The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Lord Taliktrum knows where we are.”

  Nonetheless she relented, and the two ixchel started back down the hill. The footing was treacherous, and the birds, excited by movement, redoubled their attack. By the time they reached the island’s highest shrubs they were winded again.

  They groped beneath a stand of spiny, wind-tortured thorbal trees, their legs sinking to the knees in a powder of dead moss and lichen, and then began an easier descent, under greener growth. The Black Shoulder that Ott had chosen as the Great Ship’s final harbor in the northern world had two faces: the parched east, scoured by the rising sun, and the lush west, doused by the fogs that drifted almost daily from the Bramian landmass. They had crossed from one side to the other, and soon were able to slake their thirst on beads of water clinging to leaf-tips. From below the sound of pipes grew stronger.

  “There they are,” said Diadrelu.

  Just ahead, the land fell away in a cleft, like a jagged pie-slice cut from the island, all the way to the sea. At the edge of the precipice stood Taliktrum and two other ixchel, gazing down at the bright rock walls. The cliffs, like the hilltop, were alive with nesting birds; but here the birds were shore-swallows: cousins to the common birds that dwelled in barns and outbuildings. They screeched and bickered; you could hardly call it song. Their nests dappled the cliffs, grass-woven, mud-mortared, dried to the harness of stone. Thousands of the birds came and went on wings like dark flames, bringing grubs and insects to their fledglings.

  It was, thought Dri, like a scene out of legend: the wall of sacred birds (swallows alone were sacred to her people), the crashing surf, and above them the young master of a noble House, resplendent in a swallow-suit of his own. The suit was one of but two such feathered coats in the possession of the clan. They were treasures, cared for and mended over centuries. But their value was more than ceremonial: with hands thrust into the cloak’s wingbone gauntlets, any reasonably strong ixchel could fly.

  Beside her nephew stood Ghali, the old Pachet seer, and his granddaughter, Myett, a wary, wide-eyed thing of twenty, whose first glance always seemed to anticipate a threat. Sensing their approach before the others, Myett recoiled into catlike fighting stance, and relaxed but slowly as Dri and Steldak emerged from the trees.

  “How do we fare, my lord?” asked Steldak, hurrying to Taliktrum’s side.

  The young commander of Ixphir House did not alter his gaze in the slightest, nor was his answer, when it came, directed at Steldak.

  “It will not do,” he said. “No, Pachet, it will not do at all. Where does the problem lie, can you fathom that at least? With the pipes? With the swallows? With your playing, if you’ll pardon the question?”

  The old man turned. He was stern and very dignified, with his combed gray beard and eyebrows thick as foxtails. In his hands was a splendid instrument: a set of black wooden pan pipes, joined with hoops of gold that sparkled in the sun.

  “All three, to be sure,” said the Pachet. “Every colony of swallows has its own music, its own signature and key. The pipes, too, have not seen use in a generation.” He lowered his eyes. “And I, perhaps, cannot call on—”

  “The skill you once were known for?”

  The old man looked up sharply. “The lungs of my youth,” he said calmly. “That is all I meant to say.”

  “Very honest of you, Pachet. But don’t forget my title.”

  “Your pardon, Lord Taliktrum.”

  Once again Dri felt scalded by shame—this time for the conduct of her nephew. In front of the Pachet’s granddaughter! That man played at your birth-feast, you little tyrant, not to mention your father’s, and my own.

  “Master Ghali,” she said, stepping forward, “do you have it in you to play once more?”

  “It is no use,” said Taliktrum. “The birds are deaf to him. We must think about our return to the ship.”

  “You’re quite right, my lord,” said Steldak. “The weather is changing, and if thunderheads roll out of Bramian we shall not gain the ship at all.”

  Dri took a step nearer, pointing. “If we but walk a little along the southern cliff, there is an outcropping. The sound may carry better there.”

  An awkward silence followed. Dri had been sprung from her house arrest and brought ashore precisely because she knew something of the old lore of the swallow-pipes. But Taliktrum did not want it forgotten for an instant that she was no longer in command. She had only made a suggestion, but to accept it—that was to play the younger nephew, not the lord.

