides. Every so often they send out a ship or two on patrol, but the sea-swine are never there. We did that at first, but now our warships guard only the big convoys. And there’s none due out for many weeks yet.’

  Kunrad frowned. ‘Don’t smaller ships try? I wouldn’t think they’d miss the chance to grab back some profit from the bigger ones.’

  ‘Well …’ said the landlord reluctantly, as if weighing up Kunrad and the others. ‘They do. That’s no secret … but as to when, now, they’re a mite cagey, you see? ’Cause it’s as if those bastards know what vessels’re sailing, and whither bound. Which’d mean, well—’

  ‘They’ve eyes and ears here?’

  ‘Guildmaster himself says so. So nobody trusts nobody else, outright. But you folks now, you being smiths and all, and you a master, sir, that’ll be a whit different. There’s one or two come in here still of a night; quiet, reliable men. And though I’m not saying nothing, mind, I could maybe lay you on a converging course, like …’

  The first skipper Kunrad talked to, among the tavern company that night, was a solid, silent man who made it clear he didn’t want to know. The landlord was apologetic. ‘Could be he’s no space left, or he already has passengers enough. But there’s the sothran, Ceinor, there, has the Ravenswing, a neat little barque of fifteen oars a side, slick as spit off a stove even in light weather. Knows the runs like the backs of his hands, by day or night, as trustworthy as most. Being a sothran, he wants to get home, and he’s a good cargo of fine Nordeney wool to make it worth his while. Now he—’

  Ceinor was a cool, hard-faced man of about forty, with hair the colour of rust and level green eyes. When the landlord had spoken to him, he waited a while, sipping his drink and looking unhurriedly around. Then, passing the settle where the smith sat, he almost knocked over his alemug, apologised and fell into conversation in a natural-looking way. ‘Truth is,’ he said at last, in a lilting Southland accent, ‘I’d as soon not carry passengers, for their sakes as well as mine. But you three, you’re smiths, I understand, real Northland smiths.’

  ‘This is a mastersmith!’ said Olvar. ‘And I’m a fisherman’s son also, with time at sea.’

  Ceinor nodded. ‘Well, I might find places for a day or two hence, but not in comfort now, no pretty cabins nor nothing like. Bunk with the cargo, eat our scoff, lend a hand when’s needed, pay in advance. You lo
ok like men who can stand that well enough. I could have uses for Northern smithcraft, and surely for smith’s sinews at the oars. And you won’t find cheaper on the Suderney run, not this summer.’

  Kunrad contemplated the man a moment. From what the landlord had said, he was probably a smuggler in normal times, as ready to evade the corsairs as the sea-watch in both South and North. Not a complete rogue, necessarily; but a man to be watched. ‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘Except that we pay on shore, in Ker Bryhaine. Not before.’

  ‘Bugger that,’ said Ceinor calmly. ‘How’ll I know you’ve got it?’

  ‘You won’t,’ said Kunrad. ‘That’s the point. So you won’t decide halfway we can walk home.’

  Ceinor chuckled. ‘I’m not that much a villain, but you’re right to have a care. We could take it from you anyway, if we wanted, but then I’d have to answer to mine host here. Half-and-half then – coming aboard, and at journey’s end. Done? Sleintje, then, and a fair wind!’

  ‘When do we sail?’ demanded Olvar. ‘With the dawn tide?’

  Ceinor eyed him narrowly once more. ‘We do not. Soon, but least said, safer we be. I’ll send word to mine host, when and where we stand ready. We’ll speak no more, till then!’

  ‘D’you think we can trust him?’ whispered Gille, as the captain ambled off towards the fire.

  ‘Like enough,’ said Kunrad. ‘But I’ll leave word with the Smith’s Guild, and tell him so.’ He drained his ale impatiently. ‘May we sail soon!’

  They had sold their horses, not without regret, to the landlord, who seemed to treat his beasts well enough; but that left little enough money to sit drinking, with things to buy for the voyage. Gille suggested the prentices take a turn out to get them, but Kunrad flatly forbade it. ‘You’ll be chasing skirts, and Olvar’ll be eating, and there’ll be money spent for nothing.’

