So began the darkest time of Kunrad’s searching, and certainly the farthest from any prospect of success. He had never seemed more foolish to himself, or cursed more thoroughly the day he had set out on a venture doomed from its beginning. Despair, true numbing despair, would almost have been welcome to him as he bent and strained and thirsted, a chill end to hope, because it would have stilled his feverish thoughts; despair, or madness. Yet he found that neither would come to him; and when he thought of courting death, of defying or attacking the corsairs, he could not bring himself to that, either. Not from cowardice, but from inner fires more compelling. One was the prentices; he could not leave them behind. Blind and ignorant, he had dragged them into this, to his shame, and them at least he must free, cost what it might. And the other, as always, was the armour; as soon abandon breathing as that. These thoughts burned deeper than mere despair could reach. But which burned stronger, to his fiercest shame, he did not dare to think.
The rowing shoreward was swifter than he expected, but even when the arms of the bay closed in behind them, and the sand of the shallows shone under the dark stern, the corsairs’ pace neither stopped nor even slackened. There was a slight drumming lurch, a loud rustle, and then tall reeds hissed along the low flanks, tangling the oars, bending into a green arch overhead. They were passing through a wide reedbed in the mouth of a river, a stream almost. Kunrad guessed it was too slow and shallow to show up on any chart, and concealed from the sea among the reeds unless one walked right up to it, little likely in those bleak lands. Sand grated along the keel, weed snarled about the bow, but soon they were through and rowing in deeper water, strings of tidal pools, salt-smelling and stagnant, with waving strings of green slime. Another grate over sand and through reedbeds, a long stretch in which the corsairs sprang out and hauled, and the longboat slid into a wide deep waterway.
Kunrad expected to rest soon, at least, to come upon some beach or cluster of rush huts where the corsairs would have their lair. But there was no such place, and not the slightest let-up in the rowing. Behind them, which was the only way Kunrad could see, the glimmer of the sea was fading, and the reeds closing in, level and featureless save for the occasional scrubby bushes and treelets that clung to scraps of solid ground. It threaded a glistening line across a different sea, a vast expanse of grey and brown, waving reed-blades, clumps of thin spiky grasses. They were on the margins of the Great Marshes.
Suddenly, as they passed a gap in the reeds, he saw a tall pale square sail some ways off, and stiffened in excitement; then he realised it was the Ravenswing, being sailed off down some wider, deeper channel, escorted by the other longboat. This boat seemed to be in a hurry, taking a faster route perhaps with some immensely valuable or important piece of booty. Then he almost missed his stroke, at the price of a warning kick, as he realised just what that booty must be.
As the sun climbed, the corsair rowers began sagging at their oars. Well before Gille, even, he was pleased to note, let alone Olvar or himself. The tall commander swore at them just once, then grudgingly ordered a halt and a meal. The boat did not land, but was made fast to an overhanging branch. The meal was twice-baked bread, rock hard and ridden with fat grubs, a few scraps of smoked meat, and water from overside strained through squares of sailcloth. The same portion was given to the smiths as the rest. The corsairs devoured it all ravenously, and so, after an initial hesitation, did the smiths, though they tapped out the grubs on the gunwale. Kunrad was able to exchange encouraging looks with Olvar, but no word; he caught Gille’s eye, but he looked away.
The commander did not rest, but stood at the stern throughout, gnawing a single breadcake and scanning the featureless reed-fields in every direction. After only a few minutes he came stepping over the thwarts to the smiths, tugged back their hair to look into their eyes and examine their injuries. Then, with an approving grunt, he went leaping back to the tiller, the painter was untied and the rowing began again. At first it went more slowly, but the leader kept calling a faster pace, sometimes foolishly so; and Kunrad realised that he was getting nervous.