  “Come, Grandfather,” said the young woman, casting a distrustful eye on Dri. “Let us put your instrument away.”

  But Taliktrum raised a staying hand. “We will do as my aunt recommends. Take the Pachet’s arm, Myett, and guide him carefully.”

  They made their way single-file along the cliff’s edge. He’s learning, thought Diadrelu. As am I.

  When they reached the rock outcropping the plain sense of her suggestion was clear to all. The rock was nearer to the nests, and the wind did not gust back in the Pachet’s face. Taliktrum grew animated. He beckoned to the old man, waved Dri and Myett impatiently away. “You’ll startle the birds, blast you, fall back!” Then he spread his hands wide, froze there for an instant, and swept them toward the old musician. He was, Dri realized with sudden heartache, mimicking her brother’s gesture: that pompous double wave that told a singer or a poet that he might proceed. She had never imagined it was something she could miss.

  Pachet Ghali knelt, and filled his lungs, and played. The music was like nothing else in ixchel tradition. It was not a melody as such, and yet there was a loud and lilting refrain. It was no attempt at birdsong, and yet it was a summons to the creatures. It was spellcraft: one of the last shards of magic in the collective memory of her people. Among the ixchel, only artists retained any link to the ancient disciplines whereby (it was said) miracles had once been performed. It was part of her brother’s genius and audacity that he had planned to wed ixchel magic, for the first time in centuries, to a practical use.

  But her brother was dead, and the Pachet was old, and the birds did not seem to hear him.

  They all stood listening, hoping. The sound contended with the wind, the surf, the noise of the swallows themselves. At last Taliktrum sliced the air with a despairing hand.

  “Enough,” he said. “Save your breath, old man.”

  The Pachet did not cease playing, however. Instead he rose slowly to his feet. His eyes were wide. Taliktrum looked from the player to the cliffs and back again. And then Dri realized that the birds had fallen silent.

  The others stood as tense as she, watching the cliffs. Pachet Ghali played on. Suddenly a dark shadow flitted past his shoulder. Two more followed in the wink of an eye. Then it was as if the whole colony of birds had become of one mind. They flowed over the rim of the crevasse in a dark torrent and swept among the ixchel, so close that Dri felt the caress of wingtips on her shoulders. The Pachet turned, chasing the swallows with his eyes. All at once his music changed, and from a summons it became an order, a sharp and definite command.

  Only twenty or thirty birds heeded him this time, but they were enough. Peeling away from the flock, they formed a racing circle about the ixchel. The Pachet raised his song a whole octave, his face amber-red with the strain.

  Then the birds fell on Taliktrum. They jostled and crowded, vying to seize some part of his shirt or leggings. Dri had coached him for this moment, from the old lore of their House, the memories passed down to her by her great-aunts and uncles. Taliktrum raised his arms as though preparing to dive, and then it seemed almost that he was diving, but upward, as the swallows bore him swiftly through the treetops.

  “Gods of earth and air,” said Diadrelu.

  She heard his triumphant laugh. The birds flew where he wished: up the slope of the island, out over the cauldron of waves, down in a plummeting dive from which they were scarcely able to recover.

  Myett approached Diadrelu and gripped her arm. “My grandfather
tires,” she said. “You must tell your nephew to come down.”

  “Let him cease playing when he will!” Steldak laughed. “Our commander wears the swallow-suit; if they drop him he will fly back to us himself. And he no longer answers to Diadrelu, girl: she has been sanctioned by the clan, and walks free by his mercy. Aya Rin, see how they obey! It is as if—”

  Steldak never finished his thought. Taliktrum and his swallow-servants raced by overhead, and the young lord swept a hand over the four figures beneath him. And before they could wonder at the move the swallows were boiling around them, black eyes shining with urgency, talons seizing at their clothes.

  They rose together in the grip of the birds. The flock winged after Taliktrum, who was racing out over the sea. We’ll die! thought Dri. For the Pachet’s music had ceased: he could barely hold on to his instrument, let alone play.

  But the birds still held them tightly, and still flew where Taliktrum willed. He led them far from the cliff, and high into the sky. For Dri, who had flown many times by swallow-suit, it was a frightful but thrilling experience. For the others it was pure terror. Steldak wore the look of a man in free fall, watching his death rush toward him. Myett and the Pachet were reciting prayers.