  Gille looked wistful. ‘I wouldn’t say that! But let’s all go. We can at least see the town.’

  It was a pleasant evening, and Kunrad himself was restless. ‘Well enough! They say the castle’s a sight to see, and the Guildhalls.’

  Gille grinned at him as they went out. ‘You should chase a skirt yourself now and again, Mastersmith. It’d do you good. Why, you can’t have had any since – what, eight months back! Gretja from the mill, was it now?’

  Kunrad raised his eyes to the Powers. ‘Will you be quiet? Anyhow, I didn’t get any, as you put it. Not from that quarter! I spent most of my time avoiding … any, if you must know.’

  ‘Why?’ grinned Olvar. ‘Very nice girl. Healthy. Good cook. Make a change from banging on an anvil all the time.’

  ‘Oh, go and find some fish to gut. Healthy, yes, but she was away ill the day the wits were handed out. And her hordes of relations too – would you have wanted them sponging around the smithy all day?’

  ‘With the possible exception of her cousin Melle, no,’ admitted Gille. ‘There speaks age and wisdom, Olvar. I make a point of dodging relations.’

  ‘Fathers especially,’ said Kunrad. ‘Enough of this, and admire the citadel up there. Founded by Vayde, they say, three hundred years back, the first in the Northlands, and the main fortifications built by him.’

  The castle rose like a breaching whale above the waves of the town, built upon a black shelving cliff edge that glistened raw and iridescent in the evening sun. Tall trees clung to its ledges like mere twigs at this distance. ‘Like to see any corsairs take that on,’ whistled Gille. ‘That rock face, and then the smooth stone on top – look at the size of the blocks! Couldn’t get a grip on that with ladder or grapnel.’

  ‘They say Vayde was a giant,’ said Olvar. ‘Shaped stone as we shape metal.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Kunrad. ‘He planned amazing fortresses, yes, and greater ones in the South, I hear; but he didn’t build them all with his own hands, as the legends have it. Big in body, a terrible-looking man, so the Chronicles say, wrathful, cruel even; but no monster. He was a giant in mind and craft; he devised clever engines, hoists and grinding wheels and so on, that let fewer men do the work. He was a smith above all smiths, and made all things material dance to his tune, steel and stone and stuff we hardly know of. It was people he couldn’t handle. So when our folk came east after the fall of Morvan, he tried to get them accepted by the sothrans. When that didn’t work, he set out to settle the North for us. But not in time to stop the fighting. When he came home from his last expedition, it was already happening, and he was old, old beyond any normal span. They say he died taking the last great settlement party north. In the Marshlands.’

  ‘Glad we’re not going that way,’ said Gille softly.

  ‘Nothing uncanny. He was holding off a band of sothran pursuers, nearly single-handed. But I’m pretty glad, too. That’s no place for men.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think his ghost makes it any brighter,’ said Olvar, and shuddered. Like most of the common folk, he believed in ghosts as a part of the natural cycle, ancestral ones especially. Kunrad was less sure; but even for him there was something disturbing about the thought of the mind that had shaped those sheer cliff walls still roaming the night somewhere.

  ‘Let’s do our buying,’ he said. ‘Weather gear, some extra foodstuffs, a book of the sothran dialect – though you should know enough, from your lessons.’ All smiths learned both tongues, so they could read the ancient texts and tracts of their craft. ‘And we’ll learn something from the crew, no doubt.’

  ‘But you two being landlubbers,’ rumbled Olvar, ‘they may be words you should be leery of using.’

  The markets of Saldenborg were still busy at that hour, alive with pushing and jostling and smells good and less so. To listen to the merchants, though, they might as well have been empty. ‘You’re getting these as a gift,’ whined the man who sold them capes and trousers of coarse oiled cotton. ‘Look at ’em – lovely, with a double flap at the shoulder, pitch-lined and all. Never feel a drop. And I can’t afford to haggle, the way business is. Glad to shift ’em.’