By late afternoon, with the low sun making the reeds a royal carpet of red and gold with ermine flecks, the corsairs were all visibly anxious, twisting about as they rowed, evidently looking for familiar landmarks. Don’t tell me he’s lost us! thought Kunrad, then grinned at himself. Smiths rarely got lost, and he was inclined to patronise sothrans. It occurred to him that his captors could be uneasy for other reasons, and he felt an urge to duck down, to hide himself beneath that great dome of sky. From end to end of it the Marshes stretched, and he was lost in the heart of them.
This was their form, a great delta plain that stretched all across the Debatable Lands between Nordeney and Ker Bryhaine, formed by an arm of the mighty river Gorlafros, also called Westflood. Out between a gap in the mountains of the Shield-Range it ran, from one of the many lakes along the path of the Gorlafros, from its dark and distant uprisings on the eastern side of the Northern Mountains, from the springs of the melting Ice. The Gorlafros was wholesome enough in itself, fed and diluted as it was by lesser streams that ran off the eastern slopes of the Shield-Range. By the time it flowed into the Southlands and to the sea at Bryhaine’s southern border, a wide and sluggish desert flood, it carried nothing worse than a burden of rich silt. But in the North it was still strangely influenced by the Ice, the greatest concentration of its influence beyond its own frozen boundaries, and carried many things dark and dangerous down into the lands of men. Where its waters flowed it was said that the Old Years lingered, when men had lived in caves, worn beastskins and worked nothing more than sharpened stones, and would have forgotten the very secret of fire if the kindlier Powers had not preserved it for them. And over that great delta, where those cold waters met and mingled with the inflowing tides of the sea, the hand of the Ice was strongest.
To the perils of any ordinary marsh, devouring bogs, straying paths, famine, insects and disease, were added rarer, darker terrors. Wild beasts were there, snakes, water-reptiles, bloodsucking bats and worse, but they were the least of it. Visions and phantoms haunted the night, some mere terrors of the mind alone, but others deceptive or predatory. Creatures more material laired there also, stalking the land with strange powers and purposes that legend made ghastly beyond comprehension. Men who would otherwise never be suffered to live sought desperate refuge among the mires, and found, often, that if only they too were fierce and cruel enough, they would be allowed to remain. Although not, perhaps, unchanged. Black tales were told of half-monstrous things that still showed some trace of human kinship, pathetic and sickening.
Yet men still sought to cross the Marshes, for there was no other way between North and South, save by sea – which had its own dire perils. At most times organised caravans could pass in reasonable safety, and armed escorts. In later years men were to build a massive causeway across them, a broad unbroken bed of stone from island to island, kept well defended at both ends for many centuries, and well valued.
In Kunrad’s day this was not even dreamed of. There were only paths, winding and unreliable, with here and there a rickety bridge, small safeguard against such perils – or, some said, a focus for them. If any were needed, added others. Children far off thrilled at tales of the Marshes, and sat up shivering in their beds thereafter. Kunrad had been such a child; and here he was, brutally driven deep into the heart of his nightmare. He might need to confront it still more closely yet.
Would they halt for the night, he wondered, as the twilight fell, and the mists rolled over the dimming sky? Make camp, set guard – that might give him some chance, however remote. Or would they just sit here in mid-channel and shiver, without light or fire? As it turned out, they did neither.