  Only Taliktrum was fearless: indeed he looked half crazed with ecstasy. Roaring, he made the birds climb higher still, until they saw beneath them all five Black Shoulder Isles, and the belching cone of an active volcano, and a fantastic mountaintop ruin on Bramian with serpentine walls that vanished in the mist. How is he doing it? Dri wondered. Will they obey him as long as he wears the suit? Then the flock wheeled round and Dri saw fear enter her nephew’s face at last.

  Great Mother!

  A human stood atop the hill she and Steldak had climbed an hour before. He was a tall man in late-middle years, head shaved, dressed in a sand-colored cloak tied with a crimson belt. His hands were raised above his head, and in one of them he held a scepter of gold topped with a dark and jagged crystal. The furious seabirds whirled about him, fearing for their eggs, and it was a moment before Dri saw his face. When she did at last, she knew with a certainty that it was not the first time.

  The man did not glance skyward; they had not been seen. As Taliktrum brought the flock around for another pass, Dri took out the monocular and trained it on him. The man had lowered his scepter until it pointed at the Chathrand, and Dri could see his lips moving in some chant or incantation. A moment later he turned and quickly left the hill.

  How had he landed, and where was his boat? Dri could not imagine that such a personage had been aboard the Chathrand all along. But where else could he have come from? And where in the Nine Pits had she seen his face?

  Taliktrum struggled to draw nearer to his aunt, but he could not control individual birds, and merely sent them all zigzagging above the isle. “What do we do?” he shouted in the ixchel-voice no human could hear. For a moment all his pride of lordship was forgotten.

  “Land!” Dri shouted back. “Sweep low around the isle, and land! We must get back to the ship! This magic is no use to us now!”

  Taliktrum nodded, still in shock. He swept his hand in a circle, and as if reading his very thought the birds dived for Sandplume. Soon they were safely out of sight, with trees and hill between them and the stranger above.

  Then Myett screamed like a child, and pointed out over the western sea.

  A warship was racing toward them, around the south shore of Bramian. Dri snapped the monocular to her eye: she was a great sleek predator of a ship, seven falling stars upon her foresail and a hull painted white as snow. It was a Mzithrini Blodmel. No more than twelve miles off. And of course it was not making for them at all—nothing as small as an ixchel was visible at such a distance—but rather for the Chathrand, the unsuspecting Chathrand, still moored on the blind side of the isle.

  Taliktrum’s gestures became frantic, crude. Wary of being seen by the man above, he drove the flock so low that a few unlucky birds flew full-tilt into the crest of a wave, perishing instantly. Then the nesting-cliff came into view and he veered so sharply that Myett’s birds nearly lost their grip. Their landing was rough to say the least. Dri and Steldak were flung against the sides of trees. The old Pachet landed with a grimace of pain, but he kept his instrument safe in his arms.

  Taliktrum ran to Diadrelu’s side. “Get up, Aunt, we have to think! It was a Blodmel, wasn’t it?”

  Dri climbed painfully to her feet. “Not just any Blodmel,” she said. “That is the Jistrolloq, the White Reaper. And it cannot be here by chance.”

  “But perhaps they still respect the new peace?” asked Pachet Ghali.

  “Yes, and they have come all this way to invite us to a game of pass-the-sandal,” said Taliktrum acidly.

  “Keep silent, old fool,” snapped Steldak, “and let His Lordship think.”

  Taliktrum pulled a large bundle from under a drift of leaves. It was the other swallow-suit, which they had hidden an hour ago. He tore it roughly from its travel sack.

  Diadrelu shook her head. “No, Pachet, they have come too far for any task but murder. They blame us for their elder’s death, and indeed it was Arunis who flung the incubus at their shrine.”

  “How long do we have?” demanded Taliktrum.

  “If the wind does not freshen?” said Steldak. “Perhaps forty minutes, my lord.”

  “That old giant on the hilltop is in league with them, isn’t he?” demanded Taliktrum. “I know his face, somehow.”