  Haggle he did, nonetheless, and by the time they escaped with their purchases it was growing dark. The streets were emptying, and though linkboys with their torches were escorting people all around them, there never seemed to be one free. ‘Maybe we don’t look rich enough!’ grumbled Kunrad. ‘Better make our way back while we can!’

  They took the wider, lighter streets, and aimed for the harbour. That brought them out, in the end, along a narrow cobbled path by the shore, where the saltpans glimmered white in the deepening gloom. Kunrad stopped there again for a moment, leaning on the rickety fence, held by the sight and sound of the sea as it sluiced gently against the outer walls. The idea of going out on it both thrilled and alarmed him a little, of feeling a floor unsteady as a galloping horse beneath his feet. He drew a deep breath, and realised he was rather looking forward to it.

  ‘Anything the matter, boss?’ asked Olvar anxiously.

  ‘No. Nothing. I was just thinking – but for that bastard Merthian, I might never have seen this. I might never have seen the citadel, or the Sea, or ships – or all the lands between. Or Suderney, when we get there. I might never have left home. I might have lived and died in that little nook of the world, and never pushed my nose outside.’

  Gille made an extraordinary noise. ‘Thanks, master. There was something I’ve been wondering, and I was angry with myself for even thinking it. Now I’m wondering all the harder. Are you running after Merthian, or away from yourself?’

  Kunrad choked, and turned on him. Gille half cringed, but held his ground. Then his look changed, and he yelled, ‘Master – look out!’ He yelped in pain as Kunrad sprang back, and the blade that lunged past him pricked Gille’s outthrust arm instead. Olvar bellowed like a bear, and smashed his fist down on the sword, striking it from the wielder’s hand. His other fist came around, there was a soggy noise in the night, and the sound of a body falling under people’s feet. Harsh oaths sizzled like kettles. Kunrad had the moment he needed to drop his bundle and draw his sword. ‘Olvar! Gil
le! Here, back to back!’

  Gille was whimpering with pain and fright, but his long dagger flashed in the gloom. Olvar’s was in his left band. He kicked down a length of fence and tore free a post. The prentices backed down the path. A high voice hissed in the shadows, long swords shimmered, and a knot of figures sprang forward in a fierce rush.

  Kunrad parried the leader with a force that sent him staggering, then, with an effort of will as much as strength, struck him down. The second shot past, Gille struck out and was slashed at; but the prentice wasn’t there any more, and the dagger ripped at cloth. A bellow of rage ended suddenly in the thud of Olvar’s cudgel. Kunrad was trading swift slashing blows with the next attacker, a savage swordsman but no artist. Another thrust at his unprotected side, but Kunrad whirled, slashed out, then back to catch the first attacker’s blow. The force of it drove him to his knees, but he held it – then gave way suddenly and ducked forward. The other’s own lunge carried him half over Kunrad’s shoulder, and the smith, gritting his teeth, stabbed upward, hard. He had been taught that defence. His attacker crashed to the ground with a groan, and Kunrad backed away after the prentices, along the path where it was hard for more than one at a time to come at him.

  Another rush; another glinting blade. Somewhere in the darkness at his side Olvar’s cudgel landed with a sound like squashing fruit. Kunrad parried, threw back his attacker and desperately struck again and again, hailing blows on the unseen shape in the darkness. There was the peculiar clink of poor metal breaking, a scream, and Kunrad felt his sword bite deep. Mail jangled as it struck the ground. He jerked his sword back as other feet rushed suddenly, winced and thrust it straight out before him, a classic lunge. Another blade knocked it aside, but Kunrad’s swift disengage circled the point round to where it had been almost at once. A thudding impact jarred his arm to the shoulder. There was an awful, explosive wheeze, and coarse cloth folded over his fingers, with shuddering flesh beneath. He had run his attacker through the body, hilt-deep. A dull weight pulled down the blade, fingers clawed at his arm and suddenly flew open. The weight slid slowly away, and there was the sound of something rolling over. Kunrad tried to stifle his panting, lest it draw another attacker on him.