As the last light was fading on the reed-blades they slowed gradually, until the oars trailed in the calm black surface of the channel. The corsairs were silent, darting quick glances this way and that, sniffing the air. After a few minutes the leader gave a soft hiss, no more
, and waved, and the steersman turned the nose in towards a tall stand of grasses that bowed over the channel, tall enough to hide the boat. There they sat in shadow, silent, while around them other voices grew, the thin song of stinging insects, the squeaks and snuffles of small creatures hunting among the reeds, the soft rustle of nightwings. Olvar swore and slapped at his neck, but a corsair caught his wrist and gestured for silence; the whites of the man’s eyes glared in the gloom. At length the leader nodded, and the port oarsmen thrust off from the tangled grass clumps. Then, just as the nose was turning out into the open stream again, the leader jerked upright and clutched hard at the overhanging stems to hold them back. A distant rustle grew abruptly louder and a strange stench, musky, oily, rank as decaying fish, washed over the boat. The grasses bent low all of a sudden, and the corsairs ducked. With an explosive leathery clap a huge shadow swept overhead, and the acrid wind caught at Kunrad’s throat and eyes. A confused impression of bronze and black, dully glittering, with a spark of glaring red; then it was past, and he saw it, long and thin against the cloud-shrouded moon, snaking through the air with the motion of a cracked whip, between two immense, slow-beating wings. Only then did the size of it come home to him, and the vision make chilling sense, black talons on legs held tightly back over an enamel-scaled flank, as large as the boat or larger. One deep rumbling cough echoed across the marsh, as alarmingly directionless as the cry of a hunting owl; another red spark flickered in the twilight. Then it was gone from sight, and every man in the boat sagged with escaping sighs. The leader gestured at them to wait, and it was only as the twilight deepened and the quiet continued that he at last let them row onward.
They set tall stands of iron at bow and stern, where there was less risk of sparks, and torches within them; but it was only at the last extremity of light that he ordered them lit. The crackling yellow flame was a comfort, spreading its warm glow across the cold water, colouring the grey rushes. But as they passed, the front-wall stirred here and there against the wind, and once or twice the light glittered on eyes that peered out, some small and timid, but some larger and gleaming pale. Kunrad imagined how the boat must look, two neat discs of gold gliding along in this vast, hazy blue-black expanse, where even the stars did not shine – how conspicuous, and how small.
He was rowing almost in a dream when he felt the stroke slacken, and his oar clatter against the one behind. Gille nodded with fatigue, Olvar sat like a wall, but all around him the corsairs were turning in their seats, half rising and staring eagerly, even the commander at the gunwales, clutching his wounded leg. Kunrad twisted around and saw, not too far ahead by the look of it, a welcome orange glow, a beacon maybe or a large campfire. The commander hissed angrily at his crew, and they sank back to their oars; the lash turned Kunrad’s head again. The light would probably hold little good for him, he knew; but compared to being stranded out here, it seemed warm and encouraging. Whatever else, at least the corsairs were human.
An hour or so later, though, they were rowing yet, without sign of the light; and yet the corsairs were visibly taking heart. Wherever they were going, they must be nearly there. Kunrad was about to risk another glance around, when the leader saved him the trouble, snapping out an order and leaning hard on the helm. Kunrad’s side shipped their oars and sagged over them as the longboat swung around. From somewhere ahead a single harsh trumpet sounded, and suddenly the boat was gliding into a pool of golden water. A reflection of what lay ahead; and as the swirls died it took sudden shape.
A shape that Kunrad could not believe. But he had to look up, all the same.
It was huge. It looked like the paw of some vast vanished beast-statue, a great island wedge of wind-scoured rock, some eight hundred paces long and little fewer in width, rising out of a wide dark pool. Its steep flanks, raw and jagged, deeply fissured, stripped of vegetation, reared full sixty feet above the marsh to a gently sloping table of stone; but they loomed higher yet, because all around that upper surface stood a wall of rough stone topped by a palisade of tall tree trunks, still bark-clad. Along its summit, behind galleries of wicker and wood, torches burned, their light glancing here and there off the helms of armoured sentinels. Behind the wall tall rooftops lifted, crude affairs of reed-thatch or rough-cut wooden scales, but stout and strong-looking, and light gleamed through shutters beneath. Other gleams of light broke from beneath the wall, from the rock itself, in cleft and channel, and from its base at the end of a long jetty, one of many that stretched out into the pool, like claws around the foot. Masts clustered around the jetties, more thickly even than in Saldenborg harbour, masts of all heights, some huge. Fat-bellied merchantmen and lean dragon-head warships huddled alongside little coasters and tiny fishing boats, silent witness to the terrible toll that had been levied upon the sea-trade of both lands, and to the savage strength that brooded above. A fortress for an army and a harbour for a fleet, all in one. Crude, maybe, and roughhewn, like the corsairs themselves; all made new and in haste, perhaps. And yet, in their image, frighteningly powerful.