  “He is a sfvantskor,” said Diadrelu. “It has come back to me at last. He was aboard the Jistrolloq when it came alongside us in Simja. And I would guess that the wand he holds is what Arunis called Sathek’s Scepter, which he dispatched the incubus to steal. But this is no time for guesswork. You must fly to the ship at once, Taliktrum, and take the Pachet with you.”

  “And what then, Aunt? Those devils are going to sink her!”

  Taliktrum’s voice had come out shrill. Dri stared at him, appalled: he had the look of a cornered animal. She had any number of misgivings about her nephew’s role as clan leader, but paralysis in the face of danger was something she had never imagined.

  “The Jistrolloq is a terrible foe,” she said cautiously, “but the Chathrand is not defenseless, and she is nearly twice their size. Go, Taliktrum. See the Pachet safely to Night Village, then warn the humans.”

  “Of course!” laughed Taliktrum. “What other counsel should I expect from you? Talk to the giants, trust them, embrace them! Let them decide our fate!”

  “If you would not do this,” said Diadrelu, “give me the other suit, and I will.”

  “Do you believe me now, Lord?” said Myett suddenly, her eyes locked on Diadrelu. “I warned you that she would seek to usurp your place.”

  “Oh child, nonsense,” said Pachet Ghali.

  “Diadrelu has no business here,” said Steldak. “What is it she advises? To sweep into the ship, crying an alarm? That would bring doom on our clan no matter what followed. If the Chathrand did indeed escape, Rose’s first act when out of danger would be to exterminate us all.”

  “Madness,” whispered Taliktrum.

  “Yes, nephew, it is,” said Diadrelu. “While we bicker they are closing. Our people will be dead by midday if we do not act. But I never suggested that we abandon secrecy. Go to the stateroom and alert Hercól or Thasha or Neeps Undrabust, or even the woken rat. They may sound the alarm in our stead.”

  Still Taliktrum demurred. Dri fell silent: the facts had all been spoken; he would face the deed before him or he would not. And you, Diadrelu Tammariken? Will you face what must be done, if his will breaks?

  “They cannot see the Jistrolloq,” said Myett, “and they will not believe the ravings of the Tholjassan or the Isiq girl, to say nothing of the rat.”

  “They are still at anchor,” said Steldak. “A light anchor, but it will take more than an hour to raise it. And if they should be caught in the cove by the Jistrolloq they will be utterly destroyed.”

 
“Then our mission fails,” said Taliktrum.

  His voice was hollow with despair. While the others looked at him, speechless, Dri studied the footing between her nephew and the cliff.

  “We will indeed sound an alarm,” Taliktrum continued, “but it must be more than that. Pachet Ghali, you must play for the birds again. What my father hoped for at Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea must happen now, this very minute. We must abandon the ship.”

  “Lord Commander,” said the old man, turning pale, “I do not know if my skills are equal to such a task! There are so many of us—and the birds heeded me but once out of all my attempts.”

  “They will heed me, I think,” said Taliktrum, “as soon as you cast your spell.”

  “Are they to bring us … here?” asked Steldak, aghast. “To this heap of an island, this birdhouse?”

  “Better here than the bottom of the sea,” said Taliktrum. “And later swallows can bear us to Bramian, a few at a time. We may rebuild our House there, and find some measure of peace, and one day our children may try again.”

  “It is broad daylight,” said Diadrelu, “and the deed on Sanctuary was to be accomplished under cover of darkness. How many will the humans kill when our people rush to the topdeck?”

  “Not all,” said Taliktrum, “that is the main thing.”

  “And what of your father’s dream, the one he gave his life for?”

  “He gave his life to save Steldak from a cat,” said Taliktrum. “As for dreams, it is time we woke from them. But providence does favor us in one way—had we not come ashore we would be as ignorant of the danger as the giants, and soon to perish with them. Not even you, Aunt, could prefer that fate.”

  Their eyes met, lady and young lord, the old commander and her replacement. Then Dri shut her eyes, said a prayer to Mother Sky, and leaped at him.

  Taliktrum had a warrior’s instincts, if not a leader’s. He moved into a whirling side-step that would have kept Dri’s blow from ever landing—had she tried to land one. But her nephew was not the target: she was after the other swallow-suit, gripped under the arm he raised to block her, and in that first split-second leap she snatched it from his hand.