Kunrad shivered. This place was not as strong as Vayde’s ancient towers, but in this desolation it might as well be. In flat ground, he remembered, the horizon was only a league or so distant. This was what he had mistaken for a campfire, just as the two lands had mistaken the corsairs for a mere flare of nuisance, not a serious challenge to be reckoned with. How soon would they discover their mistake?
Slowly now, because the jetty was so crowded, they rowed in towards it, past the mouths of other channels. Their square-cut banks, and the tall stacks of marsh peat drying out along the margins of the pool, cordon and fuel in one, suggested that men had widened and deepened them. No doubt the Ravenswing would make its way here to join the lifeless array in the shadow of the jetties, swelling the wealth of the corsairs by a tiny fraction, and their numbers also. No doubt corsair captains had delivered that speech on every deck – and cut throats with the same casual will, to give it point.
Careful strategies; the relentless rowing, too, perhaps. As if they were watching and working on their captives, to single out the men who suited them best. What awaited the rest? Chains, certainly; mutilation perhaps, slow working to death. There were eyeless men among the starveling chain-gang on the dock, working the heavy capstan to reel in the longboat’s lines. Its pawl clanked loudly across the pool, like a pendulum ticking away the last instants of life.
The bow bumped the jetty, lifting lightly, and the corsairs heaved themselves out, cramped and complaining. For the three smiths it was worse. The chains loosened from their legs were whipped around their arms and necks, and they were bundled ashore like so much livestock. At the end of the wharf a flight of wooden stairs, easy to cut loose, ran up the rock. Golden lantern-light picked it out momentarily, then was blotted out by a tall figure, with a knot of others at his heels, coming down at the easy trot of active men in no real hurry. The grousing corsairs fell silent and stood uneasily, and their captain hurried to the stairfoot.
As the man who led the way down strode under the light, Kunrad blinked; his clothes seemed to sparkle. The longboat commander made a great show of saluting him, and was greeted with a genial clap on the shoulder as the newcomer surged past, tossing curt questions back over his shoulder. ‘Well, what’s the cat dragged in now? Smiths, you say?’ The voice was sothran, harsh but not uneducated.
‘Northland smiths!’ prompted the longboat commander, quietly smug. ‘And the long one a mastersmith!’
The newcomer turned sharply. He was as tall as Kunrad, made more so by a tousled crown of dark brown hair, and the light of the wharf-lamps glistened on a gaunt, hard-lined face, long-nosed and lantern-jawed, with narrowed, frowning eyes. Between hair and beard his skin shone with a strange glossy pallor, yellowish and sickly-looking, as if he had been carved out of wax; but he moved with swaggering ease and strength, showing off the rich fur cloak that swept back from his shoulders, and the glitter of jewels at neck and belt and wrist, and scattered about his richly cut and
trimmed clothes. The torch-light caught the earrings that dangled in his hair, and the heavy studs that pierced his nose and upper lip, shining among his moustache. He stopped before the three captives, looked them up and down a moment, then gave a slight snort and snapped out a question in heavily accented Northern speech. ‘That true? All three?’
Kunrad nodded. No doubt who this was; and yet he was a little surprised.
‘Heading south? Why?’
Kunrad shrugged, sullenly. ‘I had a debt to collect. And there’s more money to be made in the South, these days.’ He sensed Olvar and Gille twitch with surprise, but nobody was looking at them.
The corsair’s mouth twitched. ‘You like money?’
‘I could get attached to it, yes.’
The corsair’s narrow eyes were unreadable. He looked around at the other men with him, and the commander, and went back to the sothran tongue. ‘Any problems, Padrec?’
‘He fought a bit,’ said the commander. ‘The boys too. Rows like a sonuvabitch, them too, less tired than we are. I’d say yea, skipper.’
The Castle of the Winds Page 12
